This year the Church celebrates the 500th anniversary of what many people consider the first moment of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther nailing his 95 Thesis to the church door in Whittenburg. We have countless men and women to thank for preserving the faith we were delivered by the Holy Spirit in Scripture, so each month here at Calvary we are looking at another figure in the history of the church who has sought to defend the purity of our faith.
Let’s read a passage of Scripture that we should keep in our mind, it comes from 1 Corinthians 11
23 For I pass on to you what I received from the Lord himself. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread 24 and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it.” 26 For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes again.
27 So anyone who eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord unworthily is guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. 28 That is why you should examine yourself before eating the bread and drinking the cup. 29 For if you eat the bread or drink the cup without honoring the body of Christ, you are eating and drinking God’s judgment upon yourself.
Eating and drinking God’s Judgement upon yourself. Those are strong words. Let’s talk about someone who took them to heart.
This month we’re looking at a man named John Calvin. Calvin was a French theologian born in 1509, while he originally studied to be a lawyer, around 1530 he broke with the Catholic Church and fled to Switzerland after persecution broke out against the Protestant church in France. There he writes the first edition of his most famous book, the institutes of the Christian religion. This book is still used in seminary’s today all over the world. Because of the popularity of this book and his other writings he was asked to come to the town of Geneva and help reform the church there.
While there are tons of stories about Calvin’s efforts to protect and preserve the faith, today we are going to focus on one in particular involving a group of people in Geneva called the libertines.
The libertines were a group of Christians who had some really interesting views about the human soul. They held to the belief that there was only one divine soul that indwelled every creature, which they believed was the Holy Spirit. This undermines a great number of orthodox Christian teachings but most concerning for Calvin was their denial of they’re own consciences being able to make a sinful choice. Since God is in everyman, they would argue, any desire that I posses must come from God. This led to a wide array of gross sinful decisions including the idea that the scriptural concept of Communion of the Saints was a sharing openly of all possessions, including other mens wives.
The libertines had such a stronghold in Geneva when Calvin arrived there was even a law on the books that men could only have 1 mistress at a time. It was just commonly understood that men would take mistresses, because if they felt like doing it, obviously God wanted them to do it. After all it was God’s Spirit compelling their every decision.
This obviously infuriated Calvin, who knew and taught that man has within him his own spirit, and then is indwelled with Gods Holy Spirit upon conversion. Since man is in himself a different entity than God, he can, and does, make fallible and often times sinful choices. The libertines were sexually immoral and proud of their liberty to do as they pleased, including an insistence that they be served communion, even in the midst of their unrepentant lifestyle. A showdown was imminent, and it happened over the Lords Table.
Calvin began preaching against the libertine sect calling them out on their heresy from the Pulpit. At the time Calvin preached a whole lot, usually about 5 times a week, plenty of opportunity to preach and teach the truth of God’s word, but the libertines wouldn’t budge, calling for a change in the liturgy. All this preaching is getting in the way of our worship, they said, we should just have the creeds, the Lords Supper, and the ten commandments, that would be enough. More than that would be too much, too dangerous, and not needed. The libertines fought as Calvin preached and eventually it came to a stand off.
In 1553 a libertine by the name of Berthelier was barred from partaking in communion by the consistory, or church government. He then appealed to the City government who overturned the ruling. This puts Calvin in a tough spot, the church said no, the state said yes, but the holiness of God must be preserved. As he wrote to his friend Viret:
“My ministry is abandoned if I suffer the authority of the Consistory to be trampled upon, and extend the Supper of Christ to open scoffers. . . . I should rather die a hundred times than subject Christ to such foul mockery”
The morning came for the church to gather and the libertines arrived, swords drawn as if to say “serve us communion, or die”. Calvin preached on the importance of this ordinance of the church, the need for us to come to the table with a pure heart, and when he finished he stepped down to the table and said these words.
“As we are now about to receive the Holy Supper of our Lord Jesus Christ, if anyone who has been debarred by the Consistory shall approach this table, though it should cost my life, I will show myself such as I ought to be.”
He then removed his white robe, and covered the bread and wine with His hands and continued,
“These hands you may crush; these arms you may lop off; my life you may take; my blood is yours, you may shed it but you shall never force me to give holy things to the profane, and dishonor the table of my God.”
You see to Calvin, this wasn’t just an issue of wrong thinking. In fact heresy rarely is. Heresy at its core is to deny God the glory that He is due. In insisting that they be served communion, even with impure hearts and motives, they were saying that God’s holiness was less than theirs. This pure thing that God has given us in the communion of the saints was being defiled by these men, and Calvin wasn’t going to let that happen.
Because of Calvin’s bravery, to stand up to these men who were intent on killing him, the side of orthodoxy was given strength, the church of Christ was reformed even more, and while the libertines would rise once more years later to try and overthrow Calvin again, the decisive blow had been struck. The worship of God is a holy affair, and Communion is not to be taken lightly. For Calvin it was a life or death decision. We are fortunate to have the bravery of men and women all throughout the history of our faith to preserve the purity of what we have been given, the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and now we can partake of the Lord’s supper, this communion of the saints, together, fighting even still for its purity, not for its own sake, but for the Glory of God to be shown as beautiful as it truly is.
Think back on 1 Corinthians 11, this is why here at calvary we make such a big deal about being in a right relationship with God, and with others before you come to the table. It’s not just silly superstition, but our duty to uphold the holiness and glory of God in this ordinance that we call the Lords’s Supper. So next you are invited to come to God’s table, remember, this is a holy affair, not one to be taken lightly, but a moment of worship where we celebrate the goodness and glory of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
