Grace, mercy, and peace from our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Okay, we need to admit it: as Lutherans, setting aside a Sunday to celebrate the Lutheran Reformation is odd. Peculiar. Pretty much the rest of Christendom thinks that a tradition like this borders on some sort of personality cult. Others think that we simply make too much of this event called the Reformation, of Luther and his cohorts. After all, we don’t move the Feast of St. Matthew, or the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, or St. Luke, or the Feast of Simon and Jude — which, by the way, was Friday — or any other saints, unless their festival lands on a given Sunday. Reformation is the only thing that we do where we move the event to the previous closest Sunday.
Reformation used to be a big deal. But let’s also admit this: that celebrations of Reformation today among Lutherans is pale in comparison to what it used to be — even what it used to be in the year I was ordained, 1991. It was common for congregations to have a special service on Sunday morning for their own members, and then in the afternoon they’d get together with like-minded congregations for a community-wide service, with a community choir and special liturgy, and pastors processing down the middle aisle, each taking his turn to do a portion of the liturgy. Sometimes services would even be followed by a great feast or banquet. But those days are largely gone, and the Lutheran Reformation seems to be little more than deserving of an honorable mention and the singing of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
So I ask you a question: did our predecessors in the faith make too much of Reformation, or do contemporary Lutherans make too little?
This morning we have before us, as we always do on this particular Sunday, the traditional Scripture readings assigned for the festival of the Reformation. The Epistle is one of those old standards, one of those favorites — it’s almost every single year: Romans 3: “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.” And then there’s the even more popular and more recognizable John 8:31-32: “If you abide in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
Now the first reading that I read is also a commonly assigned one — every three years, if not more often, as a reading for Reformation — and it’s been that way for a very long time. I’m talking centuries. But it’s a reading that is often assigned but rarely ever preached on. That’s because the contemporary Lutheran pastor — this one included — isn’t quite sure what to do with that particular reading. I’m talking about Revelation 14, verses 6 and 7: “Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And he said with a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come, and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.'”
We’re used to sermons based on Romans 3 and John chapter 8, Ezekiel 33 and Jeremiah 31, which instruct the pastors to preach the Word of God — the Law and the Gospel — to wayward children, so that they would hear the Gospel, repent, and trust in Christ alone. But up until the start of the 20th century, most every Lutheran believed that the angel — also rightly translated “messenger” — referred to in Revelation 14 is the reformer, Dr. Martin Luther.
After all, the book of Revelation is a written record of the visions God gave to St. John, and these visions are steeped in images and symbolic language concerning the New Testament era and the end of time. It’s not a straightforward, particularly clear, precise book in our reading and understanding of it. It has an awful lot of stuff that takes an awful lot of time in order to rightly understand what it is God is teaching and revealing to His Christian church in the New Testament era.
The book of Revelation is a book that tells us that the New Testament era — the New Testament church — will be marked by suffering, false doctrine, persecution, and woes. Our translation uses the word “judgment.” Woe is a judgment that will, in fact, plague the Christian church throughout her New Testament history. The suffering, Revelation teaches us, will grow worse and worse until the last day, when Christ will come and usher in the new heavens and the new earth.
Our Lutheran forerunners believed that Revelation 14:6-7 was a prophecy of the public ministry of Dr. Martin Luther. They didn’t think that this passage applied, generally speaking, to Martin Luther in the same kind of way it does to any preacher who’s become well known for preaching the Gospel and having sort of wide influence over the hearers. No, no — it’s more than that. They believed that these two verses are a singular and direct prophecy of the man named Martin Luther, who restored the teaching of the Word of God — the preaching of the Law and Gospel — to the church throughout the world.
Here’s what Johann Bugenhagen — Luther’s pastor and friend — preached at Luther’s funeral in 1546: “This angel, who says ‘Fear God and give Him glory,’ was Dr. Martin Luther. And what is written here — ‘Fear God and give Him glory’ — are the two parts of Luther’s doctrine: the Law, meaning fear of God, and the Gospel, give glory to God.”
C.F.W. Walther, 300 years later in 1845 — 177 years ago — said this: “These words from the Revelation of St. John are, as you have already learned on other occasions, a prophecy of the Reformation of the church established by God through Luther 300 years ago.” He continued: “The angel, the one sent by God who flew through the midst of heaven, is Luther. And the eternal Gospel that he preached is Luther’s doctrine.”
This is what our Lutheran forefathers thought of Luther, and what they came to call Lutherans: Luther’s doctrine — namely, the teaching of the Law and the Gospel. It’s how they also understood Revelation 14:6. That was then; this is now.
Pastor Gerald Miller, pastor of Mount Zion Lutheran Church in Denver, Colorado, conducted a survey of his own as he prepared this study for his Reformation service. He studied commentaries from Lutherans on Reformation sermons from notable theologians over the last 100 years. In the last 100 years, he could not find a single Lutheran who still believed that Revelation 14:6-7 is a direct reference to the reformer, Dr. Martin Luther. For some 400 years, Lutherans were certain — maybe rightly so, maybe mistakenly so — that the prophecy of Revelation 14 was fulfilled in Martin Luther. For the last 100 years, every Lutheran has been silent on the topic.
Why the change? I mean, there’s no new data. We haven’t discovered any new way to understand the book of Revelation. There’s been no great archaeological discovery that would in any way, shape, or form change what the Greek words actually mean and how they’re constructed in the book of Revelation. There’s no data or insight regarding the book of Revelation, and no particular thing that would apply to chapter 14, verses 6 and 7, that would offer any kind of conclusive and final interpretation of 6 and 7. There’s nothing that would prove our forerunners wrong — or right — in their belief about Luther and verses 6 and 7. So what happened? Why the difference?
Perhaps the difference between then and now is this: the fellow reformers, contemporaries of Luther — and Lutherans from bygone days — had a better understanding and a deeper appreciation. Listen carefully to the momentous change that came with Luther, with his teaching, and with the Reformation. Think of it this way: the room is dark. You flip the switch. The room is now bright and lit. Quite a change.
At the time of the Reformation, you see, a great many people believed that God was doing something miraculous on a global scale through His instrument, Martin Luther. They rightly came to understand that by the power of the Spirit, the Word of God — the Gospel of Jesus Christ — by the preaching, writings, teaching, debating, and all the other things Luther did at the time, that in fact people were now being set free in a land and a territory that had been held in a dungeon of darkness for a thousand years. God had done this by sending a messenger, whom his contemporaries were beginning to liken to an apostle, a prophet of old, who proclaimed — quote — “to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people, the eternal Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
See, in 1517, you all know, there was basically one fundamental church: the Roman church. It wasn’t called the Roman Catholic Church, by the way, until the Council of Trent, about 450 years ago. If a person lived in the West — anywhere in the West — they were under the jurisdiction of the Roman church. And that jurisdiction of the Roman church reached every single aspect of daily and human life. The people were, in effect, held hostage, in bondage to the preaching and teaching and discipline of the Roman church. They were spiritually and temporally embodied. It was a religious body — not just spiritual, but it even went into everyday life, about what someone could and could not do, what one could say and not say. A bondage of sin, death, and the power of the devil. Spiritual darkness held sway over the visible church for literally a thousand years.
From the pope to the peasant, the Gospel had been locked away, hidden, and buried. Deprived of the Gospel, every one of the children who were born were born in spiritual darkness, and were held captive to worldly philosophies of the day — not to the Law and Gospel of Jesus Christ. Galatians 4:3 has something to say about that: “So we too, when we were children, were held in bondage to the elementary principles of the world.”
The Roman church administered a system of bondage. It required compulsory service to a system of works-righteousness. It was based on a bad kind of fear of God — the wrong kind of fear — on law and superstition and financial extortion that drove the entire system. The Roman system had been designed and arranged to raise money, not to raise people from the dead; designed to raise money, not to deliver man out of the burdens of his or her sin. It had no way to bring about a clear conscience and confidence before God that one was in fact forgiven and saved.
Add to the religious and the moral and political tyranny of the day the realities of life in the Middle Ages: poverty, short life spans, plagues and diseases, constant threats of war from Muslims and territorial disputes between princes and nobles, famines, natural disasters, and more. Walther characterized it vividly: “Before Luther’s day, nearly a thousand years of spiritual darkness had settled over all of Christianity. The light of the pure Gospel was nearly lost everywhere. The book of books, the Holy Scripture, lay in the dust. Right in the midst of Christianity, all Christianity was under the yoke of slavery. The Antichrist foretold in Scripture — the pope of Rome — ruled on his throne of Satan. Christianity languished in fearful despair and anxieties. Thousands, in their previous predicament of sin, cried out in vain, ‘What must we do to be saved?’ But there was no answer.”
The situation was far worse than wolves, far worse than strife, far worse than food shortage. Our fathers understood that it doesn’t get any worse than this. It doesn’t get any worse than having no knowledge that you have a gracious God — the gracious God found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And that is exactly what Luther discovered in his study of the Bible, when he pulled that book of books from the dust, blew it off, and began to read it — especially in its own language, in Greek and Hebrew. He discovered a gracious God who rescued him, and rescued you, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
So when God raised up a preacher, a messenger — even though he was nothing but a dirty little monk from a dirty little town in Germany — to preach the Word of Christ in such a way that peasants and kings alike came to know the truth, Revelation 14:6-7, to the reformers of the day and for 400 years thereafter, fit like a glove.
What Luther did was unprecedented in human history. While there would be other reformers, let there be no mistake: when the name and the title “The Reformer” is spoken, it means Luther.
If only our people today had such situational awareness of our culture and of the moment of history in which we live. If only our people today knew the Scriptures as the reformers came to know them. If only our people today understood that sin is bondage, not freedom. If only people today understood that great darkness and depravity have fallen over our land, in our time, and in our so-called churches. If only people knew and believed Romans 3: that we’ve all 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. If only people believed the words of Jesus in the Gospel lesson this morning: “If you abide in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
You see, Luther didn’t become the restorer of the Gospel by chance. God Himself drove Luther to it, and then worked through Luther. Luther said that he and his colleagues drank beer in Wittenberg while God reformed the church. Though long departed, Luther still teaches — and teaches the Law and the Gospel — through his writings and his recorded word. He remains the champion of faith and of grace in Christ. Christ’s death on the cross is the atoning sacrifice for Luther’s sins and for yours. You have been forgiven all your sin. You’ve been given eternal life, apart from any works of your own. There’s no merit or worthiness in us. Our salvation, as the Reformation itself, belongs to God’s work alone.
And that is Luther. Whether Luther is the angel of Revelation 14:6 and 7 — that might be up for debate, and won’t be answered until the end of time. But we don’t need to diminish the importance of Luther, of the work of God in the restoration of the Gospel and the Reformation, because of our ignorance of history and of the Bible.
After our Lord’s life, death, and resurrection — after the faithful and courageous work of the Apostles — after those two things, the most important event in church history and in world history is unquestionably the Reformation. There God restored the Gospel to you, and He has set you free. And you are free indeed. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.