Reformation
Rom
3:19-28
10/26/17
How many times had Martin Luther
done the exact same thing? How many times had he posted the invitation to a
disputation – a debate? The church door
was the bulletin board. It was the place
you posted items so that the academic community of the University of Wittenberg
could see them. Luther was posting an
invitation to a disputation along with the specific items he wanted to discuss.
Disputations were an important way
that theology was done in the sixteenth century. There was nothing unusual
about Luther’s action. The introduction to the Ninety-Five Theses reflects this
fact as Luther wrote: “Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring
it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg
under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and
Sacred Theology and regularly appointed Lecturer on these subjects at that place. He requests that those who cannot be present
to debate orally with us will do so by letter.”
In one sense, the Ninety-Five Theses
were a failure. No debate ever took
place at the University of Wittenberg as Luther had intended. Of course, 500 years later we think of them
as being incredibly successful. After
all, they started the Reformation.
However on that day in 1517, Luther
had no such intention. He had no such
expectation. I first read the
Ninety-Five Theses when I was at Concordia College, Ann Arbor as a pre-seminary
student. I was excited finally to read
this key document that had started the Reformation! And it was a complete letdown. Honestly,
they are really not all that interesting.
They are a discussion of guilt, penalty, indulgences and purgatory – the
standard stuff of late medieval theology and practice.
The irony of celebrating 2017 as the
500th anniversary of the Reformation is that Luther had not yet made
his Reformation breakthrough in 1517.
Certainly the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses started the process of
the Reformation and Luther’s thought was developing, but he wasn’t actually
there yet.
The central issue of the Reformation
was this: Does a Christian have to do something in order to have the full
blessing of salvation? The theology of
the medieval church said, yes. Doctrine
had been developed to explain and justify practice to related penance. A person went to confession. They confessed their sins and received
absolution.
But that was not the end of it. The
medieval church had said that absolution forgave the guilt of sin. The good
news was that you were not going to be eternally damned. However, because your
sin had offended God, you still owed him a penalty that had to be paid. That’s
what penance was all about. It was the
penalty that you owed God. The priest assigned a penance that you were to
do. But because medieval theology taught
that it was a mortal sin if you didn’t complete the assigned penance,
confessors assigned a small penance you could be sure to do.
But that didn’t cover the full
amount that you owed – not even close. And the bad news was that if you died
and still owed penance, you were going to purgatory. There you would be purged by fire in intense
suffering until it was all paid off.
Only then would you enjoy the full blessing of salvation.
The Church was very clear in
teaching that it was much easier to offer the needed satisfaction now during
this life rather than suffering in purgatory.
People were very motivated to do as much as they could to get rid of the
penance they owed And so when John Tetzel came into a nearby area selling
plenary indulgences – a guarantee that the entire
amount of penalty was removed – he found many buyers. Some of those buyers came from Wittenberg,
and so Luther learned about what was happening.
Medieval theology was based on the
idea that you had a part to play. God’s
grace was a kind of supernatural substance that equipped you to do your
part. Your effort was necessary both in being
saved and to pay off the penance you owed. The practice of the late medieval
Church was built around activities that did this: paying for Masses; going on
pilgrimages; buying indulgences.
Yet that was only for people who
weren’t really serious about their
eternal welfare. If you were, then there
was only one course of action to take: you had to become a monk or a nun. Martin Luther was really serious. He had joined the Observant Augustinian
Order. And there he learned first by experience and then by study what the
apostle Paul is responding to in our text.
Paul begins our text by saying, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from
the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it.” The words “But now” establish a contrast.
Paul wants us to know that what God has done in Jesus Christ has changed
everything. He says that the “the
righteousness of God” has been manifested apart from the law.
The phrase “the righteousness of
God” had been a source of torture for Luther.
He understood it to mean the righteousness that God demands. God is
holy. He demanded holiness from those
who wanted to live with him. After all,
Jesus had said, “You shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Luther strove to avoid sin. Where there
was sin, it could be forgiven. But of course that left you with penance to do.
His time in the monastery taught
Luther a painful lesson: his effort was never
good enough. He fell into sin. His
efforts only piled up more penance that he had to do. Doing only brought the prospect of more doing
in the empty hope of avoiding the fires of purgatory.
It didn’t take a genius to recognize
that Luther was exceptionally gifted. So the Augustinian order had him work
toward his doctorate in theology, and during that process he began to teach at
the University of Wittenberg. He began
to lecture on the Scriptures, and this study led Luther to understand why works
and doing could never offer peace and comfort.
Paul says, “but now” in our text because he has just described the
presence of sin in our life. Ever since
the Fall, sin had been a power that controlled us.
Earlier in the chapter Paul had
stated, “For we have already charged
that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.” Apart from Christ sin is not
just something you do. It is something
that rules you. The apostle goes on to quote Scripture which says, “None is righteous, no, not one; no
one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they
have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
Because
this is the case, works and doing can never justify the sinner. It can never offer you peace. The law is about doing, and just before our
text, Paul had said, “Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those
who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may
be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be
justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” The law
shows you your sin. When you run through the Ten Commandments they show you
that you have earned nothing except God’s judgment.
Yet as
Luther studied God’s Word he began to realize that “the righteous of God” is
not something demanded by God. Instead
it is something that God gives. It is his saving action in Jesus Christ to
put all things right. It is God’s doing,
not our own, because it is a matter of grace alone.
And here
grace is not some supernatural substance created by the imagination of medieval
theology. Instead it is the grace of the
New Testament – the undeserved loving
favor of God who gives you forgiveness and salvation as a gift. It is the gift of forgiveness won by Jesus
Christ’s death and resurrection for you – a gift that is now received by faith.
As Paul says in our text, “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and
fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift,
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a
propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”
Medieval
theology could offer the Christian nothing except uncertainty. That’s how it is when you try to deal with
God on the basis of your works. The question never goes away: “Have I done
enough? Have I done it well
enough?” Uncertainty will always be
there because the nagging answer is, “No.”
Yet when we
confess our sin and inability, we are freed to receive God’s gift in
Christ. By his death and resurrection
Jesus has accomplished what we never could.
Now the righteousness of God has
been manifested apart from the law. The saving action of God has redeemed
you. He has freed you from sin, death
and the devil, and so you know that you can be certain about where you stand
with God.
Paul says that already now you are
justified. This means that because of
Christ you already know the verdict of the Last Day. You know that when our Lord returns in glory
you will stand before his judgment seat.
But because he has already now taken away your sins and made you
righteous, there is nothing to fear.
Instead, it is something that will be part of your final victory and
vindication.
Martin Luther didn’t go to that
Wittenberg church door in order to start the Reformation. But that’s what God used him to do. He used Luther to turn his Church away from
the traditions of men and back to the Scriptures alone – to the word of
God. He used Luther to restore the
Gospel – to restore grace alone, faith alone and Christ alone to the life of
his church.
The five hundredth anniversary of
the Reformation is a time to celebrate.
These are precious gifts that we have received. But they are not like family heirlooms that
have been passed down to us and are now displayed in a breakfront in the house
– never disturbed except by some occasional dusting.
In order for the Reformation to be a
blessing to us we must return to the first of the Ninety-Five Theses, now
understood in its full Reformation sense.
There Luther wrote, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’
he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
We live in a world that wants to
know nothing about sin. “Freedom” its
motto – you are free to do what you want.
Yet this self chosen freedom is really slavery to sin and all the
destruction it causes. We must reject the
world’s way of looking at things and recognize that all of human existence is
moving towards the day when everyone will indeed appear before the judgment
seat of God. He will justly judge on the
basis of his law – on the basis of the way he has ordered his creation. The great surprise for many will be that the
almighty God doesn’t care if you can’t believe in “that kind of God”; or if you
don’t believe in “those kind of rules.” The almighty God is the Creator. He is the Judge, and many people are in for a
very rude surprise.
For the Reformation to be a blessing
to us, we must confess this sin for what it really is – sin against God. We must repent and seek to turn away from
this sin, even as we turn in faith to Jesus Christ. For the God who is the Judge who is also the
One who sent his Son into the world to redeem us from sin. He is the One who already now says that we
are justified because of his grace alone.
He gives forgiveness and salvation received by faith alone. There is nothing that we have to do. There is
nothing that we can do. It is his Gospel gift and so it is as certain and sure
as God himself.
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