We have been speaking a great deal about money, wealth, Mammon, gold. But as we come to the Lord’s Table again, we should be mindful of one other thing concerning gold. You can’t eat it.
God has given us a covenant we can drink. He has given us a salvation we can eat. And it doesn’t have to go through any kind of currency transfer. We just come to His table in evangelical faith, and by eating this bread and drinking this wine, He nourishes us. By eating this bread in faith, and drinking this wine in faith, we come to Him directly.
Now someone, if they wanted to argue, could say, “Yes, but you can take gold, or other forms of money, and buy food with it.” Yes, you can. But the ability to change one thing into another like this is a gift of God. Exchanging money for food is a very simple form of this, but there are other more complicated forms of it. Like how a kernel of wheat has the ability to make a full grown stalk out of what it finds in the dirt and air. That’s a change as well. This can all happen because the world is sacramental, suffused with the kindness of God in every direction.
But these changes occur because God does not change, and the way to approach Him does not change, and that way is always direct. When we hear His Word and believe, or when we drink His wine and believe, we are not coming in a roundabout way. We are coming to Him directly, on the direct path that He has established.
In the sacrament, nothing changes. God is true, and God is constant. He meets us here, just as He has promised. And because of that kindness, we discover that in the world around us, everything leads back to Him—even our gold if we see it rightly. Meet with God directly here so that you may come to see Him indirectly in everything else. The world is only sacramental if we always remember that it cannot be the sacrament.