Last week I spoke about the two great doctrines of the
Christian religion: the Law and the Gospel. These two teachings both come from
God, but they are quite different from one another. The Law consists of God’s
commandments for how we are to live. Last week we heard about the way that all
these commandments can be summed up: “Love the Lord your God with all your
heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as
yourself.” The Law says, “Do this and don’t do that. If you do as you are
told, then God will bless you. If you do not do as you are told, then God will
punish you.”
The Gospel is very different than the Law. The Gospel does
not make reference to us and our actions, but rather to God’s actions. God saw
that we were fast bound in Satan’s chains, that we were sinners who are damned
by the Law. He had compassion upon us from eternity and planned for our
salvation. We needed to be redeemed from the devil. Jesus of Nazareth, true God
begotten from the Father from eternity, and true Man, born of the Virgin Mary
is our Redeemer. One drop of his blood is enough to redeem the whole world, but
he has provided for us a costlier ransom than that. By his death for our sin he
has destroyed the power of death, and by his glorious resurrection he has
opened the way of eternal life to all who believe. Because of Christ God has forgiven
us for our sins and draws us near to him by the Holy Spirit through the
preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments.
The Law and the Gospel are the ABCs of the Christians
religion. And yet, even though these teachings are so simple and fundamental,
they are what are most important for properly understanding the Lutheran
Reformation.
The Lutheran Reformation gets interpreted in all kinds of
different ways. It is seen as a turning point in politics between church and
state. It is seen as a turning point for academic freedom. It is seen as the
story of a great man, Martin Luther, swimming against the stream and achieving
astounding results. There is a bit of truth to all these interpretations,
otherwise nobody would talk about them, but they all miss what is truly great.
Martin Luther taught his nation, and whoever else would listen throughout the
world, what the Bible says. The Bible pronounces curses and woes upon sinners,
for sin is extremely offensive to God. The Bible pronounces sinners to be
children of God for Jesus’s sake. The cross of Jesus Christ is what brings
these two together. Sin is punished when Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin for
us, so that we might become the righteousness of God. Luther learned and
proclaimed the simple biblical truth that sinners are saved when they believe
in Jesus.
But why was it necessary for this simple biblical truth to
be relearned and proclaimed afresh? It’s because it is always under attack. It
is in the nature of the devil, the world, and our sinful nature to obscure and
obstruct the simple and plain truth of the Bible with all kinds of
sophisticated arguments. I’ve talked with you about this several times in the
past. The Bible’s teaching is very easy to learn and believe. It is so easy
that even an infant can understand and believe it. It is that Jesus is the Good
Shepherd. We are his sheep. A sheep is going to stick close to the shepherd
whom it trusts. Proof that even an infant can understand such a simple teaching
is found in the way that an infant knows its mother and is calmed by her. An
infant can know its mother. So also it can know its God who makes himself known
to it. Sheep are calm and confident when they are protected by the shepherd,
and that is the way that Christians are when they are trusting in Jesus,
listening to his voice.
But there is no end to the number and sophistication of the
arguments that are designed to modify or destroy this simple truth. Dealing
with these problems can get very complicated. This is one of the things that we
have to do together as a congregation with sermons and Bible classes: we have
to look into these distortions and try to sort them out. It’s kind of like yarn
that get knotted into a big ball of mess. It takes patience and diligence to
get to the bottom of things.
Errors and distortions of God’s Word have been a part of
this miserable earthly life from the very beginning and they won’t stop until
Christ comes again in glory to put all that stuff away. Error and distortion
were there with Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. The whole Old Testament
testifies how God’s people fall victim to error. The New Testament church had
to deal with errors at the time of the Apostles. You can read about their
struggles in the Epistles. In the hundreds of years that followed after the
Apostles the Christians tried to deal with the errors and distortions the best
that they could, but they were not always perfectly successful. No one ever is.
They didn’t get to the bottom of things. That is when false teachings, false
preaching, and false practices take hold among a group of Christians in a whole
new way. Instead of the yarn being unraveled it only gets tangled all the more.
Furthermore when false solutions are insisted upon the knots are pulled tighter
and are only harder to undo.
At Luther’s time, basically all of Europe was part of one
Church—the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Pope in Rome. Many errors made
a mess of the simple Christian teaching. Almost all of these errors were false
attempts to deal with certain problems that had come up in the past, but those
solutions never got to the bottom of things. Accordingly, the Roman Catholic
Church was full of teachings and regulations that were supposed to make the
Church healthy and strong, but these man-made solutions actually made the
Church weaker and weaker.
The farther any Church gets away from the two chief
teachings of the Law and the Gospel, the weaker that Church becomes. Instead of
preaching sin and Christ’s grace, the Roman Catholic Church preached about becoming
monks and nuns and how this trinket or that trinket would make a person
spiritually stronger. The Lord’s Supper was looked at almost as though it were
a vending machine. The people paid their money and this is what helped them
stay out of hell and get into heaven. Understanding and believing were deemed
unimportant for the common people—the pastors would take care of all of that
for them. But then it was expected that everybody follow the priests and the
Pope no matter what they said or what they did. Maybe we could sum up this
rather complicated situation by saying that the people were expected to pay and
obey and not ask too many questions.
This worked out well for both the laity’s flesh and the
clergy’s flesh. It worked out well for the laity’s flesh because they could
live carefree lives. They didn’t need to trouble themselves with learning of
God or his Word, or be concerned whether they were under his judgment. So long
as they remained loyal to the Church and gave their offerings, the priests
assured them that all was well with their souls.
This situation also worked out well for the clergy’s flesh.
They got paid well and they didn’t have to do any work. They didn’t have to
study God’s Word and confront and admonish people accordingly. They could just
say the mass, grant the indulgence, and cash their paycheck. With all of this
activity—and sometimes it was quite a bustling activity—nobody paid attention
to what God says in his Word. Everything was directed towards keeping the
machinery of the church organization running smoothly.
Martin Luther was not satisfied with the churchly solutions
that were offered to him by his teachers. Martin Luther was concerned about
being judged by God and going to hell, for he was a sinner. His teachers told
him that his best shot at getting to heaven was to become a monk, so he became
a monk. When becoming a monk didn’t stop his sinning, he tried going to
confession. He spent hours in the confession booth with his father confessor,
wracking his brain to confess every sin that he had committed. This didn’t stop
him from being a sinner either. So he punished his body severely. He didn’t eat
and didn’t drink and slept on the cold stone floor. He got up to pray at the
specified hours in the middle of the night until he collapsed in exhaustion.
All the manmade rules and regulations that the Roman Catholic Church offered
him did not give him the assurance that he desired.
Slowly, over the course of many years, Martin Luther
unraveled the rat’s nest that theology had become over the centuries. The way
that questions and problems had been quickly and easily answered by the Church
with reasonable responses were not satisfactory to him. When he started to read
the Bible came to love more and more what it taught even though it was not as
satisfactory to his reason and was not highly esteemed by his colleagues. The
ABCs of God’s revelation are simple but stark. The way I’d like to look at what
Luther discovered in God’s revelation about our life as Christians is one of
his hymns: “Dear Christians One and All Rejoice.” This is one of the best hymn
in all of Christendom.
First, the Law: In verse 2 he says, “Fast bound in Satan’s
chains I lay, Death brooded darkly o’er me. Sin was my torment night and day,
In sin my mother bore me. Daily deeper still I fell, My life became a living
hell, So firmly sin possessed me.” In verse 3 you can hear how Luther tried to
fix himself, but in vain: “My own good works all came to nothing, No grace or
merit gaining. Free will against God’s judgment fought, dead to all good
remaining. My fears increased ‘til sheer despair, Left only death to be my
share. The pangs of hell I suffered.”
What you see here is the consideration of God’s Holy Law
instead of lame churchly regulations. If
Luther would have been satisfied with following the rules of the Roman Catholic
Church, then he would have been highly regarded by everybody and lived a
peaceful life. In like manner, you all can ignore God’s Law and yet follow the rules of this congregation. If
you follow the rules and are not put on the ban or excommunicated, then, when
your death comes, you’ll get a nice funeral. But all of this is merely earthly.
You are God’s creature, and you will be judged by him. The expressions that
Luther uses in this hymn of his do not belong to him alone. It is good for all
of you to see how miserably damned you are because of the sins that you have
committed, and the sins that you have been able to stop even though you have
tried. This is God’s Law. It works terror and despair. Luther pulled it out
from where it had been stored in the Church’s attic, and it shook his soul.
But God, in his mercy, also revealed to him the Gospel.
Verse 4 of this hymn says, “But God had seen my wretched state Before the
world’s foundation, And mindful of his mercies great He planned for my
salvation. He turned to me a Father’s heart—He did not choose the easy part—But
gave his dearest treasure.” And then in verses 7 through 10 there is this
wonderful conversation between Jesus and you, the sinner. Verse 7: “To me he
[Jesus] said, ‘Stay close to me. I am your rock and castle. Your ransom I
myself will be. For you I strive and wrestle. For I am yours and you are mine,
And where I am you may remain. The foe shall not divide us.”
The only thing that could give peace to this sinner’s heart
was Jesus, the Son of God, who made friends with him, fought for him, and stuck
with him so that he would not die and go to hell. This is the fundamental
teaching that Luther learned afresh from the Bible. Because it contradicted and
brought to nothing many of the Church’s teachings and practices that were
imagined to be solutions, he was excommunicated by the Pope. He is branded by
the Roman Catholic Church as the worst heretic who has ever lived to this very
day.
You can judge for yourself whether Martin Luther was a
heretic. As far as I’m concerned, I would much rather have Christ as my
defender and comforter than the miserable pope together with their horde of
clergy and saints. My sins are much too awful and powerful to be healed with
any manmade medicines. Only the blood of Jesus Christ will avail. This was
Martin Luther’s joyous hope and it is mine too.
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