Sermon
for Reformation Sunday, October 30, 2022
Grace, mercy, peace, and the comfort of the Gospel be yours from God, the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
2 Chronicles 29:12-19 12These
are the Levites who responded: from the descendants of the Kohathites: Mahath
son of Amasai and Joel son of Azariah, from the descendants of Merari: Kish son
of Abdi and Azariah son of Jahallelel, from the Gershonites: Joah son of Zimmah
and Eden son of Joah, 13from the descendants of Elizaphan: Shimri
and Jeiel, from the descendants of Asaph: Zechariah and Mattaniah, 14from
the descendants of Heman: Jehiel and Shimei, and from the descendants of
Jeduthun: Shemaiah and Uzziel. 15They
gathered their brother Levites, consecrated themselves, and went to cleanse the
House of the Lord, as the king commanded by the words of the Lord. 16The priests entered the inner
part of the Lord’s house to cleanse it. They
brought every unclean thing that they found in the Lord’s temple out into the
courtyard of the House of the Lord. The
Levites took it and carried it out to the Kidron Valley. 17On the first day of the first
month, they began to consecrate the temple. By the eighth day of the month they had gotten
as far as the porch of the Lord. They
continued to purify the House of the Lord for eight more days. On the sixteenth day of the first month, they
completed the work. 18They
went in to King Hezekiah and said, “We have cleansed
the entire House of the Lord, the altar of burnt offering and all its utensils,
and the table for the presentation of bread and all its utensils. 19We have prepared and consecrated
all the utensils which King Ahaz discarded during his reign, when he was
unfaithful. Look! They are right there in front of the altar of
the Lord. (EHV)
God’s
servants cleansed the Lord’s house.
Dear friends in Christ,
Very often, God used Old Testament events to foreshadow
what was to come in the future in His salvation plan. Our sermon text this morning, however, does
not fit that model, so you may well question how it came to be chosen for reading
as we celebrate the Reformation. We
cannot say that God intended this series of events to foreshadow the
Reformation. Rather, the events here
reported parallel the actions and blessings that were carried out for us in the
1500s in Germany, because both involve a cleansing of God’s house.
The event
recorded for us in this text comes shortly after Hezekiah became king of
Judah. Sad to say, Hezekiah’s father and
predecessor, Ahaz, had been a horrible king for God’s chosen people. Attempting to stop worship of the one true
God, King Ahaz had literally barred the doors to the Temple. Later, when Ahaz suffered defeat at the hands
of the nation of Aram, he began worshipping the false gods of Aram’s capital
city, Damascus, rather than turn to the true God for help, imagining that if he
worshiped the idols of his conqueror, he could turn the tables on them and
achieve a victory. In that foolish delusion,
Ahaz set up, in and around Jerusalem, numerous altars to those false gods and
required the people to participate in his idolatry. Tragically, that horrible, faithless king led
his own people of Judah away from the true God into idol worship.
On the
other hand, the Lord raised up Ahaz’s son to be a completely different kind of
king. In the first month of his reign,
Hezekiah re-opened the doors of the Temple and assigned the Levites to sanctify
themselves and the Temple, so that worship of the one true God could resume in
Judah. We see that carried out in our
text. Over the course of sixteen days,
the Levites cleansed the Temple and its courtyard of all desecrations, and they
sanctified that magnificent building so that it could again be used as God had
intended.
As
mentioned, this account parallels the events of the Reformation. The situation in the Roman Catholic Church
had deteriorated until it was much like worship in Israel during the reign of
Ahaz. Rather than proclaim the pure
Gospel of our Lord Jesus, the church had developed all sorts of myths, false
gods, illegitimate practices, and deceptive doctrines that were causing the
people to trust in things other than Christ Jesus for their hope of salvation
and eternal life. Yet, God blessed us by
bringing a man into this dark situation to lead the restoration of the church
to its proper function.
That man,
Martin Luther, became a monk out of desperation. He vowed to become a monk out of terror in a
storm, and he served in the church for several years living in fear of a God
who demanded righteousness from all people.
Luther was so terrified of his inability to live a perfect life that he
was convinced that he couldn’t even properly confess all his sins. So, it was to his benefit, and ours, when
Martin was commissioned to teach the Scriptures at the new University of
Wittenberg. In that assignment, the Lord
led Luther to dive headlong into the Scriptures and there discover how the
teaching of the church had become corrupted.
Thus, in a parallel to that of God’s servants, Hezekiah and the Levites
of our text, the Lord used Martin Luther as God’s servant to cleanse the
Lord’s house.
To
cleanse the Roman Church, much spiritual debris had to be removed. The church of Luther’s day was littered with
various idolatries. Worship of relics
and the saints was common practice encouraged by the church. It was taught that Rome could dole out merit
of the apostles and other saints and even Christ Himself, at the papacy’s whim,
to rescue poor sinners from the imagined dungeons of purgatory. Even the altar of the Lord was contaminated
by the false teaching that the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, was a re-sacrifice of Christ
carried out by the priests to earn merit before God. Yet, none of this false teaching had support in
the Scriptures.
Judah’s
King Ahaz led his nation into idolatry when he closed the Temple of the Lord
and turned to pagan worship. The papacy
had done much the same thing by teaching that man can, and must, do something
to contribute to his own salvation. The
Levites in our text had to go right to the heart of the Temple in order to
purify it for worship. Luther had to do
the same. In His study of the
Scriptures, Luther re-discovered that the Bible centers on one theme—that salvation
comes only through justification by faith in Jesus Christ. The righteousness God demands of His people
is not something we do but the righteousness lived by Christ Jesus for us. This is the heart of the Gospel that the Lord
led Luther to re-discover. Therefore,
like the Levites of this text, Luther worked to restore faithful worship of the
true God to people who had been previously misled.
In our
text, the Levites were given the task of restoring and sanctifying God’s Old
Testament dwelling place. Luther’s task
was to restore and sanctify the New Testament church. Understand that there really isn’t any
difference between the Old Testament church and the New Testament church except
this: Old Testament worship pointed forward to the Promised Savior, and New
Testament worship looks back at what Jesus Christ has done as our Savior. All the sacrifices of the Temple pointed
forward to the sacrifice of God’s perfect Lamb, His own dear Son, on the
cross. All New Testament worship is to
point to that Lamb, Jesus Christ, as the one atoning sacrifice for all sin—a one-time
sacrifice for the sins of the world—to cleanse us of our guilt and impurities,
so that God now dwells in us who believe.
As you
consider the work of the Levites in our text, notice that they didn’t add
anything to the worship of God. They
didn’t change the Temple worship to something new or alter any of the
instructions God gave through Moses. The
Levites simply took away everything that had defiled the Temple and cleansed it
of the filth that had accumulated from unfaithful leaders who preceded
them. This is what Luther did for the
church, and for you and me. By focusing God’s
people on the Gospel of salvation through faith, alone, in Christ Jesus alone,
Luther cleansed away the filthy idea that man can and must do something to save
himself. He returned us to the peace and
truth of God’s Word.
As the
reformation spread, people were no longer burdened with unforgiven sin. No longer was it necessary to be in terror of
misleading teachings, or an anti-Christ who held threats over the heads of the
people in order to extort money from them.
Rather, the Gospel could again freely ring out the truth that Jesus died
to save sinners; that Jesus’ blood was the true redemption price for the sins
of the world, and that Jesus’ sacrifice brought peace between God and men.
For
hundreds of years before Martin Luther arrived, the Word of God had been
largely withheld from the German people.
Luther set out to make sure that the people heard the truth and could
read the Bible in their own language.
Today, we take for granted that we have God’s Word in readily available
form. For that great blessing we can
thank God for the gift of Martin Luther to the Holy Christian Church. Along with that, we thank God that we again
hear the truth of the Gospel that Jesus died to take away all our sins, and
that there is nothing we can do, and nothing we must do, to receive that
forgiveness but simply believe in Jesus Christ for our salvation. We give thanks that because God sent Martin
Luther to clean God’s house, we again receive the body and the blood of Christ
in both forms in the Lord’s Supper, because as in the time of Hezekiah, the
altar of God has been restored.
When the
Levites finished their work of cleansing God’s Temple, they reported to King
Hezekiah, “We have cleansed the entire
House of the Lord, the altar of burnt offering and all its utensils, and the
table for the presentation of bread and all its utensils. We have prepared and consecrated all the
utensils which King Ahaz discarded during his reign, when he was unfaithful. Look!
They are right there in front of the altar of the Lord." The Levites were announcing that once, again,
worship of the true God could take place.
Once again, the people could hear, and see, the truth that the promised
Savior would come to be the final sacrifice for the sins of all people. The work of God’s church was restored when God’s
servants cleansed the Lord’s house.
Early in
the morning on February 18, 1546, Luther lay dying of a failing heart, his
service to the Lord nearly completed. He
was heard repeating the words of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” His good friend, Dr. Jonas, then asked him,
“Do you want to die standing firm on Christ and the doctrine you have
taught?” Luther replied with a firm
“Yes,” and shortly thereafter, he passed from this world. The doctrine Luther taught is that of John
3:16, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever
believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
God put Martin
Luther in the right place and time and blessed him with the capabilities and
dogged determination to restore the truth of the Gospel to the Christian Church
on earth. That sweet Gospel gives life
everlasting through faith in the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, who laid down His
life to give you peace with God for all eternity. That good news, my friends, is the truth in
which you and I can live and die in peace, because God’s servants cleansed
the Lord’s house. Amen.
Glory be to the Father
and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and
ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.
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