I appreciate the conversation I had recently with Rev. Mark Vincent of Clarke-Venable Baptist Church on this subject. This article begins with an introduction written by Bro. Mark.
“Five Hundredth Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, 1517-2017
“Five hundred years ago something happened in Wittenberg, Germany, that fanned a tiny spark into a roaring blaze and left a mark in history that will never be forgotten. A monk named Martin Luther publicly objected to and called attention to many errors that he observed in the Roman Catholic Church. His objections have come to be known as Luther’s
Ninety-Five Theses. These objections, according to Luther, were grievances that he held because the practice of the Catholic Church was inconsistent with the Word of God … The primary issue was how do you get to Heaven? The Church taught one thing on the issue while Luther noted that the Bible contained much different teaching than the Church was practicing. A person is saved by faith alone in Christ alone according to the Word of God.
“Another profound thing to come out of the Protestant Reformation is that the Bible was put into the hands of the common man. Before this, the only people who had the Bible were Clergy, the professionals. Martin Luther and others were absolutely convinced that the Bible should be translated in the language that ordinary people could read. Martin Luther translated the Greek and Hebrew scriptures into his own language, German.”
In preparation for this writing, I learned that Martin Luther’s primary goal had been to discover how to save his own soul from hell. He had come to believe that the sale of “indulgences” for the forgiveness of sins, which was the demand of the Catholic Church, was wrong. God revealed the truth of “justification by faith in Christ alone” as he studied Romans 1:17, “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.”
This realization was the impetus for his tacking the 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, October 31, 1517. Many had been persecuted, killed, even burned at the stake, prior to Martin Luther’s revolt, but the thing that helped Luther at that time was the invention of the printing press.
People took his 95 Theses, many others of Luther’s writings, and the Bible he had translated into German, and spread them all over the country. In a few years, the entire country was no longer Catholic, but Lutheran.
About the same time, there were other men, such as Zwingli of Switzerland, Calvin of France, and the Anabaptists, that God was using to bring back the truth of the great salvation that He had offered through the shed Blood of Jesus Christ and the Power of His Resurrection. These great founders of the many Protestant denominations that we know now had to struggle much, in study of the scriptures to lay down clear explanations of its doctrines, and in their suffering persecution by those who resisted the changes they proposed.
But unfortunately, since the 1500s, in our modern, more “enlightened” society, most people believe that their own thoughts and ideas are good enough to save them from hell. Unlike Luther, they choose not to believe that the Bible—which has stood the test of time and has survived multiple attempts to remove it from the reach of the public—is really the Word of
God, “given by inspiration of God,” II Timothy 3:16. He called John 3:16—:For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life”— the “Bible in a nutshell.”
After pointing out that the Apostle Paul said that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,” R. T. Kendall, who served as minister at Westminster Chapel in London from 1977 to 2002, stated, “I believe we need a new Reformation today, a reawakening of the true gospel of God: the good news that you will go to heaven when you die — and not to hell — by transferring your trust in your good works to what Jesus Christ, the Son of God, did for you on the cross.” Thank God we do not have to buy our way into Heaven. God’s Son has already paid the price in full!
We in America have greatly benefitted from this change that took place so long ago. I remember my own salvation experience, in a Baptist church in Gautier, Mississippi, many years ago, which resulted from a sweet wooing of the Holy Spirit and His own enablement for me to respond in faith to be saved! Martin Luther’s quest, to accomplish his own understanding, brought about not only his own personal salvation but that of millions of souls in the 500 years since then!
