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Luther and Justification by Faith Alone

This is my righteousness: Nothing but the blood of Jesus

Hans & Margarethe Luder On November 10^th, 1483, in Eisleben in Germany Hans Luder’s wife Margarethe gave birth to a boy whom they named Martin. Hans went on to modify his name from Luder to Luther and his son was known as Martin Luther.

Hans, like many a father, was ambitious for his son and sent him for schooling in Latin (the language in which all proper education was done) from the age of 7, followed by boarding school at the age of 13. At 17 Luther was ready for university and went off to Erfurt, one of the best in Germany. His father was still key in all of this, he picked the school and paid the tuition and Luther settled down to study Liberal Arts. At 21 Luther had his Master’s degree and, at his father’s insistence, began law school. The year was 1505 and Luther’s life stretched out ahead of him, just as his father had planned.

Europe in 1505 was a very different place to today. The Roman Catholic Church wielded an enormous amount of power, not just in matters of religion but also in politics. They insisted upon only one rule, God’s rule through the Pope, who the Roman Church understood to be Christ’s representative on earth. Therefore everyone was to be subject to him.

Politically, the Pope worked hard to keep various nations and empires in check. Here’s a map from slightly later, 1560, but the basic layout is the same.

Spain and France were both keen to free themselves more and more from the absolute political power that the Pope insisted upon. The Swiss had always been more independent and to the east the Turks, in the shape of the Ottoman Empire, were slowly making inroads into central Europe. The Pope had most inflence in what was known as the Holy Roman Empire which covered most of modern day Germany. But this was, in reality, little more than a loose federation of many cities and nation states. The Holy Roman Emperor was an elected position and many of the fights of the day were over which royal figure would get the title. In Luther’s day the position was taken by members of the House of Hapsburg, who ruled in Austria and later also in Spain.

In all this politicking, one would hardly notice a 21 year law student in a German town.

And then things changed.

On the 2^nd of July that year, 15050, Luther was returning to Law School from his parents’ house when he was caught in a terrible storm. Fearing for his life he cried out to St Anne, the Patron Saint of miners (his father was in the mining business), for help promising her that if his life was spared he would become a monk. 2 weeks later he entered an Augustinian order of monks, took his vows, and switched his studies from Law to Theology.

His father was furious.

Martin Luther Luther was ordained a priest and celebrated his first mass in 1507 at the age of 23. In doing so he became part of the vast religious system that was the Roman Catholic church. It’s an almost alien world to that which many of us are familiar with. The words sound the same but they are used in completely different ways.

Under Roman thinking your first duty was to turn to God. In response to this act the Church would give to you grace, the mercy of God stored up for us by the good works of Jesus, Mary and the Saints. This first infusion of grace, through baptism, would actually make you sinless. Life from then on was a constant cycle of sinning, falling short of what God had intended for us, and going back to the Church time and time again for more portions of grace for which you had to do good works to deserve. These portions of grace were delivered through various sacraments, 7 in total, of which the main ones available to you and I were baptism, penance and the Mass – the Roman version of Holy Communion. It was as though you were constantly in need of a wash, a wash that would make you perfect in front of God, and the Roman church owned the seven taps by which you could the grace to clean yourself.

Those that died without having had enough grace, which was almost everybody, would then have to face purgatory, thousands of years of having our sin slowly burnt away until we’re pure enough to enter God’s presence. This was, obviously, something you wouldn’t want to go through and so the church provided what were known as indulgences, literally time off from purgatory. And these indulgences were sold.

In 1516 Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal commissioner for indulgences, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. There he is with his hand on the money box. Luther, by now teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg and also priest of Wittenberg’s city church, wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg protesting against it. Reformation Day, 1517 Along with his letter he included a copy of an academic paper he had written entitled, “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,”.

He also nailed the same paper on the door of the church in Wittenberg. That day, October 31, 1517, is to this day known as Reformation Day and the paper that Luther nailed to the door is better known as the 95 Theses. Little did he realise it at the time, but Luther had just started an earthquake that would profoundly influence every area of life. To this day we still feel its effects.

Luther’s protest took him all the way to excommunication from the Church a few years later and a trial at an assembly in the town of Worms in 1521. In the space of only 4 years what to do with Luther had become so important an issue that the council was presided over the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Luther was declared an outlaw. This displeased Frederick III, Elector of Saxony in Germany, who saw it as one more example of the Pope trying to have too much power, and he offered Luther a safe haven. The earthquake that Luther had started was more than religious, it was political – but then in 16th Century Europe religion and politics were intertwined.

Safe in Frederick’s castle Luther got to work writing. From his desk poured forth treatises, sermons, letters and even a complete translation of the New Testament from the original Greek into German. Driving all of this was a firm conviction that the Gospel, the good news about Jesus, that the Roman Catholic Church taught and practised was not the gospel of the Bible. If the Roman Church saw God’s mercy as a tank of water and the church as the owner of the taps then Luther, as he read the Bible, saw something else. He saw a great ocean as far as the eye could see with the invitation of God to freely jump in and be washed of all sin. Rome, it seemed, was trying to put the ocean into bottles and sell them one at a time and Luther was determined to put them out of business.

The big issue then, as it still is today, is what the Bible calls “Justification”. To be justified, in the Bible, is to be seen to be in the right, especially in front of God. There is, after all, only one properly righteous one, God Himself. And because He is righteous, He will not tolerate unrighteousness. The great question of the Bible, then, is how you and I can become righteous – be justified -, so that we can once again be in a relationship with the righteous God.

The book of the Bible that deals with this question most directly is Paul’s letter to the Romans which we read from just now. It was reading the book of Romans that made Luther understand how he and you and I might be justified. Here’s how Luther described that journey,

I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: “The righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel” (Rom. 1:16). I hated that word, “righteousness of God“.

Luther hated it because he understood the words “righteousness of God” to be talking about God’s holiness, his moral purity, his hatred of all evil.

But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn’t be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction … I said, “Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?”

So what changed? Well, here’s how he goes on.

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: “The righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel, as it is written: ‘The righteous person lives by faith.’”

Luther’s great discovery was that the righteousness of God being spoken of here was not just the fact that God Himself was righteous, but that He actually gave that righteousness to people. That was the gospel. That God gives His own righteousness to you and I if we live by faith, that is to say, if we simply trust Him to do it.

For Luther this was incredible news. The heavy chains of trying to be good enough and continually failing were broken apart.

All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light … I exalted this sweetest word of mine, “the righteousness of God,” with as much love as before I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise.

He read on in Paul’s letter to the Romans and saw the same thing again and again. You and I are justified not by what we do but by simply trusting God, by having faith in him. Perhaps the high point of this theme comes in the section that we read together and, in particular chapter 4 where Paul compares 2 ways of getting right with God – works or faith alone.

a fair day's pay? We live in a world where we’re rewarded for what we do. One of the proudest moments of my life was bringing home my first proper pay packet. A month’s worth of hard work rewarded by my employers. It wasn’t much but I’d earned it. Is that how things work with God? Does he reward us for the good work that we do? Are we justified by our works? Here’s what the Bible says,

Romans 4:4 Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation.

That’s common sense. You get a pay packet because you’ve worked for it, not because someone gave it away.

⁵ However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.

Just think about that for a minute. There are 2 quite incredible things being said. First, this is for the person who does not work. Justification, a right standing in front of God, is not earned by being good, it’s earned by trusting God. And second, God is called the “God who justifies the wicked”. Can you get your head around that? It’s stunning. God justifies, that is He declares to be righteous, the wicked!!! He doesn’t look at good people and say “yup, they’re good, they can come in!”. He looks at wicked people who trust Him, who have faith in Him, and says “I declare them to be righteous!”

It’s outrageous, isn’t it? It turns everything upside down. No wonder Luther called these truths “the very gates of paradise”. From the moment he was born, and all the more when he became a monk, he had been taught by the church that he must be good enough to enter the presence of God, he must be perfect to be justified. But he read the Bible and he saw quite clearly that justification was by faith, by trusting God, not by works, not by what he did.

It was, rather, because of what Jesus Christ had done for him. Here’s what the letter to the Romans tells us about that,

Romans 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. ²⁵ God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished-- ²⁶ he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Let’s just break that down. We are all sinners, that much Luther knew and we should be clear on. There is not one of us who is perfect. But as well as all being sinners we can all be justified through what God has done in Christ Jesus.

You see when Jesus died on a cross he was what the bible calls here a sacrifice of atonement – he took the punishment that you and I deserve for not being righteous. And Jesus being a sacrifice for us becomes real for us if we trust Him, if we have faith in His blood, in his dying for us.

It’s an incredible thing for not only do we get something we don’t deserve, we get called righteous even though we are not, God also remains righteous – He still punishes sin but not in us, He punishes it in Jesus. He remains just and yet can also justify those of us who have faith in Jesus.

Luther would go on to call that faith “a living, unshakeable confidence in God’s grace”. Unshakeable confidence in the ocean of God’s grace available in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Christian life, the Bible tells us, is one of faith alone from first to last, constantly trusting in the God who justifies the wicked.

Of course this is no good to anyone who wants to get there on their own, who wants to have to contribute something to their justification. But the Bible excludes such thinking. Instead it calls us to consider ourselves as we really are, men and women who can’t do anything to save ourselves and need to trust God to do it all. Perhaps you need to be reminded of it. Maybe you’ve never even seen it that clearly before. What you must certainly not do is leave here today not grasping hold of this profound truth and putting it into practice – trusting only in Jesus, not in yourself and what you can do.

All of this outraged Rome. Luther was saying that you didn’t need the Pope and all the sacraments and good works to be justified, you just needed to trust what God had done in Jesus Christ. It was an explosive idea and spread like wildfire, not least due to the invention of the printing press in the previous century, but more importantly because it was what the Bible said. Luther was not the first to point this out, but he was the first to have his works printed in great numbers and sent out all over the continent of Europe. In fact, at the same time as Luther was standing in front of the Emperor, only 4 years after publishing the 95 Theses, his work was being discussed in the White Horse Inn in Cambridge by men like Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer. They would go on to lead the Reformation of the Church of England.

Luther is famously quoted as saying that justification by faith alone is the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls and all over Europe the church sprung to life because of it. And not just Europe. We here today, an Anglican church in Australia – a land not even known to those of Luther’s day – trace our religious heritage back to him. It is an enormous debt and one we should never forget for Luther is the man who rediscovered the great truth of the Bible that we are wicked, quite incapable of being justified ourselves, and yet God is a gracious God who justifies the wicked by faith.

Luther’s last words were written on the 16 February 1546, two days before he died. Most of what he wrote was in Latin, as the custom of the day was. But for the very last line he switched to German for a phrase that sums up his life’s work.

We are beggars: this is true.

How wonderful, though, to be a beggar who knows where all the free food is and only has to ask. That is the legacy he left us.

Posted by on 09/16 at 12:37 PM

Mr Ould,

You wrote:

Luther was saying that you didn’t need the Pope and all the sacraments and good works to be justified, you just needed to trust what God had done in Jesus Christ.

Not quite.

While it is true that all we need to have is trust in what God has done in Christ, that trust is not something that we can gin up in ourselves. It is something that is given to us by God—and that not directly, but through the visible means of grace. As it has been expressed better than I can do:

Also they teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins ...

... That we may obtain this faith, the Ministry of Teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments was instituted. For through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Ghost is given, who works faith; where and when it pleases God, in them that hear the Gospel ... (Augsburg Confession, articles 4 and 5)

So while it is true that we do not need the Pope and that good works do not justify, it is untrue to suggest that for Luther and Lutherans, the sacraments are not needed or that the sacraments are not intimately involved in our justification.

Posted by Christopher Jones on 09/18 at 12:19 AM

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