Martin Luther shows how probing the problem of presumption is and reveals that our so-called progress may not be as impressive as we think it is:

Presumption follows when a man sets himself to fulfill the Law with works and diligently sees to it that he does what the letter of the Law asks him to do. He serves God, does not swear, honors father and mother, does not kill, does not commit adultery, and the like. Meanwhile, however, he does not observe his heart, does not note the reason why he is leading such a good life. He does not see that he is merely covering the old hypocrite in his heart with such a beautiful life. For, if he looked at himself aright–at his own heart–he would discover that he is doing all these things with dislike and out of compulsion; that he fears hell or seeks heaven, if not also for more insignificant matters: honor, goods, health; and that he is motivated by the fear of shame or harm or diseases. In short, he would have to confess that he would rather lead a different life if the consequence of such a life did not deter him; for he would not do it merely for the sake of the Law. But because he does not see this bad reason, he lives on in security, looks only at the works, not into the heart, and so assumes that he is keeping the Law of God well. (Luther’s Works, St. Louis edition, 11:81 ff)

All the prophets did foresee in spirit, that Christ should become the greatest transgressor, murderer, adulterer, thief, rebel, blasphemer, etc., that ever was . . . for he being made a sacrifice, for the sins of the whole world, is not now an innocent person and without sins . . . our most merciful Father . . . sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men, saying: Be thou Peter that denier; Paul that persecutor, blasphemer and cruel oppressor; David that adulterer; that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief which hanged upon the cross; and, briefly, be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them. Here now cometh the law and saith: I find him a sinner . . . therefore let him die upon the cross . . .’ (Galatians, ed. Philip S. Watson, James Clarke, London (1953) 269-271; on Gal. 3:13).

 

Meanwhile it is to be noted that the whole Scripture of God is divided into two parts: rules and promises. The rules certainly teach us what is good, but what they teach is not forthwith done. For they show us what we ought to do, but do not give us the power to do it. They were ordained, however, for the purpose of showing man to himself that through them he may learn his own impotence for good and may despair of his own strength. For this reason they are called the Old Testament, and are so.

For example, “Thou shalt not covet,” is a precept by which we are all convicted of sin, since no man can help coveting, whatever efforts to the contrary he may make. In order therefore that he may fulfil the precept, and not covet, he is constrained to despair of himself and to seek elsewhere and through another the help which he cannot find in himself . . . Thus the promises of God give that which the precepts exact, and fulfil what the law commands; so that all is of God alone, both the precepts and their fulfilment. He alone commands; He alone also fulfils. Hence the promises of God belong to the New Testament; nay, are the New Testament.

“There is a righteousness which Paul calls “the righteousness of faith.”  God imputes it to us apart from our works – in other words, it is passive righteousness…  So then, have we nothing to do to obtain this righteousness?  No, nothing at all!  For this righteousness comes by doing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing, but rather in knowing and believing this only – that Christ has gone to the right hand of the Father, not to become our judge, but to become for us our wisdom, our righteousness, our holiness, our salvation!  Now God sees no sin in us, for in this heavenly righteousness sin has no place.  So now we may certainly think, “Although I still sin, I don’t despair, because Christ lives, who is both my righteousness and my eternal life.”  In that righteousness I have no sin, no fear, no guilty conscience, no fear of death.  I am indeed a sinner in this life of mine and in my own righteousness, but I have another life, another righteousness above this life, which is in Christ, the Son of God.

Christians never completely understand (this) themselves, and thus do not take advantage of it when they are troubled and tempted.  So we have to constantly teach it, repeat it, and work it out in practice.  Anyone who does not understand this righteousness or cherish it in the heart and conscience will continually be buffeted by fears and depression.  Nothing gives peace like this passive righteousness.  The troubled conscience has no cure for its desperation and feeling of unworthiness unless it takes hold of the forgiveness of sins by grace, offered free of charge in Jesus Christ, which is this passive or Christian righteousness…  Once you are in Christ, the Law is the greatest guide for your life, but until you have Christian righteousness, all the law can do is to show you how sinful and condemned you are.  But if we first receive Christian righteousness, then we can use the law, not for our salvation, but for his honor and glory, and to lovingly show our gratitude.

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Abraham was told by God that he must sacrifice the son of his old age by a miracle, the seed through whom he was to become the father of kings and of a great nation.  Abraham turned pale.  Not only would he lose his son, but God appeared to be a liar.  He had said, “In Isaac shall be thy seed,” but now he said, “Kill Isaac.”  Who would not hate a God so cruel and contradictory?  How Abraham longed to talk it over with someone!  Could he not tell Sarah?  But he well knew that if he mentioned it to anyone he would be dissuaded and prevented from carrying out the behest.  The spot designated for the sacrifice, Mount Moriah, was some distance away; “and Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt-offering.”  Abraham did not leave the saddling of the ass to others.  He himself laid on the beast the wood for the burnt offering.  He was thinking all the time that these logs would consume his son, his hope of seed.  With these very sticks that he was picking up the boy would be burned.  In such a terrible case should he not take time to think it over?  Could he not tell Sarah?  With what inner tears he suffered!  He girt the ass and was so absorbed he scarcely knew what he was doing.

He took two servants and Isaac his son.  In that moment everything died in him: Sarah, his family, his home, Isaac.  This is what it is to sit in sackcloth and ashes.  If he had known that this was only a trial, he would not have been tried.  Such is the nature of our trials that while they last we cannot see to the end.  “Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.”  What a battle he had endured in those three days!  There Abraham left the servants and the ass, and he laid the wood upon Isaac and himself too the torch and the sacrificial knife.  All the time he was thinking, “Isaac, if you knew, if your mother knew that you are to be sacrificed.”  “And they went both of them together.”  The whole world does not know what here took place.  The two walked together.  Who?  The father and the dearest son – the one not knowing what was in store but ready to obey, the other certain that he must leave his son in ashes.  Then said Isaac, “My father.”  And he said, “Yes, my son.”  And Isaac said, “Father, here is the fire and here the wood, but where is the lamb?”  He called him father and was solicitious lest he had overlooked something, and Abraham said, “God will himself provide a lamb, my son.”

When they were come to the mount, Abraham built the altar laid on the wood, and then he was forced to tell Isaac.  The boy was stupefied.  He must have protested, “have you forgotten: I am the son of Sarah by a miracle in her age, that I was promised and that through me you are to be the father of a great nation?”  And Abraham must have answered that God would fulfill his promise even out of ashes.  Then Abraham bound him and laid him upon the wood.  The father raised his knife.  The boy bared his throat.  If God had slept an instant, the lad would have been dead.  I could not have watched.  I am not able in my thoughts to follow.  The lad was as a sheep for the slaughter.  Never in history was there such obedience,  save only in Christ.  But God was watching, and all the angels.  The father raised his knife: the boy did not wince.  The angel cried, “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, “Nay, in the midst of death we live.”

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Martin Luther’s theological thunderclaps are wonderfully refreshing in today’s fuzzy, politically correct, intolerantly tolerant, inoffensive-at-all-costs West.

[I]t is a terrible and detestable blindness and a demonic presumption when a person has the audacity, as all work-righteous and hypocrites do, to attempt atonement for sin through works and tries in this way to earn the grace of God. It is wretched arrogance. . . . This is like a poor beggar–lice-ridden, syphilitic, leprous, filthy, stinking, and crawling with maggots and worms over his whole body, but nonetheless proud and arrogant–who vauntingly says: ‘Just look at me, a handsome fellow!’

. . . Therefore we have no right to indulge in much bragging and boasting when we step before God. Even if we were members of the highest aristocracy on earth and were prone to take pride in this, before God we would still be nothing but bags of worms or bags of manure, infested with lice, maggots, stinking and foul. . . .

The healing alternative:

But if we do want to boast, then let us boast that we receive from the fullness of Christ, that we are enlightened by Him, attain forgiveness of sin, and become children of God through Him. . . . This fountain is inexaustible; it is full of grace and truth before God; it never fails no matter how much we draw from it. Even if we all dip from it without stopping, it cannot be emptied, but it remains a perennial fount of all grace and truth, an unfathomable well, an eternal fountain.

The more we drink from it, the more it gives.

–Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 22:132-34

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I greatly longed to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in my way but that one expression, “the justice of God,” because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust.  My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him.  Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him.  Yet I clung to dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant.

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that “the just shall live by his faith.”  Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith.  Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise….

This is to behold God in faith, that you should look upon his fatherly, friendly heart, in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness.  He who sees God as angry does not see him rightly but looks only on a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face.

One of the more profound statements ever made by a Christian theologian is the final thesis of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, written in 1518, barely six months after he had nailed his epoch-making Ninety-five Theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg.  The Ninety-five Theses were a call to arms against church abuses.  The final thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation summed up the “ideology” that generated the call.  Luther formulated it as a contrast between two kinds of love, human and divine: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.  The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.”

Consider, first, what Luther calls human love, but which is better described as distorted love.  It’s elicited by the object of love; it’s basically passive in the sense that it depends on the object of love.  Its only activity, says Luther, consists in “receiving something.”  A person sees beauty – or goodness or truth – and wants to have it.  As a consequence, people who love in this way seek their “own good” in those they love; they don’t bestow any good on them.  A man may shower a woman with gifts, but he may be doing it so that he can ingratiate himself to her, enjoy her, keep her, or even worse, so that he can display her as a trophy.  When we love in this way, we are receivers, not givers.

Contrast this kind of possessive love with divine love.  First, divine love never had to come into being at all; it wasn’t elicited by its object.  It simply is.  It doesn’t depend on the truth, beauty, or goodness of the beloved.  Second, as Luther stated, because God’s love isn’t caused by its object, it can love those who are not lovable, “sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise and strong.”  Luther concluded, “rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good.”  Such divine love is supremely manifested on the cross on which Jesus Christ took the sin of the world upon himself.  ”This is the love of the cross, born of the cross, which turns in the direction where it does not find good which it may enjoy, but where it may confer good upon the bad and needy person.”  Unlike merely human love, divine love gives and doesn’t receive.

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It is an absolute and unique teaching in all the world, to teach people, through Christ, to live as if there were no law or wrath or punishment. In a sense, they do not exist any longer for the Christian, but only total grace and mercy for Christ’s sake. Once you are in Christ, the law is the greatest guide for your life, but until you have Christian righteousness, all the law can do is to show you how sinful and condemned you are. In fact, to those outside of Christian righteousness, the law needs to be expounded in all its force. Why? So that people who think they have power to be righteous before God will be humbled by the law and understand they are sinners. Therefore we must be careful to use the law appropriately. If we used the law in order to be accepted by God through obedience, then Christian righteousness becomes mixed up with earned/moral righteousness in our minds. If we try to earn our righteousness by doing many good deeds, we actually do nothing. We neither please God through our works-righteousnessnor do we honor the purpose for which the law was given. But if we first receive Christian righteousness, then we can use the law, not for our salvation, but for his honor and glory, and to lovingly show our gratitude. So then, have we nothing to do to obtain this righteousness? No, nothing at all! For this righteousness comes by doing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing, but rather in knowing and believing this only — that Christ has gone to the right hand of the Father, not to become our judge, but to becomefor us our wisdom, our righteousness, our holiness, our salvation! Now God sees no sin in us, for in this heavenly righteousness sin has no place. So now we may certainly think, “Although I still sin, I don’t despair, because Christ lives, who is both my righteousness and my eternal life.” In that righteousness I have no sin, no fear, no guilty conscience, no fear of death. I am indeed a sinner in this life of mine and in my own righteousness, but I have another life, another righteousness above this life, which is in Christ, the Son of God, who knows no sin or death, but is eternal righteousness and eternal life.