From Darkness to Light: The Transformative Power of the Reformation

"We're going to talk about the Reformation. As we start talking about the Reformation, I want you to come along with me on a little trip. Let's go across the sea to Germany, and let's go to the city of Wittenberg, and let's make it about the 1530's, and let's try to show up on a Sunday -- any Sunday will do. And we'll walk into the Castle Church, and there high in the, mounted on the wall is the pulpit, and there will be Martin Luther." [00:00:08]

"And let's try to listen in to a sermon by Martin Luther. He'll be talking about Abraham, and he'll be talking about the sacrifice of Isaac. And Luther's preaching is a very vivid, picturesque preaching. For one thing, he had to -- they didn't have chairs, and people had to stand, and these were German farmers, you know, so they're up early milking the cows, and so he's got an audience he has to connect with -- so Luther's telling this story very vividly, very powerfully, and you know the story." [00:00:37]

"'Abraham, Abraham, see how Divine Majesty is at hand in the hour of death.' We say, 'In the midst of life, we die,' God answers, 'No, in the midst of death, we live.'" Now what Luther was doing there at the end of that sermon was actually quoting a medieval saying, and the medieval saying was, "Media vita in mortem sumus," in the middle of life we are in death." [00:02:01]

"Now we sometimes call it the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and that's a bit of a misnomer, it wasn't entirely the dark ages, there were a lot of bright spots, but it was also a pretty dark time. It was a time of death, a time of physical death -- this was before they had the germ theory of disease, right? This is the centuries of the plague, and so death really did surround them in the midst of life, and so you can understand why they had this saying." [00:02:36]

"And see what Luther does? He flips that around, right? So we move from death to life, we move from death to life. Well, that's our first stop, at Wittenberg. Let me take you to another city in our little Reformation tour. We have to go a little bit south of Wittenberg, and a little bit over to the west, right at the foothills of the Alps, you can picture Mount Blanc off in the distance, and there's a nice little lake, and nestled right up against that lake is the city of Geneva, the old city of Geneva." [00:03:14]

"And as you walk around the city of Geneva, you begin to see this Latin phrase all over the city. And if you've hung around Ligonier for any amount of time you've seen this Latin phrase too, and that Latin phrase is, 'Post tenebras lux,' 'After darkness, light.' So we go from death to life, and we go from darkness to light. And that's essentially what the Reformation was about. The Reformation came at a time of intense darkness, of death, at a time when there was spiritual darkness, spiritual death." [00:03:54]

"It wasn't the abnormal, that was the normal, that was the standard situation. And into that time of darkness and death comes life and light. And it comes as the Reformers focused on one thing. Now I failed my art classes, so I stopped taking art after elementary school, but I did learn one thing in elementary art: if you draw two birds and put them together, you get a book. So we go from death to life, darkness to light, because we recovered the Word of God, and when we go to the Word, we are very quickly drawn to Christ." [00:04:46]

"And there we have the major themes of the Reformation. We start off with our plight, and our plight is death and darkness. Now that just wasn't true in the -- at 1500, that's true for us today, too, isn't it? But we've sort of numbed ourselves to that, haven't we? We've sort of anesthetized ourselves to that fact -- that we live in darkness, and that death is all around us. But in the Middle Ages, it was hard to numb yourselves to that -- it confronted you head on." [00:05:28]

"And so the reformers take us to this idea of life and light, and they do it by leading us right to the Word, and leading us right to Christ. And that's why the Reformation is such a fascinating time in church history. That's why we're doing this series, and that's why it's worth camping out for a while in the sixteenth century. This was an era of death and darkness, and into this era came the life and light of the gospel." [00:06:02]

"Well, as we spend this time together looking at the Reformation, what we're going to do is flesh out these themes, these theological themes of sin, and the consequences of sin, of death and darkness, the theological predicament, the theological plight. We're also going to look at the theological solution, and the way we get at this is what we call the solas. Now I'm not even sure solas is actually a term, because the Latin word is sola, the plural is, I guess, soli, which means 'alones', but I don't think that's a word, either, so we'll just fudge and call it the solas." [00:07:50]

"Now, I know you all think it's important, because you're all here, right? So I've sort of already got you, but I want to make you understand why it's worth your while to spend this amount of time studying church history. And I'll give you three reasons, three quick reasons. One is, very simply, history matters. History matters. If you stop and think about it, we as Christians are a people with a past. We are very much a people with a past. Our faith, and make no mistake about it, our faith is an historic faith." [00:09:02]

"If it were not for an historic event, the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ as an historical faith, well then we might as well pack everything up and just go home. We have no church without it. Beyond that at the center of our faith, we repeatedly see this in the Old Testament, we see it, with that refrain, 'Remember the Exodus.' You know the saying, 'Remember the Alamo'? Well the Old Testament saying is, 'Remember the Exodus,' right? And why were they supposed to remember the Exodus?" [00:09:46]