Depending on who you talk with, it is held that there are from two to seven church ordinances. Protestants teach that there are two and Catholics, both Western and Eastern, teach that there are seven, although they call them sacraments. Eastern Catholics (Orthodoxy) also call these mysteries.
When Jesus established His “church”, His assembly or, more precisely, His Christian synagogue in the last days of the Mosaic Law, He commanded the two rituals of baptism and His supper. Regarding the parallel of numbers only, the Protestants are correct. However, Protestantism and Catholicism are both incorrect in the continued practice of these rituals.
Baptism had a spiritual development under Jesus. John, called in Scripture the Baptizer, came preaching his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Notably, the misunderstanding of his spiritual message has led many Protestants to see baptism in the same sacramental terms as Catholicism sees it; that it is necessary for justification before God. John’s message was that repentance from sins secured people from God’s coming wrath. This was the reality that his baptism proclaimed in symbolic form. This baptism was developed under Jesus and His apostles as the symbol that proclaimed that His repentant followers belonged to Him and not to Moses or any other man, and in this security of being the body of Christ His people proclaimed their deliverance from the coming Day of Wrath and their citizenship in the coming Kingdom of God.
The supper of Jesus, the Lord’s supper, also had a telic purpose. Like water baptism, the telic purpose was both fulfillment of the then present type-symbol and the transformation of the type into the ongoing substance of the fullness of the body of Christ. We are the body of Christ in glory!
When He gathered His 12 apostles to celebrate the Passover before His crucifixion, He indicated to them that they were celebrating Him as the Passover. They correctly understood, according to Matthew, Andrew, and Luke, that they were eating the Passover meal with Jesus, according to His instructions. What He told them during that meal, in effect, was that He was the fulfillment of the Passover! He also gave them further instructions that they were to continue that meal, in His absence, as a memorial of His atoning crucifixion until He returned in glory in the arrival of His kingdom.
Jesus plainly said that He would not eat of the meal again with His apostles until He ate it with them in its fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. He said that event would be a new way of eating. The word He used for new was kainos, new that has not seen service before, new in quality. Kainos was the word He used when He said in His Revelation through John that the new heaven and the new earth was about to descend from God. It is used this way many times in the Scripture.
Paul revealed the proper understanding of all of this when he termed that former last Passover meal with its Mosaic regulations by a new term, the Lord’s supper; then kept by both Jews and gentiles, without Mosaic regulations. Paul stated plainly what Luke also said, the supper was a memorial, a remembrance of the departed Jesus, to be kept until the return of Jesus. It was, in fact, a symbolic proclamation of the Lord’s atoning death until He arrived in glory.
The two “ordinances”, which were never so termed by the authors of the Bible, were symbolic living prophesies of the coming judgment and the coming Kingdom of God. All who truly participated in each one declared their own redemption from the Day of Wrath to the unrepentant world (seen in baptism) and their own participation in the Day of Freedom in the body of Jesus Christ (seen in the supper). They both were fulfilled in the return of Jesus. To practice water baptism and the Lord’s supper today is anachronistic. It is to be time-locked and to spiritually “travel” backwards in time.
Ours is the Day Age! Ours is the full deliverance and the full participated in the body of Christ!
Ours is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son! Hallelujah! Amen! In the Name of Jesus, Amen!
Read my note under the link "Water baptism - What was it?" for an overview of the current status of water baptism.
Also, read my essay under the link "The one and only assembly council" where this subject is dealt with.