A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on October 25, 2020 at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on Revelation 14:6-7. You may play the audio of the sermon here.
A mostly unedited transcript of the sermon follows the jump:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from John’s Revelation, the 14th chapter:
Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on 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.”
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
To be honest, I have always been loathe to preach on this text in the past. It’s not because I fear the book of Revelation, but because I fear making too much of Martin Luther. You see, even during the latter stages of his life, Luther’s compatriots looked at this passage and saw Luther as the embodiment of the angel with the eternal Gospel. They ascribed to him a great honor, and it’s a good piece to know, but I fear we sometimes can make too much of the man. But, still, I picked this text today because I think the time is right to explore it more deeply.
It’s Reformation Day, after all. 503 years ago, Luther began the Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Now, these theses aren’t bad, but they’re not Lutheran. They’re very Roman Catholic, appealing to the pope to open the treasury of merits and dump out every good work on all believers that they would be released from purgatory and get into heaven.
You see, the Roman Catholic system then, and still today, teaches that you are saved by grace, through faith, which then enables you to do the works of God that will get you into heaven. They believe there are certain individuals who do so much good in this life, that they not only have enough works to get themselves into heaven, skipping purgatory altogether, the place every almost every believer in Christ is sent to in order to burn away the sin that sticks to them in this life. Their extra works are then put into a big old chest in heaven that only the pope has access to.
Luther didn’t see a problem with this in 1517, but he did wonder why the pope was selling access to these merits and not just giving them freely to all who are penitent believers in Jesus Christ. As Luther studied more and more of the Scriptures, he unveiled the true Gospel, that we are saved by grace, through faith, not of our own doing, but as the free gift of God Himself. Luther unveiled this Gospel to all believers and they snatched it up so quickly that it sparked wars and battles, it divided families and countries. Luther, I think, was never comfortable with that but knew that it was necessary, for even Christ says that He came not to bring peace but a sword, that He came to case fire on the earth and the division He brings would divide families, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.
This is because Jesus’ message of the hope and comfort the free salvation He offers goes against everything that is in us. I really want you to hear this. The natural religion of man is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The natural religion of man is to make ourselves so good that we will earn our way into heaven. This is what our heart wants; we want to do it by our own way. It’s hard for us, we who are baptized believers, to sometimes comprehend this. But, you have to believe it’s true. Look at all that’s going on in the world.
The world is telling us that we need to bend the knee to racial justice. And, while it’s true that we, as Christians, have a message of peace to speak into the race issue, that all races are equal before God, that we may not have any discrimination in our hearts if we belong to Christ, that we will fight to right injustices, if we do not do it in the way the world wants, we will be castigated.
The world teaches that if we truly love our neighbors, we will be okay with men laying with men and women laying with women, that we should celebrate men who want to be women and women who want to be men, and that we should realize that a person can actually switch genders. And while it’s true that Christ died for all, even for those who struggle with homosexuality or same-sex attraction, or those who are confused about the way that God made them, and that we welcome all sinners into the house of God for we are all sinners here, if we do not do it the way the world wants, we will be castigated.
Even, in fact, if we did it the way the world wants, which we never could, they still would say it’s not enough. You see, through the recent cries of racial segregation and the LGBTQ agenda, the world is trying to prove to God that they’re good enough. It’s a giant virtue signal that shines into the sky, trying to draw God’s attention to themselves.
But what they don’t realize, and I need you to realize this, too, is that all the works we do in this would never be enough to cover our sin. In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, we know that what we do, who we are as sinners, is so damning, that we should be like the kings and rulers of the earth who hide themselves in caves and rocks and beg for the earth, for the mountains to fall on them lest they face the wrath of God.
We cannot earn our way to heaven. Imagine that the earth were drained of it’s water, and you’re stuck in the Mariana Trench, 36,000 feet below the land, and you’re trying to climb out with a six-foot rope. You cannot do it. We are so depraved in our sin, that there should be no hope for us.
But, there is hope. And it was revealed to us again in the man, Martin Luther. And for 500 years, we have held onto that hope. The world has been through the rise and fall of empires, plagues, world wars, skirmishes, battles, whole people groups moving from one place to another, bombs, threats of terrorism, planes falling from the sky, economic depressions. No matter what the world has come at us with, we have grasped on firmly to the hope of the world, Jesus Christ, and what He has given us to know in His Word. We hold fast to that because it is our hope. Our hope is bound up in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and not in our own works. We don’t need a treasury of merits when we have the merit of Jesus Christ imputed to us, given freely and placed in us. You have the righteousness of Christ, though you have no righteousness of your own. And that is your hope.
We hold onto that because, though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though the waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble, our hope in Jesus Christ is all that we have. And that hope, the hope that eternal life is ours in Christ, that the free forgiveness of sins is ours in Christ, that we are counted as His own, is what the world needs.
This Gospel was obscured in the Church for hundreds of years, but Martin Luther brought it into the light. No wonder he was counted as the angel, the messenger of God, flying over the whole world proclaiming that Gospel to all mankind. Luther never did his work for his own glory, but for the glory of God. He knew that he could not depend on himself, but rather that he must give, that we all must give glory to God in our fear of him, for the hour is coming when the Lord will return to judge the living and the dead. The last day is coming, and we must worship God that we may be ready for Christ’s return. He has made the earth and all that is in it, and He has made us, and we are His own. We must abide in His Word, that we may truly be His disciples, for His Word will show us the truth, and the truth will set us free.
What is this truth? It is the truth rediscovered by Luther, that we are saved by grace through faith alone. We cannot, we cannot win any favor from God by our works, but we must depend on Christ, we must fall on Him and be broken to pieces that He would remake us on that last and glorious day.
Imagine this: Christ describes Himself as the stone the builders rejected, and for all those who fall on the stone they are broken, but to those who reject Him, the stone falls on them and crushes them. In the day of the resurrection, would you rather be the one who is broken and remade, perfect and whole, or the one who stands before God crushed and mangled in disgusting, misshapen forms? You will stand before God, made perfect through Christ, and be beautiful. And you know this, for you have His Word, and if you have His Word, you have His truth, and the truth will set you free from sin and welcome you into eternity.
This Gospel, this hope, this freedom is eternal; it always was, it always is, and it always shall be the entire message proclaimed from pulpits across the world, in time and space. This Gospel does not change; it is always true and it is always whole–nothing needs to be added to it. Yes, there are the good works that God has created us to do, but these are not earning anything for us: they are the loving works we do for our neighbor, the things we are called to do to serve them in grace and truth, that we might reach them also with the eternal Gospel.
The Gospel is for sinners all. It is for you, you who once sat in great darkness but have welcomed into His marvelous light. It is for the sinner in the world, that they may be redeemed. It is for Luther 500 years ago, and it is for your great-great grandchildren and their great-great grandchildren. The Gospel is what we need. Though we do not deserve it, the Lord Jesus Christ died for you, out of His love for you, that you may live with Him in peace forever. There is no better news than this, and we hold fast to it, lest we fall away. We never want to forsake it, lest we forget the mercies of God.
Today, we give thanks to God for the light that Martin Luther brought back to the Church, the bride of Christ, of whom you are a member. And we thank God for the good work of hundreds, thousands of men and women who worked tirelessly through the Reformation to make sure the Gospel message would stand forever, never to be obscured by false teaching again. Though the false teaching yet persists, the light of the Gospel still shines from our pulpits and in our lives. We thank God that we have such an example of Luther and his compatriots, that we may emulate them, and see the hope in front of us in Christ as the most precious gift we ever could have. Hold fast to your hope in Christ, my friends. The day is coming when our Lord shall return, and I promise, all the evil in this world will not stand against Him. You will be raised from the dead with all believers and you will hear the voice of the angel, the messenger, Luther, and you will know that your hope was not misplaced. You are forgiven, you are saved, you are redeemed, forever, in Christ. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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