The spiritual realm is the realm of ultimate realities. The material realm that you see and experience around you is certainly real materially, but it draws its ultimate being and reality from the will of God the Father, and this God must be known in spirit and in truth. This means that matter is the shadow, and the realm of the spirit the true object.
If we are being held captive by our senses, we have a tendency to think that this here is the reality, and that the spiritual realm is ephemeral. And thus, if we want this Supper to display a “real presence” of Christ, we want to locate it on the table. But the real presence of Christ is spiritual, ministered to us by the Holy Spirit, and is a presence not composed of atoms and molecules. For people who think materially, the real presence of the Lord depends upon the corporeal presence of the Lord. But this is to ignore the splendid reality of the spiritual world.
Another stumbling block for us is that even if we grant that the spiritual world is real, we assume that it must be distant. Heaven is real, but I can’t see it, so it must be distant—the way a planet in another solar system would be. But there is no reason for assuming this. Charles Spurgeon put it this way: “I am persuaded that there is no great actual distance between earth and heaven: the distance lies in our dull minds.” Mark that — the distance is in our dullness.
One of the things that is happening in this Supper is that God is dealing with that dullness. In Christ, all things are being gathered together, whether things in heaven or on earth (Eph. 1:10). This worship service, this observance of the sacrament, is part of that gathering, part of that knitting together, part of that assembling of heaven and earth. The dullness is being removed.
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.
John Piper tweet:
When God is taken into account, the material universe is “an infinitely small part of universal existence.” Jonathan Edwards.
Reality has its being in God, not vice versa. Creation is made up like a story.
“Another stumbling block for us is that even if we grant that the spiritual world is real, we assume that it must be distant.”
Yes! Amen. I like that saying, “Christ didn’t die just to get you into heaven, He died to get a bit of heaven into you.” We hear that idea again in the Lord’s prayer, “thy Kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom is within us and it begins right now.
Thy will be done on Earth at it is in Heaven, but yeah. I read this to mean that we’re asking God to decree his precepts.
I read this as us learning to trust God in all things or perhaps the increasing holiness as He conforms all things to Him.