Luther's first lecture were on the book of Psalms. We must bear in mind his method of reading the Psalms. and the Old Testament as a whole for him, as for his time, it was a Christian book foreshadowing the life and death of the Redeemer.
The reference to Christ was unmistakable when he came to the twenty- second psalm, the first verse of which was recited by Christ as he expired on the cross.. " My God. My God, why hast thou forsaken me.?" What could be the meaning of this? Christ evidently felt himself to be forsaken, abandoned by God, deserted. The utter desolation which Luther said he could endure for more than a tenth of an hour and live, had been experienced by Christ himself as he died. Rejected of men, he was rejected also of God. How much worst this must have been than the scourging, the thorns and nails!
In the garden he sweat blood as he did not upon the cross. Christ descend into hell was nothing other than this sense of of alienation from God. Christ had suffered, even as Albrecht Durer painted himself as the Man of Sorrows.
Why should Christ have known such desperation's? Luther knew perfectly well why he himself had had them: he was weak in the presence of the mighty; he was impure in the presence of the Holy: he had blasphemed the Divine majesty. But Christ was not weak; Christ was not impure; Christ was not impious. Why then should he have been so overwhelmed with desolation? The only answer must be that Christ took to himself the iniquity of us all. He who was without sin and so identified himself with us at as to participate in our alienation. He who was truly man so sensed his solidarity with humanity as to feel himself along with mankind estranged from all Holy. what new picture this is of Christ! Where, then, is the judge, sitting upon the rainbow to condemn sinners? He is still the judge, as truth judges error and light darkness; but in judging he suffers with those whom he must condemn
and feels himself with them subject to condemnation. The judge upon the rainbow has become the derelict upon the cross.
The hideousness of sin cannot not be denied or forgotten; but God, who desires not that a sinner should die but that he should turn and live has found reconciliation in the pangs of bitter death.
It is not that the son by his sacrifice has placated the irate father; it is not primarily that the Master by his self-abandoning goodness has made up for our deficiency . It is that in some inexplicable, in utter desolation of the forsaken Christ, God was able to reconcile the world to himself. This does not mean that all mystery is clear. God is still shrouded at times in thick darkness. There are almost two Gods, the inscrutable God whose ways are past finding out. and the God made known to us in Christ.
He is still a consuming fire, but he burns that he may purge and chasten and heal. He is not a God of idle whim, because the cross is not the last word. He who gave up his son unto death also raised him up and will raise us with him, if with him we die to sin that we may rise to newness of life. Who can understand this? Philosophy is unequal to it. Only faith can grasp so high a mystery. This is foolishness of the cross which is hid from the wise and prudent. Reason must retire. She cannot understand that "God hides his power in weakness, his wisdom in folly, his goodness in severity, his justice in sins, his mercy in anger."
How amazing that God in Christ should do all this; that the most High, the most Holy should be the all loving too; that the ineffable Majesty should stoop to take upon himself our flesh, subject to hunger and cold, death and desperation. We see him lying in the feed- box of a donkey, laboring in a carpenter's shop, dying a derelict under the sins of the world. The gospel is not so much a miracle as a marvel, and every line is suffered with wonder.
What God first worked in Christ, that he must work in us. If he who done no wrong was forsaken on the cross, we who are truly alienated from God must suffer a deep hurt. We are not for that reason to upbraid, since the hurt is for our healing
Repentance which is occupied with thoughts of peace is hypocrisy. there must be a great earnestness about it and a deep hurt if the old man is to be put off. When lighting strikes a tree or a man it does two things at once- it rends the tree and swiftly slays the man. But it also turns the face of the dead man and the broken branches of the tree itself toward heaven... We seek to be saved, and God in order that he may save rather damns... They are damned who flee damnation, for Christ was of all the saints the most damned and forsaken.
The contemplation of the cross had convinced Luther that God is neither malicious nor capricious. If, like the Samaritan, God must first pour into our wounds the wine that smarts, it is that he may thereafter use the oil that that soothes. But their still remains the problem of the justice of God. Wrath can melt into mercy, and God will be all the more the Christian God; but if justice be dissolved in leniency, how can he be a just God whom Scriptures describes? The study of the Apostle Paul proved at this point of inestimable value to Luther and at the same time confronted him with the final stumbling block, because Paul unequivocally speaks of the justice of God. At the very expression Luther trembled. Yet he persisted in grappling with Paul, who plainly had agonized over precisely his problem and had found a solution. Light broke at last through the examination of exact shades of meaning in the Greek language. One understands why Luther could never join those who discarded the humanist tools of scholarship. In the Greek of the Pauline epistles the word " justice" has a double sense, rendered in English by "Justice." and "justification." The former is a strict law enforcement of the law, as when a judge pronounces the appropriate sentence.
But from here on any human analogy breaks down. God does not condition his forgiveness upon the expectation of future fulfillment. A man is not put right with God by achievement, whether present or foreseen. Yet it comes only through hearing and studying the word, Luther took over the terminology From Paul of " Justification by faith."
These are Luther's own words:
I greatly longed to understand Paul's Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, "the justice of God," because I took it to mean that justice where by God is just and deal justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him.
Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated an murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant
Night and day I pondered until I saw a connection between the justice of God and the statement that "The just shall live by his faith". Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on new meaning, and whereas before the "justice of God" had filled me with Hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.
If you have true faith that Christ is your Savior, then at once you have a gracious God, for faith leads you in and opens God's heart and will, that you should see pure grace and overflowing love. This it is to behold God in faith that you should look upon his fatherly, friendly, heart, in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness, He who sees God as angry does not see him rightly but looks only on a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face.
Luther had come to a new view of Christ and a new view of God.
He had come to love the suffering Redeemer and the God unveiled on Calvary. But were they after all powerful enough to deliver him From all the hosts of hell? The cross had resolved the conflict between the wrath and mercy of God, and Paul had reconciled for him the inconsistency of the justice and the forgiveness, but what of the conflict between God and the Devil? Is God Lord of all, or is he himself impeded by demonic hordes? Such questions a few years ago would have seen to modern man but relics of medievalism, and fear of demons was dispelled simply by denying their existence.
Today so much sinister has engulfed us that we are prone to wonder whether perhaps there may be malignant forces in the heavenly places. All those who have known the torments of mental disorder well understand the imagery of satanic hands clutching to pull them to their doom. Luther's answer was not scientific but religious. He did not dissipate the demons by turning on an electric light
, because for him long ago they had been routed when the veil of the temple was rent and the earth quaked and darkness descended upon the face of the land. Christ in his utter anguish had fused the wrath and the mercy of God, and put to flight all the legions of Satan.
In Luther's hymns one hears that tramp of marshaled hordes, the shouts of battle, and the triumph
song.
In the Devil's chained I lay
The pangs of death swept over me.
My sin devoured me night and day
In which my mother bore me.
My anguish ever grew in my rife
I took no pleasure in my life.
And sin had made me crazy.
Then was the Father troubled sore
To see me ever languish.
The everlasting Pity swore
To save me from my anguish
He turned to me his father heart
And chose himself a bitter part,
His dearest did it cost him.
Thus spoke his Son, " Hold thou to me.
From now on thou will make it
I Gave my very life for thee
And for thee I will stake it.
For I am thine and thou art mine,
And where I am our lives entwine
The Old Fiend cannot shake it. "
No comments:
Post a Comment