On October 31, churches throughout the world
celebrate the nailing of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg
Chapel door. The event represents the outpouring of Christianity unshackled and
blossoming. Like Hilkiah finding the Book of the Law, the thirty-four year old
Luther began to re-proclaim the doctrinal “solas” to the world: scripture alone,
Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and the recognition that all of life is
lived to the glory of God alone. For over five hundred years, these biblical
truths reclaimed by the Reformation have transformed individual lives and entire
societies. Truly, churches do well to celebrate the victory of the Reformation.
But like all victories, we tend to overlook
the struggles involved. We may even romanticize the Reformation. We see the
triumphs, and think that God blesses particular individuals like Luther with
great growth and success, while the rest of us struggle through our Christian
lives with failures and hardship.
Just ten years after the posting of the Ninety Five Theses, we find the
forty-four year old Luther one of the most famous men in Europe. In 1527, he
preached sixty sermons, lectured to students, wrote one hundred letters and
fifteen tracts, and spent time working on his translation of the Old Testament.
He did all this while having the responsibilities of a husband, father,
minister, teacher, and political advisor. One can find this productivity
throughout all of his life. We
think God must have blessed Luther by making his life easier so he could
concentrate on God’s work.
But a closer look at Luther in 1527 shows
some surprising details. Scholars mark this as the year Luther’s health
increasingly began to deteriorate. It is recorded that he had several fainting
spells, even fainting during a sermon. Luther, a man who loved to preach, had to
stop preaching for a while. He also
complained of intense pain in his chest, accompanied by painful buzzing in the
ears. It had become so severe that it was thought he was about to die. News of
this spread quickly, and fear gripped the people of Wittenberg. An entire
deathbed scene of “Luther’s last words” was recorded in which Luther, surrounded
in bed by his closest companions, voiced a deep concern for his pregnant wife
and infant son: “Lord God, I thank Thee for having allowed me to be a poor
beggar on earth. I leave no house, property, or money. But you gave me a wife
and children, I commend them unto Thee. Feed, instruct, and preserve them as
Thou hast preserved me, O Thou Father of children and widows.”
Luther recovered, but his physical condition
continued only to become worse from this point. This physical weakness brought
on serious bouts of depression. This melancholy would accompany Luther
throughout his life. As he struggled with failing health, he would at times wish
for death to release him from the pain brought on by intense headaches,
dizziness, arthritis, digestion problems, infections, and uric acid stones, to
name only some of his maladies. In his pain, he questioned whether or not God
had abandoned him. He wrote to Melancthon, “I spent more than a week in death
and hell. My entire body was in pain, and I still tremble. Completely abandoned
by Christ, I labored under the vacillations and storms of desperation and
blasphemy against God. But through the prayers of the saints [Luther’s friends]
God began to have mercy on me and pulled my soul from the inferno
below.”
Some may be surprised to read these words by
Luther. How could a man who stood alone against the Catholic Church and Roman
Empire show such a lack of faith? My belief is that Luther was like all of us.
We at times stand strong, and at other times we cry out to God to increase our
faith. Where Luther lacked faith in 1527, he also displayed it remarkably in
other instances. The plague ravaged Wittenberg that same year. Many of Luther’s friends died, and his
students and colleagues fled for their lives. Luther’s son even became ill for a
time. Luther though felt “public servants, preachers, mayors, judges, doctors,
policemen, and neighbors of the sick who have no one to take care of them are on
duty and must remain.” He did not begrudge those who fled, “for to flee dying
and death and to save one’s own life is a natural instinct implanted by God and
is not forbidden.” But for Luther, fleeing the plague was not an option. He
turned his house into a makeshift hospital, where he and his pregnant wife took
care of the dying. The house was quarantined, remaining so even after the plague
subsided.
This was the year 1527 for Luther, the
ten-year anniversary of the Reformation. How many of us in Luther’s place would
question whether or not God was chastising us for sin? How many of us would
question whether or not we were missing God’s will for our lives? How many of us
would wonder why we were not successful in our Christian ministry? Luther
though, expressed profound understanding for all these trials: “The only comfort
against raging Satan is that we have God’s Word to save the souls of believers.”
In all these trials, Luther clung to that Word, and its promise that it would
see believers through the difficulties of life, and that it alone showed us
Christ and our salvation, the only really important thing. Luther best expressed
this at the end of the troubled year 1527, by penning, “A Mighty Fortress is Our
God.” Luther expresses that in our trials, God will be victorious, and so will
we:
And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us,We will not fear, for God has willed his truth to triumph through us.The prince of darkness grim? We tremble not for him.His rage we can endure, for lo! His doom is sure.One little word shall fell him.