Reformation Day

The Hebrew word for angel is “malach,” which means “messenger.” In the long history of Christianity, God has sent many messengers to speak his Word to the church. Sometimes these messengers were the spiritual being we call angels. But most of the time these messengers were human, men who lived and died on earth—Moses, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, etc. One of these messengers was the prophet Malachi. His name means literally means, Malach [Angel], -chi [my] — “my angel” or “my messenger.” Even though Malachi was the last prophet of the Old Testament, he foretold the coming of one final prophet before Christ. “Thus saith the Lord, Behold I send my messenger [my angel] and he will prepare the way before me. Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes” (Mal 3:1; 4:5).

God kept his promise. He sent John the Baptist, who came in the spirit and power of the great prophet Elijah, but the Jewish people did not accept John or listen to his message. “If you are willing to hear it,” Jesus said, “John the Baptist is Elijah who is to come” (Mt 11:14). And what was John’s message? “Look to Jesus and be saved.” This is the great and central message of all Scripture. Every page of the Old Testament, all the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe (Rom 3:21). This is the message that God has been communicating to man through his messengers from the time of Adam and Eve until now. In his great vision of the end times, the apostle John saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth. Who is this angel, this messenger? It is Elijah. It is Malachi. It is John the Baptist. It is the apostles who were sent out to the ends of the earth with the saving message of Christ. The angel is every faithful pastor who has preached the true Gospel. “You cannot save yourself. Your good works cannot save you. The holy men and women who lived and died in the faith cannot save you. Salvation comes only by faith in Jesus Christ. He is the center of all the Scriptures, the source of our hope, the Way that leads us to God.”

In the centuries after Christ’s life on earth, this eternal Gospel began to be hidden. False teachers arose in the church with a different message. Instead of pointing to Jesus, as John the Baptist and the other faithful messengers had done, they taught Christians to rely on their own efforts and on those of the saints who had gone before. Rather than directing people to God’s Word as the only source of absolute truth, the pope began to teach that his words were free from all error, and that he must be obeyed upon peril of damnation. The pope placed himself upon the seat that belongs to Christ alone, and claimed his authority to mediate between God and man.

It seemed at the time, that the true Church had been destroyed and the saving Gospel had been lost. But Jesus promised that his Church could never be conquered, and that his Word would endure forever. Once again, God sent his messenger, his angel, bearing the eternal Gospel of Jesus Christ. This time it was not a Jewish prophet. Rather it was a German monk named Martin Luther. And he was, like every human messenger who had come before, a sinful man. Yet, since the time of the Apostles, God has not gifted any other man with the same clarity and boldness to powerfully proclaim the truth of Scripture. Some people accuse Lutherans of deifying Martin Luther. Not so! We don’t worship him. Yet we do recognize with thankfulness that God used him to rekindle the light of the gospel that had been smothered by the false teachings of the Roman church.

Now just as the apostle John foresaw the coming of another angel bearing the eternal gospel, he also foretold the coming of the antichrist. Our ideas of the antichrist have no doubt been colored by Hollywood, but the antichrist is not some supervillain in a bad Nicolas Cage movie. The prefix “anti” is a Greek word, and it does not mean “against.” Properly speaking, the Anti-Christ is not against Christ. He’s more subtle than that. The word “anti” means “in place of.” Who is the anti-Christ? Anyone who puts himself in the place that belongs only to Christ. For example, Jesus is the center and focus of the Christian faith. What happens when a charismatic leader or pastor directs people’s focus to himself and his ministry? He has put himself in the place of Christ and is operating as the antichrist. The Bible tells us, “Let God be true and every man a liar” (Rom 3:4). If a mere man claims to be incapable of speaking in error, he claims a divine attribute and acts as the antichrist. When a man titles himself the Mediator between God and man, a title that belongs only to Jesus, he is the antichrist.

At the beginning of the Reformation, Luther was convinced that the Pope was a faithful Christian man, who desired to follow Jesus, but was surrounded by evil counselors. He called the wicked advisors the antichrist, because he believed them to be promoting false doctrine in the pope’s name. But when Luther received the letter of excommunication signed by the pope, he realized that the pope had replaced the Gospel with his own words, and had seated himself in the seat of Christ. Luther had no choice but to publicly denounce the Pope. But instead of hearing the message that called him to repentance and true faith, the pope denounced and persecuted Luther, just as previous kings had done to Elijah, John the Baptist, and nearly every other prophet of God. In fact, in response to the central teaching of the Reformation, righteousness by faith in Jesus alone, the Roman church officially declared, “If anyone says that sinners are justified by faith alone, let him be accursed” (Council of Trent, IX).

This remains the official doctrine of the Roman church to this day, and every person who believes in salvation by Christ alone—including you—is under the Pope’s curse. Until these words are retracted, the Pope’s church remains the church of the antichrist, the church that officially puts human efforts in place of the saving work of Jesus. Now there have been, and will continue to be, many antichrists in this world. They show up in every church. In fact, you and I each have an antichrist living inside us, that old sinful nature that always wants to trust in itself and its supposed goodness, rather than in the mercy of God and the goodness of Jesus. But the Lutheran fathers recognized that no other person and office in history was more representative of the antichrist than the office of the pope.

Now is it possible for a good man to hold a wicked office? Perhaps. And it’s certainly possible for millions of misguided Christians, who don’t know any better, to belong to a church that rejects the eternal gospel and curses all who believe it. Thank God that millions of Roman Catholics don’t know what their own church actually teaches, and by the grace of God they do trust and believe in Jesus for their salvation.

So no, we don’t worship Martin Luther. To do that would be to put him in the place of Christ, and create another antichrist. But we do thank and praise God for restoring the true teaching of salvation by Christ alone through the preaching of Martin Luther. We thank God for his messenger, his angel. And we rejoice that in the five-hundred and two years since the Reformation began, God has continued to bless us with faithful messengers who proclaim his eternal Gospel. There is no greater gift that could ever be given. May God keep us looking to Jesus, the heart and message of all the Scriptures, unto life everlasting. Amen.

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