From Darkness to Light: The Seeds of Reformation

"Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising." [00:01:38]

"Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede; then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him." [00:02:50]

"Well, everyone of course knows that the motto of the Reformation is summarized by those three Latin words, post tenebras lux, 'After darkness, light.' And I want to speak about before the light, darkness. I want to speak about the medieval era, and it's difficult to define, of course. We're speaking of the period of history from 500 to 1500, a thousand years, and perhaps in some former fashion it is sometimes characterized as indeed a period of great darkness and then all of a sudden in 1517, Martin Luther posts the 95 protestations, theses, to the castle church door in Wittenberg, and the light has shone and the Reformation comes forth." [00:04:28]

"And that depiction of the medieval period is inaccurate at best, because there were those who maintained orthodoxy. And how do we define orthodoxy in the medieval age before the Reformation or before the 17th century and the five points of Calvinism and the Synod of Dort, or before 1643 and the Westminster Assembly and the Westminster Confession or for Steve Lawson's sake, the Baptist Confession of Faith in later decades?" [00:05:36]

"And perhaps a more accurate way of defining orthodoxy during the medieval age would at least be the great Chalcedonian Creed or the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of the third…of the fourth and fifth centuries. And there certainly would've been, during the medieval period, during that thousand years, a continuity of Augustinian belief, belief at least in the doctrine of the Trinity and belief in the deity of Christ and in the godhead of Christ and in the humanity of Christ and in the importance, and fundamental importance, and to some extent the authority of Scripture as the last word." [00:06:26]

"Instead of defining the church as the pope and his cardinals, Wycliffe now begins to define the church as the totality of the predestined -- past, present, and future -- and he defines the church, not in terms of its visibility, but in terms of its invisibility, and none of the predestined who know who they are. Wycliffe is still medieval in many ways. What this notion leads him to is to deny the authority, the absolute authority of the pope over the church, and that was a ticking bomb." [00:22:16]

"And he sponsors, another thing that he did was to sponsor the translation -- it wasn't Wycliffe who did it -- but he sponsored the translation of the Scriptures into the common tongue, the so-called 'Wycliffe Bible.' And that would be a precursor to Tyndale and others and Luther and his German Bible, and it was like a ticking bomb because what is it that will turn over an entire, an entire race of people? What is it that will open the minds of people? What is it that will undo the bondage of the will? What is it that will transform the hearts of sinners but the power, the unleashed power of the Word of God where people can read the Word of God for themselves and not be dependent upon the interpretations and translations of the medieval priests." [00:24:36]

"And as Hus dies he utters these words, and they are often thought to be prophetic, 'Today you burn a goose,' it sounds like 'Hus' in the language in which he spoke, 'Today you burn a goose, a hundred years from now a swan will arise,' and you remember that the coat of arms that Luther had had a swan in it, directly relating to Hus' prophetic words as he died." [00:34:37]

"There are dark days, the prophet Isaiah in the eighth century is depicting dark days that are looming and the coming of Babylonian captivity, and were there any darker days in all of the church's history than the captivity in Babylon when Jerusalem was razed to the ground and the temple utterly destroyed, and young men in their twenties taken off into captivity a thousand miles away from home and would be there for hundreds of years. And yet in the midst of that darkness there was light, and there was a Daniel and a Meshach and an Abednego and so on." [00:36:08]

"And just as in the thousand years from 500 to 1500 there were glimmers of light, they didn't get it all right. But then neither do you get it all right, and neither do I get it all right. But there were truths and basic truths of God's sovereignty, God's triune-ness, the deity of Jesus Christ, the hypostatic union, the importance of Scripture and the need to have Scripture translated into the vulgar tongue, and the reminder again tonight that when you hold a Bible in your hand that men and women have died." [00:36:40]

"It's a reminder to us that God is powerful, that He's in control, that there's a narrative of redemptive history, that there's a goal, that Jesus is coming again and His church, the gates of hell will not prevail against His church. That's what Jesus taught at Caesarea Philippi, wasn't it? 'I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.' There is a remnant according to the election of grace." [00:38:05]

"So before the light there was darkness, yes, relative darkness, and there may come periods of darkness again but God will never abandon His promise. He only has one plan, and it's called 'church.' There is no plan B. 'I will build My church,' Jesus says, and that's the only plan that He has. And may God pour out His Spirit and reveal to us again that despite the periods of darkness for purposes that are known to Him, and when God restrains from pouring out His blessing for a purpose that is known unto Him, He never forgets His plan, and He never abandons His promise." [00:40:30]