Open your Bibles with me, if you will, please, to Romans chapter 1. As you’ve seen in the email that was sent out to all of you, and as I have mentioned rather jokingly many times over the years, that although the last Sunday in October is recognized in Reformed churches as Reformation Sunday, we are Reformed Baptists, and so we can observe Reformation Sunday or not. And in many years we haven’t, and this year I think we will with the entire month. Today, next week, Lord willing, and then the final week of the month as well, we’ll look at some Reformation themes. Today we’ll deal with the reason for the Reformation, the material cause of the Reformation, which focuses then on the doctrine of justification by faith, which is illustrated for us very poignantly in the life experience of Martin Luther.
I’d like to begin with Romans chapter 1, verses 14 through 17:
I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and the foolish. So I’m eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome, for I am not ashamed of the gospel. For it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, that is in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
I’ll not take time to expound this at length, but notice—we’ll look at it some more as we go along—but notice the important point in verse 17, that is, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed. And that has to be understood then as righteousness from God is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith, that is, by faith and nothing but faith. Now turn the page to Romans chapter 3. And here Paul lays out for us the ground of our justification. How is it we are accepted by God as righteous? Romans 3, verses 20 through 26:
For by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, 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. This was to show God’s righteousness because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Again, we have emphasized here that righteousness comes to us by faith alone, and it comes to us on the ground of what Christ has done for us in our place, having satisfied the demands of God’s righteousness. And so we are righteous through faith in Christ, who has done the work that God requires of us.
We’ll see more of that as we go along as well. Now let’s look down the page a little, Romans chapter 4, verses 4 and 5:
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due. And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.
Now, an important point here to highlight is that little phrase: “God justifies the ungodly.” A stunning development that God, the righteous judge, can pronounce ungodly people to be righteous. And therein lies the gospel, as we will see.
All right, as I’ve said, we’re looking this week at Reformation themes. One—and I’ll clear this away at the beginning—one potential mistake in highlighting the past is over-idealizing our, let’s call them heroes, in the past. We don’t want to over-idealize them. We don’t want to leave the impression that they were faultless men. It is possible in looking at themes like this to leave the impression that they are more than human, that we overlook their faults, and we leave the impression that they’re better than they were.
Like all other men, the Reformers were imperfect men, personally and theologically, and we should acknowledge right off the bat that Martin Luther and John Calvin had no particular affection for Baptists. Now the Anabaptists of their day were not Baptists as they would come a little bit later in England. They come from a different stream. But the Anabaptists were definitely not Baptists as we’ve come to know them. But still, there’s no excusing the way the Reformers treated the Anabaptists. It’s an ugly chapter of Reformation history.
And in fact, we might say that it was the claim of the earliest Baptists, beginning in England, that they were simply carrying forward the principles of the Reformation that the Reformers had articulated and bringing it into areas that they had not addressed sufficiently. Particularly, the Baptists were concerned with regard to ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, the doctrine of baptism, things like that, that they hadn’t come far enough.
So all of that said and set aside, it remains the case that we ought to be able to learn from the past. We ought to be able to learn from our forebears, even though they are flawed in whatever kinds of ways. After all, if God can’t work through flawed individuals, he’s got nothing else to work with; he’s got to send angels. That’s all he’s got in humanity is flawed individuals. And it is not wrong, it is right for us to look to the past and see how God has worked in various ways, and using the scriptures as our guide and as our judge of all that happened. This is what the Reformers themselves said we should do: the principle of sola scriptura.
Using the scriptures as our guide, evaluate what has been done and appreciate the gains that were won through their efforts. At critical moments over the centuries, God has raised up men who in various ways have articulated important doctrines of the faith. And those were watershed moments for us in the development of Christian doctrine. Not that they invented doctrines, but there was a watershed moment in the articulation of certain doctrines. So early on, it would be what are called the Cappadocian fathers, who articulated for us the doctrine of the Trinity. The work of those men in the early centuries was just marvelous, and there’s hardly a thing that’s been written that can improve on what they said way back then. It has become the standard for Christians of virtually all stripes recognizing the doctrine of the Trinity that they articulated. It was a watershed moment.
A little later, it was the doctrine of the person of Christ and the two natures of Christ. You have men like Athanasius and the Nicene Fathers articulating for us what it means for Christ to be both God and man, and fully God and fully man at the same time. And how does that work out? How are we to understand that?
Again, that was a watershed moment. We have other important moments in the history of the church. We have Anselm with the doctrine of the atonement. More recently, we have Benjamin Warfield giving us the doctrine of inspiration. It was not a new doctrine. It was nothing new that he taught. It was just a fuller exposition and a fuller defense of the doctrine than had ever been given in the history of the church, and there is scarcely a thing that you can read today that is but a footnote to what Warfield wrote in that regard.
So God gives us these moments in history when certain doctrines have been highlighted for us and for the remainder of church history. Few moments in the history of the church compare to what we have in the 16th-century Reformation: the championing of several doctrines of the faith, one that I’ve already mentioned, sola scriptura. Scripture alone—that is our guide, not the traditions of the church and not anything else, but Scripture itself is our guide, and it must be the sole standard by which we judge all matters of faith and practice. Another matter articulated in the Reformation was the individual priesthood of believers, rescuing men and women from the slavery to a religious system that left men and women looking to a priest or looking to a church for their access to God, and showing them that now the soul can have immediate access to God through Christ, our high priest. We are individual priests before God.
But above everything else, and actually underlying everything else in the Reformation, is the recovery of the Christian gospel itself. In medieval Roman Catholic theology, the simple gospel of justification by grace through faith alone had been lost. And it was in the life experience of Martin Luther that that doctrine becomes highlighted through his own experience and through his own teaching. And it’s a story well worth repeating to sharpen understanding and our appreciation of this central doctrine of the faith: justification by grace through faith alone.
The Starting Point of the Reformation
All right, then the starting point of the Reformation, as you know, is October 31st, 1517. That marks the beginning. That was the day that Martin Luther made his way to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg and posted his famous 95 Theses.
They’re posted in Latin. They were intended as propositions, intended for debate among the scholarly class, so they’re posted in Latin. He had no idea, no clue at all at that moment, the kind of impact that that posting of those 95 theses would have.
Immediately, they were translated into German. Within two weeks, they’re all over Germany. Within four weeks, it’s all over Europe, and it is quite a stir all over Europe by that time. Remember, this is early 16th century. A hundred years earlier, the early 15th century, we have the invention of the printing press. And now because we have the printing press in God’s providence, these 95 theses are quickly printed and spread all over Europe.
Now those 95 theses—the propositions for debate that Luther posted on the door—were not the full-blown theology that he would come to understand in just a few short years. But the seeds of that theology were there. And I think the most significant of the 95 theses is the first one.
It reads like this. Here’s his proposition for debate among the scholarly class: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘repent,’ he intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.” Now that doesn’t sound too shocking to you. But you have to understand it within that day. And here we are in the strange position this morning of coming to a Reformed Baptist church, and you’re going to learn a heavy dose of Roman Catholic theology. You have to know this in order to understand the Protestant Reformation.
In Roman Catholic theology, penitentia, the Latin word for repentance, was not understood as a change of mind, which is clearly the idea of the Greek word behind it, a change of mind. In Roman Catholic theology, it did not mean that. It meant doing penance—not being penitent, but doing penance. And doing penance was simply an act of contrition that you perform in order to make up for your sin. I’m not misstating that; I’m not misrepresenting it. You need to understand that repentance, penance in Roman Catholic theology, is an act of contrition that you perform in order to make up for your sin.
And those acts of contrition could range from public expressions of remorse, fasting, and severe kinds of asceticism and self-denial. Lest you think I misrepresented it, let me read you a few official statements of the Roman Catholic Church. This first one is from the Council of Trent. This is the official response to the Reformation in the 16th century from the Roman Catholic Church:
Penance is the sacrament by which the benefit of the death of Christ is applied to those who have fallen after baptism.
So after you’ve been baptized, you fall into sin, you do an act of contrition before God, and by that act of contrition on your part, the benefits of the death of Christ become yours. Let me read you another. This is from the Baltimore Catechism:
By acts of penance, we satisfy God for the temporal punishment due to our sins.
So by our act of contrition, whatever’s been assigned, we make satisfaction to God for our sins, according to Roman Catholic theology. One more: the Question and Answer Catechism, the Roman Catholic catechism:
Penance is expiatory; it washes away sin. It is expiatory by making up for our failures and enduring pain in reparation for sin.
We endure some kind of affliction, pain, remorse, whatever it is, and in doing so, we make reparations for our sin.
Well, that’s the way of salvation in Roman Catholic theology. They speak of grace, of course; you can’t get away from that word if you read the Bible at all. They speak of grace, but clearly grace in practical terms is spelled very differently in Roman Catholic theology. Roman Catholic teaching—and this was the time of Martin Luther; it’s the same today—justification was not a legal acquittal from a judge, but an achieved condition on your part. It’s not a legal acquittal, and you get this distinction; it’s very important. It’s not a legal acquittal from the judge, pronouncing you righteous because of the righteousness of Christ imputed to you and considered to be yours, but rather justification in Roman Catholic theology is an achieved condition on your part.
You’re recognized as righteous in the end because you yourself have accomplished a sufficient degree of righteousness that God then recognizes and pronounces you righteous then. So it’s not a legal declaration, but a personal assessment that God makes. If you are righteous, then you will be justified in Roman Catholic theology. Now the means of attaining that righteousness—how do we get righteous enough for God to justify us then? Keep in mind the distinction between what we’ll see in a little bit: the reformed teaching, the biblical teaching that God justifies us because he considers us righteous because of the righteousness of Christ given to us. As opposed to in Roman Catholic teaching, righteousness is something you develop and you improve sufficiently for God to recognize your condition as one of righteousness. And so he judges you accordingly. Some have made the distinction that God in Roman Catholic theology is not so much a judge as he is a physician. And as a physician, he evaluates you and pronounces you healthy.
Now the means of attaining that righteousness then is given to us from the church. And it’s given to us from the church in the sacraments. Again, this is according to Roman Catholic teaching. First of all, in baptism. In baptism, grace is channeled to you. Grace is channeled to you at the hands of a priest. Righteousness is infused.
You now have a degree of righteousness and you now are responsible to improve and develop that righteousness in order to be justified. After baptism, there’s the sacrament of confession. You go to a confessor, a priest, and tell him the wrongs that you have done. He then in turn prescribes certain acts of penance for you to do to make up for your sin. And when you have sufficiently performed those acts of penance prescribed by the priest, the priest then grants absolution. You’re absolved from your sin.
That’s no longer the issue. Well, it didn’t take the Roman Catholic Church long before they could recognize the leverage that that kind of theology held over people. So they developed a system of indulgences as a form of penance. An indulgence was an alternative means of penance, which simply said in plain terms: you don’t want to or you can’t perform an act of penance? Just give us your money and buy an indulgence and purchase from us the salvation and the forgiveness that God offers. You give us your money, God will forgive you. Salvation had been a commodity that could be bought and sold.
Now you might wonder: how in the world could a church come up with a practice like that? How could they justify it? Well, it goes like this: Jesus, the apostles, Mary, and other of the saints not only were good enough, but they were better than that. They had works of supererogation. They had works that exceeded the required amount. And having achieved this excess of goodness, the church now collects all of that, as it were, into a treasury of merit from which you can draw, if you pay us your money.
It’s the official teaching of the church. Now today, the Roman Catholic Church has condemned the sale of indulgences. They still have indulgences, but the sale of it now has been condemned. In that day, it was just bought and sold like a commodity.
Now to that, to indulgences, was added the doctrine of purgatory—a place of torment where the sinner is purged from his sins. That’s what the word means: purgatory. In their suffering, you are purged from your sins and you there, according to their teaching, make satisfaction. By your suffering, you make satisfaction for whatever sin remained in you. Now, if you can purchase forgiveness from the church for the sins you commit, well, then you can purchase forgiveness from the church that will lessen your stay in purgatory as well.
And so they’re sold that way. The Pope saw the opportunity here and he needed funds to build St. Peter’s Basilica. And so he sent out priest salvation salesmen to various areas around Europe, selling indulgences to raise the money to build St. Peter’s Basilica. Johann Tetzel was the salvation salesman in Luther’s area. And he is the one then who sparked the writing of those 95 theses.
There’s a famous story in Luther’s account of all of this, that one day Luther, now a priest, is walking down the sidewalk, down the road, and he comes across a parishioner who was drunk. And he begins to chastise the man for being drunk. The man reaches in his pocket and pulls out an indulgence and shows him that it’s okay because he has paid for the indulgence and has bought forgiveness for it. And it infuriated Luther; it can’t be the way of salvation. Tetzel was, by the account of his own peers, an unscrupulous man, immoral; he was described by his own superiors as unscrupulous. But his sales at the time, initially, were really successful. And he had a little jingle, and it’s become very famous. In German, it goes—well, you’ll have to forgive my pronunciation; you can ask Lilo if I get it correct—Sobald der Pfennig im Kasten klingt, die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt. “As soon as the coin in the coffers rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” And to that then they began to preach: “Your poor parents, they’ve gone before you. They’re in purgatory suffering for their sins. And you can lessen their stay if you will buy an indulgence for them.” And then he would get very dramatic about it: “Oh, here are your poor parents suffering in purgatory. We gave you life. We did everything for you. Help, help us.”
And poor, gullible people were taken in by all of that in earnest hope of obtaining salvation and purchasing salvation for their parents as well. I think six of our men and women of our congregation recently have been to Italy and seen St. Peter’s Basilica; before you become too enamored with it, recognize how it was built. While this was the way of salvation in Roman Catholic teaching—through various efforts on your part, you could become righteous and you could become acceptable to God.
A Sinner’s Religion
And what bothered Luther was that gospel is not—we can put it this way—that gospel is not good news for sinners. That gospel is good news for good people. But if you’re a sinner, that gospel isn’t good news at all. To be a Christian, you have to be good enough. And as you labor to become good enough, God keeps careful record of it. And then finally on judgment day, you’ll be informed whether you have made it or not. Consequently, the doctrine of assurance of salvation that we hold so important and precious was condemned outright in Roman Catholic theology at the Council of Trent. You can’t know ahead of time; you have to wait and see if you’ve achieved enough righteousness on your part. On judgment day, you’ll learn. Well, this is what Luther had been taught. This is what he believed: that God would justify him if he could somehow earn it and deserve it.
And he was coming to understand very clearly that that gospel was not good news for sinners. What bothered Luther was that he couldn’t see how he could ever become good enough. He knew in his heart that he would never be able to deserve salvation. Whatever goodness he had done, whatever suffering he would do, whatever affliction he would endure, whatever acts of penance he would perform, he would still be a sinner. And how in that case could I ever be justified?
He knew also that God was a righteous judge, unrelentingly righteous, which he is. And given that God cannot fellowship with sinners, for sinners there’s no hope. It never entered Luther’s mind in those days that Christianity was, as I like to call it, a sinner’s religion. Or, in the words of Romans chapter 4 and verse 5, which we have just read: “God justifies the ungodly.” It’s a stunning thought that the righteous judge, unrelentingly righteous, has found a righteous way to declare unrighteous people righteous.
And this is what Luther is beginning to learn now. Backing up a bit, in July of 1505, at the age of 20, Luther was a law student; that was his first pursuit. Luther was shaken by the death of a friend and began serious thinking on his part. He began to think of ultimate reality—things like sin, judgment, justice, eternity.
And he was deeply bothered by it. And then just two weeks later, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm. And I don’t know the details of it—nearly struck by lightning—but it was a severe storm of some kind. And he was shaken to the core by it. And in the midst of it, he cried out, “St. Anne, help me, and I will become a monk.” Now, Anne—St. Anne—was the patron saint of the miners. His dad was a miner. That was a logical place for him to call then.
And so he asked for help and he came through it and decided to become a monk. Now, in Roman Catholic theology, a monastic vow was the highest level of spiritual and moral attainment. If anywhere, in the seclusion of the monastery, pursuing contemplative piety, there, if anywhere, you’ll find God’s favor. And so on July 16, 1505, Martin Luther entered an Augustinian monastery. He was a zealous student. He exceeded above all the others, taught himself Greek and Hebrew very well. He was hardworking. He was sincere, laboring by it all to find peace with God and peace for his conscience.
Now an important factor in all of this for Luther was what he calls the Anfechtung that he endured in those days. That’s a German word for temptation. In Luther, it took a particular kind of slant. He has a famous quote: “Only temptation makes a theologian.” But with Luther, that temptation that he’s speaking of, the Anfechtung, is temptation in the sense of trial, in the sense of affliction.
And so with him, it was a foreboding sense of doom, a sense of despair, an awareness of sin, a conviction over it, and a recognition that because of his sin, he deserved punishment. And so there’s this fear, and there’s anxiety that comes with it, and a torturing conscience. The man was deeply convicted of his sin, and he had no easy way out that he could find. And with all of that, there’s these high and noble concepts of God that he speaks of; at the time he would have recognized that God is this high and holy judge sitting on the rainbow in the circle of the earth, keeping record of men’s sins and taking care of them accordingly. For Luther, that period of temptation, of affliction of conscience, was an extended period of soul torture.
He reports, he says, that “my soul was stretched out.” And here’s what he says: “There was no corner of my body that was not filled with most bitter bitterness, horror, fear, dolor, and all these things,” he said, “seem eternal. I wish that I had never been created a human being.” So here’s a man who’s in anguish over his sin. He’s taken the question seriously, and he’s in anguish over it.
And it was in that sense that Luther spoke when he said, “Only temptation makes a theologian.” He says, “I did not learn my theology all at once, but I had to search deeper for it where my temptations took me. Not my understanding, my reading or speculation, but living—nay rather by dying and being damned—made me a theologian.” Wrestling over the question: what will I do with my sin? The fact is I’ve sinned against God. I know that. The fact is God is an unrelentingly holy and righteous judge. He cannot just clear the guilty. What will I do?
Luther had no answer for it. Later, in 1518, in a letter to the Pope, Luther, explaining his 95 theses, wrote: “These punishments that he suffered were so great and so much like hell that no tongue could adequately express them. No pen could describe them. One who had not himself experienced them could not believe them. At such a time, God seems terribly angry. At such a time, there is no flight, no comfort within or without, but all things accuse.” So here’s a man who’s come to grips with his sinfulness, convicted over it. Search as he may, he has no answer for it. The theology of the church which he served was not providing an answer for it either.
Well, that was Luther’s state of soul then as he entered the monastery. Luther, as I’ve already indicated, was the very best of monks, laboring diligently to rid himself of sin and guilt. He would pray hours, hours upon end every day. One time he prayed for six weeks, unending, and only every three or four days stopping to sleep for a couple or three hours, fasting all along as he went. He would confess his sins to confessors, confessing his sins hours upon end until the confessors hated to see him come. But he was thorough in his confession of sin. However small, all sins need to be confessed, and he would work to confess them all.
And then he would wonder, “Well, I wonder about the sins that I have forgotten.” And he’d rack his mind and his soul. “What are the sins that I’ve forgotten?” And he’d confess those as well. And then he would wonder, “What about the sins I never noticed in the first place?” And he would rack his mind and his soul looking to be thorough in all of his confessions.
And then he would wonder, “I wonder if I’ve been contrite, truly contrite in my confession, or am I motivated just by fear of judgment?” His mind and his soul is consumed with this thought of sin and forgiveness. How can I find it? How can I make up for it?
And in the theology that he had been taught, there was no answer. He would spend hours torturing his soul to be rid of sin. He’d fast day and night. He’d stay outside all night long, sometimes in the deep snow with no warm clothing, seeking to remove his sinfulness. It was a self-imposed penance on his part, an attempt to rid himself of sin and make himself acceptable to God.
And in fact, a famous line from Luther there is, “If ever a monk got to heaven by monkery, I should have been that monk.” For all of this, Luther was forced to recognize that God is too righteous to acquit guilty people. Luther was not yet good enough and he knew it. In fact, he knew he never would be.
And adding to that sense of guilt was his recognition of God. He knew he must love God with all of his heart. But after all of this trying, he writes, “I did not love. Indeed, I hated that God who punished sinners. And with a monstrous, silent, if not blasphemous murmuring, I fumed against God.” Now you understand—you go to Rome to a Reform Baptist Church—you understand the seriousness of sin. You understand the remedy and the gospel and how it applies to all of this.
Put yourself in his shoes. He doesn’t know all of that. And put yourself now in the shoes of unbelieving historians who look at Luther. They look at this and they have no clue: “What is the problem with you?” And so many unbelieving historians have judged Luther mentally unstable because of all this soul affliction that he’s enduring. But here’s a man who has come to grips with ultimate reality—thoughts of eternity, thoughts of sin, thoughts of justice—and he takes it seriously. And I don’t see how anyone taking that seriously could have any other response than what he had.
Luther found new hope when the monastery sent him on business to Rome. “Surely,” he thought, “there I’ll find relief.” Upon arrival in Rome, he said, “Hail, holy Rome, thrice for the blood of the martyrs shed here.” But he was immediately shocked by the vice and the open immorality of the clergy that he found there. And he finally said, “If there is a hell, Rome is built on top of it.” Undaunted by it all, he made his way to the Scala Sancta, the Lateran church—that huge stairway that was believed to have come from, brought from Jerusalem to Rome, the stairway on which Jesus had stood, bleeding and dying.
And he made his way up that stairway; on his knees it is said, kissing each step as he went. And he gets to the top and he says, “I wonder if it’s so.” He returned home with the same Anfechtung, the same temptation, affliction, feelings of despair that he had before. God was still that righteous judge who could only condemn him for his sin. And he wondered why God would be so cruel as to require of him something that he could never give.
A major turning point in Luther’s experience was one Johann von Staupitz. Staupitz was a Saxon nobleman, head of the convents in Germany, and also the head of the new University of Wittenberg. He was also Luther’s confessor, spiritual father. He would hear Luther’s confessions hours on end until finally, Staupitz would say, “Ich verstehe es nicht. I don’t understand it. I don’t get it.” But it was Staupitz who first got the idea across to Luther that peace comes through faith. Not doing, but by trusting. And he urged Luther to look to Christ. Now later, Staupitz became critical of Luther, increasingly so over the years, and he died a loyal son of the Roman Catholic Church. But Staupitz did get Luther started on the right track, and Luther himself writes of him, “If I did not praise Staupitz, I should be a damnable, ungrateful, papistical ass, for he bore me in Christ. If Staupitz had not helped me out, I should have been swallowed up and left in hell.” Well, Staupitz was convinced that theological studies would help Luther and give him peace, not realizing how that would work out so well.
In 1508, he appointed Luther to the newly formed University of Wittenberg, a no-name university that no one else would have ever heard of otherwise. In fact, I read in one place that in 1514, there was a “who’s who” of German universities published, and Luther’s name doesn’t even appear. In 1513, then, Luther began to lecture in theology. First of all, he lectured through the Psalms. In 1515, he lectured through Romans. In 1516, he lectured on Galatians. In 1517, he lectured through Hebrews, and then again through Psalms again.
And for the first time, Luther began to wrestle with the scriptures themselves and not the traditions that had been handed to him from the church. He spent hours laboring over the text, the Greek and Hebrew texts, trying to understand the words that were given, the theology that it was teaching. And the lectures became very popular. And in 1515, then Luther was—the town council called him to the pulpit of the city church, which is a position that he held until his death. In Luther’s study of the text of scripture, he began to notice real differences between the scriptures, on which the church’s faith was purportedly founded—between the scriptures and the church itself.
And during this time—this is another important turning point for Luther—during this time, he read an essay by Augustine. This was an Augustinian monk in an Augustinian monastery, teaching now theology. And so he’s familiar with Augustine and he’s reading Augustine, an important passage that helped to turn his thinking.
Augustine cited Romans 1, verse 17, which we read earlier. Romans 1, verse 16: “I’m not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.” And now verse 17: “For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.” And Augustine makes the comment there that this righteousness that Paul is speaking of here is not the righteousness that belongs to God himself, but the righteousness that he bestows on human beings.
That’s an important distinction. Now, Augustine himself didn’t take that thought where Luther did. He didn’t understand it fully. And there are difficulties with Augustine’s theology. But that point was important. It was critical in Luther’s development of his understanding of the gospel—that the righteousness that God is speaking of in Romans 1:17 is not the righteousness that God is in himself, that belongs to him; it’s the righteousness that he bestows on human beings. And that was a stunning thought for Luther. God bestows righteousness? I thought righteousness was something we owed to God. And that’s why all these labors and the penance and the affliction and all. Righteousness is something God gives? That’s a stunning thought for Luther. He began to lecture further through the Psalms again. And when he reached Psalm 22, God really began to open his eyes. There he reads the opening verse of the 22nd Psalm:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Luther knew these are the words of Jesus, quoted on the cross. And Luther began to reason and to wonder: why would the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, feel forsaken of God? These were David’s words, of course, but now Jesus makes them his own. Why would he feel afflicted, forsaken of God? And Luther thought, “I understand; that’s how I feel, but for good reason. I’m the sinner and I deserve to be forsaken of God. I get that, but why would the Lord Jesus be forsaken of God?” He was shocked by it all and gradually began to come to grips with that awesome reality that Christ was forsaken of God because he had become the sinner’s substitute.
He stood in the sinner’s place. He assumed every obligation of the sinner. And in the behalf of the sinner and in place of the sinner, Jesus took the punishment due to them. As Paul wrote, he’s redeemed us from the curse of the law, having been made a curse for us. And what I’ve said many times in the most awful words in the Bible, 2 Corinthians 5:21: “He who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, had identified himself so with sinners that he had assumed all of their responsibilities, took the punishment of their sin to himself, and in their place made satisfaction to God for their sins in all that God required of us. Our sin became his. He took it. He paid the penalty of it. His righteousness becomes ours and we receive it simply by faith alone.
Not by works, not by earning it, not trying to establish a righteousness before God, but simply trusting in Jesus Christ to be what God requires for us. And so Luther discovers Christianity is a sinner’s religion after all. In the words of Romans 4 and verse 5 again: “God justifies ungodly people.” What a thought—that a righteous judge has found a righteous way, righteously, to declare righteous ungodly people. And he does it because those ungodly people, as they are in themselves, have Jesus, the righteous one, and on the ground of their association with him, simply through faith, God pronounces them righteous. Their sin made his, his righteousness become theirs, and God now has righteous grounds to declare unrighteous people righteous.
So Luther discovered: I do not improve to the point where God finally accepts me. God just gives me Jesus. He declares me righteous by virtue of the fact that I have a perfect substitute. Luther’s mantra became the Latin Christus pro me: Christ for me. Christ for me. Christ for me.
That is to say, it is not my pains that make up for my sins. It’s his pains that make up for my sins. It’s not my righteousness that I give to God. It is his righteousness he gives me by virtue of my association with Jesus simply by faith. And I have in him everything that God requires of me. Luther’s famous affirmation—this became what characterizes the very heart of Reformation theology—is that we are simul justus et peccator. We are at the same time righteous and a sinner.
How in the world can that be? I’ve not attained righteousness. I’ve not improved to the point that God accepts me. I’m a sinner—I’m peccator, a sinner. And yet I am righteous as well. How’s that? Because God views me now through my faith union with Jesus Christ. God sees me as in him and clothed with his righteousness. I am at the same time sinner and righteous. And in fact, he went on to say, we are semper iustus et peccator, always righteous and a sinner. As I am in myself, all I will ever be is a sinner. But standing before God in Jesus Christ, I’m righteous.
What a liberating thought. Luther had come to understand the gospel. He found the solution for his soul struggle over his sin. It is true—and he will not back up on this at all—it is true that God is unrelentingly righteous. And the demands of his righteousness must be met. But it is also true that God, the righteous judge, has taken the place of the accused, has borne the punishment of the sinner’s sin, and provided a righteousness that they could not provide in themselves. God justifies ungodly people, and he does it on the righteous grounds of Jesus Christ.
And so Luther learned that righteousness really is not something we give God. We achieve it through our good works, our efforts, our penance, and all the things. It’s not something we give God. Righteousness is something God gives us. And that’s the glory of the gospel. This gospel is for sinners. That man or woman who recognizes his sin, or her sin, comes under conviction for it, recognizes that they’re in trouble with God, but for remedy of those sins, gives up—gives up on every self-help and every effort on your own and turns simply to Jesus Christ. That man, that woman is justified before God. God declares us righteous, not on the ground of what we have done.
He declares us righteous on the ground that Jesus Christ is for us everything that he requires of us. And Luther writes there: “Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith alone.” And I love this next line: “Thereupon I felt myself reborn, that I had entered paradise itself through open gates.”
There is something about this gospel that is terribly offensive. And it has proven so across the centuries many times over. You preach this doctrine that you have nothing to offer before God. It takes salvation out of the hands of sinners and it leaves them helpless. You preach this kind of doctrine and self-righteous people will tell you, “Oh, you just make me feel like a worm.” It’s an offensive doctrine in that sense, but there’s something just gloriously attractive about this doctrine.
It is full of hope for sinners. We come to realize that we’re sinners. Come to realize that the best—not the worst—the best that we can do is woefully inadequate. And like Luther, we come to feel conviction over it. “What in the world am I going to do?”
And then someone comes along and tells you the gospel. And you hear about Jesus. You hear about one who stood in the place of sinners and gives himself to be for sinners everything that God requires of them. And there’s new hope. And so we go to God with a new confidence because we go to him on the ground of nothing that we have done. We go to him on the ground of Jesus Christ and what he has done for sinners. There I have hope. And there I have a ground of confident approach to God. We love to sing that. We love to sing about this. Some of our favorite songs here are like that:
My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
That’s it.
Thy works, not mine, O Christ, speak gladness to this heart. They tell me all is done, they bid my fears depart.
Nothing in my hands I bring—nothing to offer—simply to thy cross I cling. Naked come to thee for dress, helpless look to thee for grace.
I come just as I am. Nothing in my hands, nothing to give. “I come just as I am without one plea”—nothing to offer at all.
Just this: Jesus shed his blood for sinners, and God promises me that he’ll have me if I come by way of him. This is the gospel. It’s good news indeed. It shaped the modern map, changed the world, and well it should. God justifies ungodly people, and he justifies us through faith, and through faith alone. Amen.