Material Principle – Page 2 – What Does This Mean?

So, Does God Hate Me?

Encore Post: So, does God hate me and you? He has plenty of reasons to do so. When God made the world, it was perfect, without sin, evil, sickness or death. He made us, male and female in his image (Genesis 1:26). He blessed us and called all He made “very good” (Genesis 1:31) But our first parents, Adam and Eve, believed the lie of Satan that they could become more like God by disobeying His command. (Genesis 3:4-6) This first sin (Original Sin), brought sin, sorrow, grief and death into the world. Since then, all men and women descended from them, including us, have been born as sinners. From the moment we were conceived in our mother’s womb, our every thought has been polluted by sin and evil. (Genesis 6:5, Genesis 8:21, Matthew 15:19) So, God has every right to hate us.

Thank God that He is a gracious and merciful God (Psalm 103:8). In fact, St. Paul tells us that God loved us before He made the world. He picked us out to be made holy (Sanctified) and blameless (Justified) and rigged events so that we might be adopted as His sons through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. (Predestination).(Ephesians 1:3-6) So, God does not hate His children. He has always loved us. This attitude towards us is what we mean by the word: Grace. God is gracious to us because His Son was born of the Virgin Mary at just the right time in history, lived a perfect life for our sake, suffered, died on the Cross for the forgiveness of sins, rose again from the dead (Resurrection) and Ascended into Heaven so that we might live with Him forever. (Eternal Life)

So, grace is not some kind of substance that is given to us a little bit at a time or some kind of magical power that gives us a do-over. It is that God loves us and is bound and determined to save us — and does.

Blog Post Series

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

How Do We Know What God Thinks About Us?

Encore Post: Once in awhile, you have a bad day. You know the kind. Your alarm doesn’t wake you for work. The traffic lights are all against you on the way to work. You get there late and spend the whole day apologizing. Your car gets a flat tire when you are on your way home. You might begin to wonder if you did something to get God angry at you. This feeling is even stronger when you suffer from disasters — when you or your loved ones suffer from serious illnesses; when violent weather wipes out your home, your neighborhood or even your city; when evil people steal your property, wound or kill those you love or when you are dying and the doctors can’t make you well.

You are not alone. Everyone feels this way from time to time — even people who do not have faith in Christ. The world around us teaches us that there is a God, he is all powerful and that he has rules for us to live by. It also teaches us that he will punish us for breaking these rules and that someday we will die. This Natural knowledge of God is imperfect, though. It does not tell us what God really thinks of us, and, how we can keep him from punishing us. We need God to reveal himself to us to know the answer to that question.

Thank God that He in His love and mercy, does this for us in two basic ways. He Himself became a Man in Christ Jesus (John 3:16, Philippians 2:1-11). When we find it hard or impossible to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. (John 1:18 ) Secondly, God Himself has spoken to us through prophets and other authors in the Holy Scriptures, the books contained in the Bible. (Hebrews 1:1)

Grace Alone and Scripture alone at Leipzig

It really was not about indulgences. The Ninety-Five Theses were a spark that ignited a debate about the place of the Pope and other church authorities. Luther’s opponents noticed the Reformer had challenged their authority when he criticized the abuse of indulgences. Luther had given German princes the excuse they needed to forbid the sale of forgiveness. Luther pleased Renaissance thinkers, who lived by the motto Ad Fontes (to the source) and put the allies of the papacy on the defensive. That is why the attack on an obscure monk consumed all of Europe and why Johann Eck led the charge.

Eck challenged Luther’s friend Andreas Karlstadt to a disputation about free will and grace. He did this hoping the Reformer would join the debate. His goal was to get the Reformer to admit he was attacking the Pope and his power. Duke George “the Beard” of Saxony offered to host the disputation in Leipzig. He pressured the University of Leipzig into organize the event. On 27 June 1519, the disputation opened with a mass at St. Thomas Church (where two centuries later Johann Sebastian Bach would be a Church musician and composer) The event itself was held in the great hall of Duke George’s castle.

Karlstadt and Eck began the debate by discussing the role of free will and grace in the salvation of sinners. Karlstadt argued that a sinner had nothing to contribute to his own salvation, but was completely dependent on the grace of God. He defended this doctrine on the basis of the Scriptures. Eck responded that the Pope and Church tradition taught that grace was necessary, but there was something in a person that worked with it to save him. Karlstadt countered that Scripture is the final word on such matters. The Wittenberg professor was a good scholar, but Eck was a brilliant debater and had set the table for Luther to enter the discussion.

Luther and Eck covered a wide range of topics. In the end, the debate turned on the authority of the Pope and Church Councils. Eck accused Luther of promoting the teachings of Jan Hus, who was condemned as a heretic by the Council of Constance one hundred years earlier. Hus was burned at the stake when the Holy Roman Emperor at the time went back on his promise to Hus of safe conduct. It was a powerful slander. With that, Eck labeled Luther and his followers Lutheran, implying they followed Luther and not Christ. This forced Luther to admit that both Popes and Councils could make mistakes and that there was some truth to the charge.

Later Eck would admit that Luther had proved twelve of his thirteen theses. The last one, and in his eyes, the most important, Eck believed he had won. The result was to make clear the brake between the teachings of Luther, and the Scriptures, and the Pope. There would be no turning back. It was only a matter of time before the church would excommunicate Luther.

Martin Luther, St. Paul and Righteousness

We think of Martin Luther as a great reformer, a writer and a pastor. And he was all of these things. But his call was as a professor. His first lectures were on the Psalms, Romans, Galatians and Hebrews. To do these well, he spent many hours reading commentaries and the writings of the Church Fathers and the scholars of the Middle Ages. Once in awhile, he found himself not quite understanding a passage or a word. He spent months trying to understand some words. When he finally came to understand repentance, he described his excitement as if it unlocked all of Scripture for him.

Over Five Hundred years ago, as he was preparing to lecture on Romans, the great scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, published a Greek New Testament (1516) with Erasmus’ own Latin translation with it. It was then he came up against Romans 1:17: ” ‘For in it [the Gospel] the righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of God is revealed from faith for faith” Everything he read said this righteousness was the quality of God that moves him to condemn sinners. He just couldn’t understand how that was good news.

His friends urged him to lecture on the Psalms again, so he began teaching the book in March and April of 1519 — five hundred years ago. While he was working on his lectures in his tower study, he couldn’t get Romans 1 off of his mind. Then his eyes fell on the context: “The just shall live by his faith.” All of a sudden, it occured to him that the righteousness of God is not the holy nature of God, but it is God’s gift of righteousness that Christians receive by faith as a free gift for the sake of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It was as if God had opened the gate of heaven for him. God’s righteousness is a gift God gives by his grace.

Luther has a way to go before he fully understood theology they way Lutherans do today. Yet God had revealed to him the central teaching of the faith. He would never forget his tower experience.

Reading Ephesians in the Summer

If you have been reading this blog awhile, you may remember my comments on the structure of the Church Year in liturgical churches, especially the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod. Our long Pentecost season allows continuous reading of books of the Bible — in some cases whole books. In the three year lectionary, we will be doing this with the book of Ephesians beginning this Sunday.

As it turns out, I did a running commentary of Ephesians 1 & 2 at the beginning of this year. If you want to read this series of posts, start with “So, Does God Hate Me?”. At the bottom of each post, select the link for the next “Material Principle” post. If you find your curiousity peaked, drop Pastor Hercamp and I a comment on the blog itself. We would be happy to write a post to answer a question or explore a topic.