Some days if you let your mind shift a little bit while watching the news or reading the paper you actually have to laugh. That is one of the reasons that comedies usually have something of the news in them. Saturday Night Live skits were at their best when they faked the nightly news. The Onion takes this kind of humor to the extreme. History, someone once sad is written by the winners, today it seems written by the whiners. Anyway we are coming up on the anniversary of the Reformation. The Reformation happened 500 years ago in 1517. We are starting to get glimpses of the histories that will be written and the news that will be put out as we lead up to this event and of course the whining and the rewriting of history is starting. Luther has been blamed for everything from the Nazi’s to Communism, from Postmodernism to the anti authoritarian mood of the day. Some have even accused him of being responsible for the belief that developed a few years ago that the Bible is true “in the eyes of the beholder”. I heard that old saw again the other day. It has been going on the for years. Here is one response to it.
“ If is one of the ironies of history that Luther of all people, Luther the thoroughgoing ‘incarnationalist,” should so often be portrayed as the patron of the historical-critical dissolution of Biblical substance. . . . We have here a remarkable echo of Luther’s realization that the Gospel narratives are not simply histories but are “Sacraments,” that is, “sacred signs through which God works in believers” that which the histories mean. Unlike secular histories, which are ‘dead histories and histories of the dead,’ the evangelical history is God’s living instrument through which God imparts all His riches in Christ, justifies, renews, and saves us. In other words, the Gospel not only reports what God has said and done ‘then and there’ in the past, but it actually conveys God ‘here and now’. – Kurt Marquart, “Central Lutheran Thrusts for Today,” Concordia Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 ( May 1982) p. 86f.
Therein lies the blessed mystery of the scriptures. They are not moldy old stuffy words written by some possibly early bipolar personalites who locked themselves away for revelations of some sort when they were manic!!
That the scriptures are alive and breathe life into sin parched lives is indeed a miracle we witness nearly every day of our lives. It is safe to say that lives are saved through the hearing and reading of this Word every day even if the Word is read by someone who seems less than a vessel God would use to spread the Gospel. It is the Word that has to power to save period.
I marvel often when reading the Word when I had read a passage the day before and some how I did not mark the spot,I read, so I read it again the next day and it is like it is all together new! We are always at a different place each day inour thougth life and what spoke to us in one way one day can and often does speak to us in an entirely different way some time later!
What a feast we have been given by our God it is a shame more do not partake of this rich food that satisfies not as the reading of an old history book but as life giving nourishment to our often starved out souls!