Sacraments are immediately instituted by God. This means that man does not have the power to multiply sacraments. Those who want to live sacramentally, seeing a sacramental significance in everything, must be careful here. The only way to see the world sacramentally is to jealously guard the two sacraments that God has given to us, applying them to everything else. Application is quite different than multiplication. If we turn everything into a sacrament, then nothing is a sacrament. This is why there is a kind of pantheism that is functionally atheism.
Now these sacraments are given immediately by God, our confession says, in order to represent Christ and His benefits. This is not all that the sacraments do, but they are established by God in order to represent Christ and His benefits. Now, here is the question. When God represents something, does He represent it well?
The washing with water—does it represent conversion and cleansing from sin well or poorly? This bread, does it represent the body of Christ, broken on the cross, restored in the Church, well or poorly? This wine—is it a good and accurate representation of the blood of Jesus, the blood that washes every sin away?
When God paints, does He pick up the brush with maladroit fingers? The sacraments, down through church history, have been the occasion of much confusion. The representation of Christ and His benefits has frequently not gotten through. But this is to be attributed to the blindness and obtuseness of men, and not attributed to any inadequacy in the representations that God gives.
If we want men to get it right, then we must pray God that His Spirit enable us to do so, by declaring the gospel to them in power—in all the ways that He has given us to declare the gospel. What we must not do is tinker with the representations He has given to us. We must not pick up our brushes to improve upon what He has painted. We must not alter the content of the gospel to make it more palatable to sinful men. We must not surround the waters of baptism with the fences of our own traditions—lest anyone fall in and be saved. We must not refuse the bread and wine to the people out of fear that they will not “get it.”
What we are to do is set before you what God has done, and invite you to receive it.