In his commentary on 1 Corin-thians 10:4, John Calvin makes an interesting comment worth briefly exploring on the sacraments, the ascension of Jesus, and the work of the Holy Spirit. Apparently, many in Corinth were hiding behind the efficacy of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as a sort of prophylactic against judgment, or temptation to sin in spiritually dangerous situations such as eating meat in pagan temples. Paul challenges their comfortable assumptions by reminding them that the Israelites had those same sacraments in their own old covenant form. Just as the Christians were baptized into the name of Christ with the Spirit, Israelites were baptized into Moses through the cloud and sea. Just as Christians ate spiritual food in the Supper, the Lord fed the Israelites with spiritual food of manna and drank water from the Rock that is Christ. And yet, as Paul points out, through their sin the Lord became displeased with them, and many of them were struck down in the desert. In which case, the Corinthians ought not sit too easily in their lax approach toward temple idolatry. Toward the end of his comment on verse 4, Calvin takes up an interesting objection:
There remains another question. ‘Seeing that we now in the Supper eat the body of Christ, and drink his blood, how could the Jews be partakers of the same spiritual meat and drink, when there was as yet no flesh of Christ that they could eat?’ I answer, that though his flesh did not as yet exist, it was, nevertheless, food for them’¦.Nor is this an empty or sophistical subtlety, for their salvation depended on the benefit of his death and resurrection. Hence, they required to receive the flesh and the blood of Christ, that they might participate in the benefit of redemption. This reception of it was the secret work of the Holy Spirit, who wrought in them in such a manner, that Christ’s flesh, though not yet created, was made efficacious in them. He means, however, that they ate in their own way, which was different from ours, and this is what I have previously stated, that Christ is now presented to us more fully, according to the measure of the revelation.
Assuming the relationship of type to antitype between the Old Testament and the New Testament, Calvin says that believers in both are partakers of the same spiritual meat and drink, the flesh of Christ. That they drank from the rock that was Christ means they participated in the sacraments of Christ. But the problem is that Christ wasn’t incarnate, sacrificed, risen, and ascended at the time of the Exodus. So how can that relationship hold? Here we get an interesting glimpse into the all-important role the Holy Spirit plays in Calvin’s view of the sacraments.
It’s more commonly known that Calvin’s view of the sacraments is ‘spiritual,’ in that the Spirit is the One who makes Christ present to believers in the Supper, or rather makes believers present to Christ. Lutherans leaned on the idea of Christ’s ubiquity, or the idea that even Christ’s physical nature became omnipresent because of its hypostatic union with the divine nature. Calvin, however, emphasized the importance of the ascension of Christ’s physical, glorified body that occupies a particular space as a body, seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavenlies (wherever that happens to be). In other words, ‘Where is Christ?’ is a legitimate question.
If we were to be present to the Risen Lord, it would be by the action of the Holy Spirit who ‘makes things which are widely separated by space to be united with each other, and accordingly causes life from the flesh of Christ to reach us from heaven’ (Calvin, quoted in Michael Horton, The Christian Faith, 814). So the Spirit unites things in space, bridging the distance between the ascended Lord and his people who depend on him for heavenly life.
What is so fascinating about this passage is that apparently the Eternal Spirit also bridges the distance between the ages and unites them across time. For Calvin, believers in the Old Testament were fed and sustained by the benefits of Christ’s future life, death, and resurrection as the Spirit miraculously applied it to them then. There was an eschatological dimension to the sacraments for Old Testament believers, just as there is one now.
Remember, every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we proclaim his death until he comes again. And not only that, we must also remember that the Christ who is present to us now through the power of the Holy Spirit is the risen Christ. We participate by faith in receiving the life of the age to come now, but also by entering into communion with the Lord who is the age to come in his own person.’
