This past Sunday at Zion, we celebrated the 509th anniversary of the Reformation, a period in church history ignited by a young Augustinian monk named Martin Luther when, on October 31, 1517, he posted 95 theses on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, protesting what he saw as corruption in the Church of his day.
At the heart of Luther’s complaint was the Church’s sale of indulgences. Indulgences were certificates you could purchase that promised to reduce the divine punishment due for your overindulgences—your sin. You could also buy them for loved ones who had died, if you feared they might be stuck working off their peccadilloes in purgatory for a little too long before finally making it to heaven.
Luther saw this practice as flatly unscriptural, and he waged an unflagging campaign to teach people Scripture so they wouldn’t fall for what he saw as a grift. With his characteristically sharp tone, he argued for the importance of studiously studying the Bible:
Up to this time reading the Scripture has been forbidden the laity. For the devil hit upon a fine trick when he schemed to tear people away from Scripture … When you are about to die, I shall not be with you; neither will the pope. If you then do not know the ground of your hope but merely say: I will believe as the councils, the pope, and the fathers have believed, the devil will answer: Yes, but what if they were in error? Then he has won and will drag you down to hell. Therefore we must know what we believe, namely, what God’s Word is, not what the pope and the holy fathers believe or say. For you must place no confidence whatever in any person, but in the bare Word of God.
Luther was so committed to people reading God’s Word for themselves that he used his exile at Wartburg Castle in central Germany, where he was hiding from church authorities, in part, because of his insistence that people ought to read the Bible for themselves, to translate the New Testament into German. Until then, the Church’s standard Bible in Western Europe was the Latin Vulgate. Latin is a regal language, but even in Luther’s day it was a dead one, and ordinary people couldn’t understand it.
In my message on Sunday, I noted how this rediscovery of the primacy of Scripture during the Reformation period echoes an episode from Israel’s history. In 622 BC, a young king of Judah named Josiah was working to restore the dilapidated Jerusalem temple when the nation’s high priest stumbled across something called “the Book of the Law” (2 Kings 22:8), which, in that day, referred to the first five books of the Bible. After hearing it read, Josiah realized that his nation had become spiritually atrophied and morally malformed. He tore his robes (2 Kings 22:11) in deep grief and set out to cleanse his kingdom from its sin.
The Bible can inform a person, reform a kingdom, and transform history.
In Luke 24, the risen Jesus, only days after His crucifixion, joins two despondent disciples on the road to Emmaus, a village near Jerusalem. These disciples, however, don’t recognize Him. They cannot fathom that a dead man could be walking beside them. But Jesus opens the Scriptures and unveils and unpacks how the whole Old Testament points to Him, His death, and His resurrection. When they begin reflecting on Jesus’ Bible study, these disciples say:
“Were not our hearts burning within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)
When Jesus appears to them again, Luke notes:
He opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. (Luke 24:45)
It turns out that opening the Scriptures opens our minds.
Today, there are over 100 English translations of the Bible. We’ve come a long way since Luther’s day, and all these translations leave us without excuse. Read your Bible. If you’re not sure where to begin, start with the Gospel of Luke. Just ten to fifteen minutes a day can begin to open your mind—and your heart. If you have questions, ask. If you want to go deeper, find a Bible study or small group.
And don’t wait for the perfect moment. If you aren’t reading Scripture regularly, you can begin today. Why would you wait? It is, after all, how God speaks to you.
And it’s always good to hear from Him.