Luther & The Gospel

Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, 28th Edition Chapter 1

16 Οὐ γὰρ ἐπαισχύνομαι τὸ εὐαγγέλιον⸆, δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν ⸋εἰς σωτηρίαν⸌ παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι, Ἰουδαίῳ τε °πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι*. 17 δικαιοσύνη γὰρ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ ἀποκαλύπτεται ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν, καθὼς γέγραπται·* Ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ⸆ ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται*.

The New International Version Chapter 1

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” n

OPENING REMARKS

Today we’re taking a little departure from our study of 1st John to take a trip into church history, specifically the reformation and Martin Luther.

Yesterday was the 503rd anniversary of what many regard as the beginning of the protestant reformation. On October 31st 1517, Martin Luther, a young Augustinian monk, and a lecturer at the university of Wittenberg nailed a document now famously known as the 95 theses to the castle church door in Wittenberg. Luther’s 95 theses were written in Latin and were intended to spark debate within the Catholic church about some of the practices of the church which he felt weren’t Biblical. Within weeks Luther’s 95 theses had been translated into German and through the use of the brand new printing press had been spread right across Germany and in time across the whole continent.

What Luther couldn’t have known that day back in 1517 was what he had unwittingly begun. By nailing that document on the door he had started a movement that would eventually result in the transformation of the west. God was going to use his imperfect actions to radically change the world.

But why should we care about the reformation? What’s the point of dwelling on something that happened 500 years ago? What has it got to do with us today?

Well, it’s true to say that culturally we live in very, very different times. Many of the things that concerned much of the world in 1517 aren’t the things that really concern us today. Times have changed. However, God’s word has not. The study of the Reformation is a study in getting back to the Bible. The reformers were interested in getting back to God’s word, in cutting through all the traditions of men, all of the fluff and pomp of religion and rediscovering the true gospel. The more ignorant we are of the Luthers, the Calvins and the Wycliffes of the reformation the more likely we are to be snared by the same things that gave rise to it.

This is my concern with much of the spirit filled church in the west today. So few have any interest in church history and in particular the reformation. Doctrine has become a dirty word amongst pastors and leaders, such is the fear of disagreement we have settled for a weak, emotionally driven, intellectually light-weight Christianity that is highly vulnerable and liable repeat the mistakes of the past.

Many well-meaning Christians have tried to warn me off the study of the reformers and their theology; ‘we follow God, not man’ they say. I know what they’re getting at. But in order to follow God more closely, we inevitably have to read the work of other men who have known Him. Some of these men, and indeed women have shone very brightly in their generation, and have advanced well beyond us in their study of God’s word. Wouldn’t it be arrogant to simply ignore these men and women? Supposing that we know best. We study the lives of these men because God uses men, he uses people to reveal Himself. If we won’t read the work of those He uses, we’re missing out.

So today as we focus on these two verses from the first chapter of the book of Romans, the verses that were breakthrough verses for Luther, I hope we are reinvigorated by God’s word. I hope we catch something of that reformer spirit, of a desire to have our beliefs about God shaped by the Bible and not by what others tell us about the Bible.

A POTTED HISTORY OF THE CHURCH

Before we dive into the scripture, I want for you to appreciate the state of the church in 1517. In order to do that we’re going to jump back to the end of the 1st century.

In the 70 years since Jesus’s resurrection the apostles have preached all across the Roman empire. The church has grown rapidly but not without great persecution. In the late 90’s AD John is the only apostle left alive, Peter has been crucified upside down and Paul beheaded outside the gates of Rome. The emporer Nero has publicly burned, crucified and tortured hundreds of Christian converts across the empire.

The Church is led in the next 100 years by men who were either disciples of the apostles or closely connected to them; men like Irenaeus, Polycarp, Clement and Origen. These guys are known as the church fathers. During this time these men fought against false teachings which were creeping into the church; the sort that we’ve been reading about in 1 John. Many of them met grizzly deaths too, like Polycarp who as an old man was led to the stake infront of a huge crowd in Rome. He was given the chance to avoid death, all he needed to do was put a little incense on the altar to the emperor. He refused saying; “Eighty and six years have I served him, and he has never done me injury; how then can I now blaspheme my King and savior?”

The point being is that the church was birthed in persecution. For almost 300 years Christians had to meet and gather secretly for fear of being arrested, beaten or worse.

But in 312 AD everything changed. The emporer in waiting a man named Constantine declared that he had converted to Christianity. Under his reign Christianity became the religion of the empire and enjoyed freedom for the first time. On one hand this was good, it gave the church the space to gather and put time into further defining its theology. However it was the beginning of a dramatic power shift.

By the end of the chuch fathers era in around 500AD things had already begun to look very different from the early days. The Bible was now translated into Latin, and by law the only ones who could teach and interpret it were the Bishops and clergy. As the Roman empire crumbled and fell a new power rose in its place; the Roman Catholic Church. The Bishop of Rome assumed a position of special power as Christ’s representative on earth, the Christian sabbath day was moved from a Saturday to a Sunday, and as the Bible had now been removed from the reach of the common Christian strange teachings began to become tradition.

The worship of Mary, the practice of confession, purgatory, of Baptism as the moment of salvation and the simple sacrament of the Lord’s supper became the Mass, in which a priest would believe he was able to turn the bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Jesus, re-offering Him as a sacrifice for sins for the church.

In this, Christians were taught that they were saved at baptism, that through faith in Jesus they had been made right with God, but tragically they were also taught that from then on it was over to them. That every sin they committed post conversion needed to be atoned for afresh by the church, through the mass, confession, pilgramage or by paying an indulgence. You could even lose your salvation through committing certain mortal sins like murder or adultery. If that happened then you needed to go through the whole process again and hope that God might have mercy on you.

By the time of Martin Luther, the paying of indulgences to the church was very common. You paid a priest a certain amount of money and he gave you a certificate absolving you from whatever sin you had committed. The money went towards building many of the beautiful cathedrals we see around europe today and to lining the pockets of the churchmen in Rome.

The gospel had been hijacked and turned from a message about the free grace of God that brought hope for all into a message that brought only fear, anxiety and striving. Luther grew up believing that God had made an offer of salvation but that ultimately it was up to him and his obedience to the church to make sure he got saved. For Luther, God was scary, He was demanding, He was distant. Far from the picture of God that Jesus revealed.

So when Luther read the words of Romans 1:16-17 instead of seeing the grace of God he saw the awful and perfect wrath of God and the hopelessness of his situation.

For I hated the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’, which according to the use and custom of all the doctors, I had been taught to understand philosophically, in the sense of the formal or active righteousness by which God is just and punishes unrighteous sinners.

Although I lived an irreproachable life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God; nor could I believe that I had pleased him by the satisfaction I could offer. I did not love—nay, in fact, I hated this righteous God who punished sinners, and if not with silent blasphemy, then certainly with great murmuring. I was angry with God, saying, “As if it were not enough that miserable sinners should be eternally condemned by original sin, with all kinds of misfortunes laid upon them through the Old Testament law, and yet God adds sorrow to sorrow through the Gospel, and even brings his righteousness and wrath to bear on us through it!” Thus I drove myself mad, with a desperate and disturbed conscience; persistently pounding upon Paul in this passage, with a parched and burning desire to know what he could mean. - Luther

Isn’t it incredible what effect tradition can have on your understanding of the Bible! Luther was no slouch! He was a university professor who could read and write in several languages but the plain meaning of this verse eluded him. This should serve as a reminder that all of us will have lenses on when we read the Bible. Lenses of tradition, lenses of experience, lenses of culture, we’ll be impacted by what we have heard Christians say about certain verses. But following the example of Luther its down to us to do the work to get past our lenses and to the true meaning of the text. I will always do my utmost as a pastor in study and prayer to get past my own lenses and give you the word of God unfiltered. That’s why I have taken the time in recent years to learn to read the New Testament in it’s original language, in Greek. So that I might be able to get to the core meaning of the text. And this is exactly what Luther did too. He got hold of a Greek New Testament and began to read that instead of the Latin translation he had been taught from, reading in the original language was part of what unlocked the beauty of this passage for him.

Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, 28th Edition Chapter 1

16 Οὐ γὰρ ἐπαισχύνομαι τὸ εὐαγγέλιον⸆, δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν ⸋εἰς σωτηρίαν⸌ παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι, Ἰουδαίῳ τε °πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι*. 17 δικαιοσύνη γὰρ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ ἀποκαλύπτεται ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν, καθὼς γέγραπται·* Ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ⸆ ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται*.

The New International Version Chapter 1

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” n

Many believe that in these two verses Paul summarises the whole of his letter to the Romans. We have a description of the power and effect of the gospel in verse 16 followed by a parenthesis in verse 17 telling us more about the content of the gospel, about it’s power about how it does what it does.

The Gospel is the power of God; not a godlike power as some have understood this, but God’s own power. If the gospel is God’s own power, then who can resist it? Who will overcome His power or resist His will to save His people? No one.

It is the power of God into salvation to all those believing. The word for believes in the Greek is what is known as a present participle, suggesting an ongoing action not a one time action. The gospel saves all those who believe and continue believing in Jesus. True believers will endure many doubts, many trials and attacks upon their faith but they will keep on believing in Jesus right to the end. Is your faith being challenged? Do you experience doubts sometimes? That’s all part of the normal Christian life, it’s not necessarily evidence that you’re not saved. The mark of a true Christian isn’t that they never get doubts but that they overcome doubts, that they cling to Jesus even through great challenges and trials.

For in it (in the gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed - What righteousness of God is being revealed? Some have taken this to mean the holiness of God, or His perfection. Still others have understood this as being a description of God’s righteousness in His saving of people who aren’t worthy. But the greek word used here is dikaiosune - which has the meaning of a righteousness which is reckoned to someone.

The Roman Catholic church taught that God’s righteousness wasn’t reckoned to believers but was rather infused, and that this infusion of righteousness was effective when it transformed a sinner into a righteous person. But Luther found that the gospel preached much better news than that; God’s whole, perfect, blameless righteousness is reckoned in full at one moment, it’s not a process but rather a legal, judicial pronouncement of righteousness to the believer.

Also, in the original language there is no word for ‘the’, although I think the NIV translation is the best, it could be translated ‘a righteousness of God’ this righteousness that’s being revealed isn’t just a fresh revelation of God’s perfection, but it’s His own perfect righteousness being reckoned to us, or being given to all those who are believing!

This was the eureka moment for Luther!

At last, God being merciful, as I meditated day and night on the connection of the words, namely—‘The righteousness of God is revealed in it, as it is written: the righteous shall live by faith’—and there I began to understand the ‘righteousness of God’ as that by which the righteous man lives by the gift of God, namely by faith. And this sentence, “the righteousness is revealed,” to refer to a passive righteousness, by which the merciful God justifies us through faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ At this I felt myself straightway born again and to have entered through the open gates into paradise itself. From that moment the whole face of Scripture was changed…

And now, in the same degree as I had formerly hated the word ‘righteousness of God’, even so did I begin to love and extol it as the sweetest word of all. Thus was this place in St. Paul to me the very gate of paradise…

The expression ‘from faith to faith’ is a difficult one. It’s a literal translation from the Greek ‘ek pisteoos eis pistin’ which means out of faith into faith. Some have thought this to mean out of God’s faith into our faith, but this doesn’t seem to fit. Others have thought that this means that our receiving of the gospel is of faith and that this faith is built upon. However, I’m not convinced that these interpretations really fit into what Paul is saying here. I am convinced that the NIV has the best translation here; Paul is saying that this is all of faith!

A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans Commentary

The sense is however perfectly clear and good, if the phrase is explained to mean, faith alone. As “death unto death” and “life unto life” are intensive, so “faith unto faith” may mean, entirely of faith. Our justification is by faith alone; works form no part of that righteousness in which we can stand before the tribunal of God.

Charles Hodge

This perfect righteousness of God, an alien righteousness as Luther called it, is received by us through faith and faith alone! No addition of works is mentioned, no system of penance, no help from the church, just faith. And as we know from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, we can’t even claim our faith as a virtuous work, because even that is a gift from God.

Thoughout the 2000 years of church history people have always wanted to claim some of the glory of salvation for themselves. Whether it be in their good works, or in their faith! But Luther and the reformers knew who deserved all of the glory! That’s where we get the statement soli Deo Gloria from, it means to God alone be the glory and is one of the 5 solas of the reformation; which are Sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, Sola Scriptura and Soli Deo Gloria. Meaning; we are saved by Grace ALONE, through faith ALONE, in Christ ALONE, according to scripture ALONE to the glory of God ALONE!

Your salvation is a miracle. It’s all of God, all of grace and all to His glory!