God loves matter. He invented it, He created it. God is the God of heaven and earth, which means that He is the God of earth and heaven. This means that He is Lord over all that is earthy.
When we are coming to this Table, we are feeding on bread and wine, not abstractions. When we come to this Table, we are feeding on Christ by faith, we are not feeding on a doctrine. What we are doing can and should be described and defended doctrinally, but this is not the same thing as feeding on Christ.
But what does it mean to feed on Christ? The Christian faith is literally a faith with human sacrifice at the center of it. Is it also a faith with what we would call literal cannibalism at the culmination of our worship service? No.
What does it mean then, to eat His body and drink His blood? The Lord said, without any apparent ambiguity, that if we did not do this, we would all perish. Because He is the Lord, what He says we must do we must do.
In this worship service, we have been escorted up into the heavenly places in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are there with Christ now. By faith, we partake of Him spiritually and covenantally. The means we have been given for doing this consists of the bread and wine here. When we partake of this bread and wine by faith on earth, God through His Spirit sees to it that we partake of Christ in heaven. This is a glorious means that God uses in order for us to be knit together with Christ as we are grown up into the perfect man.
But we must take care—when we say that we partake spiritually, this is not a synonym for “not really.” The Westminster Confession rightly says:
Our Lord Jesus, in the night wherein He was betrayed, instituted the sacrament of His body and blood, called the Lord’s Supper, to be observed in His Church, unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance of the sacrifice of Himself in His death; the sealing all benefits thereof unto true believers, their spiritual nourishment and growth in Him, their further engagement in and to all duties which they owe unto Him; and, to be a bond and pledge of their communion with Him, and with each other, as members of His mystical body (29.1).
In the weeks to come, we will consider each of these biblical truths in turn. For now, suffice it to say that God is doing something for us here that is done for us nowhere else.