Christ came into the world and was made flesh to save sinners.  Two thousand years ago, there was a real bodily presence of the Son of God for us on the earth.  Now we are going to continue with the thought of the bodily “presence” of our Lord Jesus Christ.  First, He was bodily present on earth through Incarnation.

Second, there is a real bodily presence of Jesus Christ in heaven at the right hand of God.  This is a deep and mysterious subject, beyond question.  When our Lord rose again from the dead, He rose with a real human body, a body which could not be in two places at once, a body of which the angel said, “He is not here, but is risen” (Luke 24:6).  In that body, having finished His redeeming work on earth, He ascended visibly into heaven.  He took His body with Him and did not leave it behind like Elijah’s mantle.  It was not laid in the grave at last and did not become dust and ashes.  Acts 1:9 says, “While they beheld, He was taken up; and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”  Luke says, “While He blessed them, He was parted from them, and carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51). 

The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 8, article 4, states, “This office the Lord Jesus did most willingly undertake, which, that He might discharge, He was made under the law, and did perfectly fulfill it; endured most grievous torments immediately in His soul, and most painful sufferings in His body; was crucified and died; was buried, and remained under the power of death, yet saw no corruption. On the third day He arose from the dead, with the same body in which He suffered; with which also He ascended into heaven, and there sitteth at the right hand of His Father, making intercession; and shall return to judge men and angels, at the end of the world.”  The fourth Article of the Church of England states, “Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again His body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature; wherewith He ascended into heaven, and there sitteth, until He return to judge all men at the last day.” 

This Lord is our Priest and our Advocate who can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, because He has suffered Himself in the body being tempted.  He knows by experience all that the body is liable to, including pain, weariness, hunger, thirst, and work, and has taken to heaven that very body which endured the contradiction of sinners and was nailed to the tree.  It is a perpetual remembrance of the perfect propitiation made for us upon the cross.  It is a blessing to know that there is a real bodily presence of Christ in heaven.

Third, there is no real bodily presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or in the consecrated elements of bread and wine.  It is because there is no such presence taught anywhere in Holy Scripture. It is a presence that can never be honestly and fairly obtained from the Bible.  Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the epistle to the Corinthians by Paul teach that the Lord Jesus, in the same night that He was betrayed, took bread and gave it to His disciples, saying, “Take, eat: this is my body” and also took the cup and gave it to them, saying, “Drink ye all of this: this is My blood.”  There is not a word in the epistles to show that after our Lord’s ascension into heaven the Christians believed that His body and blood were present in an ordinance celebrated on earth, or that the bread in the Lord’s Supper, after consecration, was not truly and literally bread, and the cup truly and literally blood.  

The comparison of other places proves that there is nothing unfair in this interpretation.  The disciples, no doubt, remembered their Master saying such things as “The field is the world: the good seed are the children of the kingdom” (Matthew 13:38).  Paul, in writing on the Sacrament, confirms this interpretation by expressly calling the consecrated bread, “bread,” and not the body of Christ, no less than three times (1 Corinthians 11:26-28). 

Some people regard the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, where our Lord speaks of “eating His flesh and drinking His blood” as a proof that there is a literal bodily presence of Christ in the bread and the cup at the Lord’s Supper.  But there is an utter absence of conclusive proof that this chapter refers to the Lord’s Supper at all!  The Lord’s Supper had not been instituted, and did not exist, till at least a year after these words were spoken. 

Some people say that Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16), are enough to prove a bodily presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper.  However, What Paul says here is not “the bread is the body” but the “communion of the body.”  The obvious sense of the words is – “The bread that a worthy communicant eats in the Lord’s Supper is a means whereby his soul holds communion with the body of Christ.” 

Above all, there remains the unanswerable argument that if our Lord was actually holding His own body in His hands, when He said of the bread, “This is My body,” His body must have been a different body to that of ordinary men.  If His body was not a body like ours, His real and proper “humanity” is at an end.  Then, the truth that He is really and truly man would be completely overthrown and fall to the ground. 

Fourth and last, if the body with which our blessed Lord ascended up into heaven can be in heaven, and on earth, and on ten thousand communion-tables at one and the same time, it cannot be a real human body at all.  Yet that He did ascend with a real human body, although a glorified body, is one of the prime articles of the Christian faith, and one that we ought never to let go!  Once we admit that a body can be present in two places at one, we cannot prove that it is a body at all.  The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 29, articles 5-6 says, “⁵ The outward elements in this sacrament, duly set apart to the uses ordained by Christ, have such relation to Him crucified, as that truly, yet sacramentally only, they are sometimes called by the name of the things they represent, to wit, the body and blood of Christ; albeit, in substance and nature, they still remain truly, and only, bread and wine, as they were before.  ⁶ That doctrine which maintains a change of the substance of bread and wine, into the substance of Christ’s body and blood (commonly called transubstantiation) by consecration of a priest, or by any other way, is repugnant, not to Scripture alone, but even to common-sense and reason; overthroweth the nature of the sacrament; and hath been, and is, the cause of manifold superstitions, yea, of gross idolatries.”

Lovingly,

Your Pastor

More Lively Hope

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