Saint Augustine famously wrote that the sacraments are visible signs of invisible graces. This definition helps us understand the two sacraments of the Protestant church, surely, but with a little bit of imagination, one can read through the whole of the Scriptures and see sacraments, or at least sacramental imagery, on every page.
For example, in Genesis 1, God set the sun to govern the day and the moon to govern the night. Every day when the sun rises, men rise with it and when the sun sets, men sleep. Throughout Scripture, sleep is representative of death ( Job 14:10-12, Ps. 13:3, Mark 5:39, etc.), so it seems that the cycle of night and day which governs our lives points to the greater reality of death and resurrection. When we go to sleep, we die. When the sun rises, we are born again. In this way, when Christ rose, He signified the rising of a new creation as Colossians 1:15 teaches us, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” As the rising sun governs our day, the risen Son governs all of our lives.
Genesis 2 tell the creation story of what I believe to be perhaps the most meaningful, though that’s not to say the most important, sacramental image of all: mankind. Like water, bread, and wine, the elements that make up Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, Adam was created out of a basic element. Dust. God did not choose the most radiant of his newly formed creation, the sun, to be His image bearer on earth. Nor did He choose animals that will later be used to symbolically describe the Lord, such as the lion or lamb. Instead, God chose to transform the most basic element of His creation into His own representative, fashioning the dust into a being made in His own likeness. It was into the dust of the ground that God breathed His Spirit into. God presented man as His visible representative on earth, just as later Christ presented bread and wine as representations of His body and blood.
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- Augustine, On The Catechising of the Uninstructed, 26.50. (back)
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