"Post Tenebras Lux" Selected Passages Sunday Evening Worship Service

Title of tonight's sermon is Post Tenebrus Lux After Darkness.

Light.

That is a Latin phrase that became the motto of the Protestant Reformation.

The tenebris in that motto is the word for darkness.

It represents the religious state of affairs throughout Europe in the Dark Ages.

They're called the Dark Ages because literature had been lost, literacy had been lost, math had been lost, in many sense, government had been lost, society in ways too innumerable to count, was crumbling during the Dark Ages.

The languages developed because the Roman Empire collapsed, and geographic boundaries allowed what we call the Romance languages now to grow up into the world.

English comes from this time period, along with the other Romance languages, you know, Italian, Spanish, and French, and Portuguese and Romanian, and these languages are all starting to prosper because the governments collapsed.

The books and reading went into the monasteries.

Greek and Hebrew was lost, and the only versions of the Bible that survived during this time were Latin.

The only ones that could read the Latin scriptures were the monks and the priests in the monasteries.

There's a reason that we don't use Roman numerals.

It's because, you know, math, sciences were basically non-existent during this time through Europe.

It was a decline of society.

And what a contrast with how clear and how bright the gospel was immediately after the resurrection of Christ.

There was no doubt what had happened when Jesus appeared to the disciples.

They wrestled with the implications of it, but they knew that everything was going to be different now.

And then the Holy, when the Holy Spirit came in Pentecost in the upper room there in Jerusalem, and they were filled with power and they preached the gospel with clarity and conviction, and the church began with mass baptisms and spread like wildfire around the world.

The path was still narrow, of course.

Most of the people in the world would reject the gospel.

Nevertheless, the light of the gospel was shining.

When you're reading it through the book of Acts, you see the narrative was that the gospel was turning the world upside down.

That was what the accusers said about it.

Those that rejected it said, You are turning the world upside down.

It was very clear the uniqueness and the luminacy of the gospel.

And yet, when the Roman Empire moved its capital from Rome to Constantinople, renamed out of the emperor's humility after himself, the institutionalization of Christianity, the government oversight, the mingling of church and state, led to the gradual decline of the brightness of the gospel.

When the bright light of the gospel got mixed with the secular governments of the world, it eventually was extinguished.

Rome would fall, of course, and the other nations along with them.

And so by the end of the dark ages, the start of the Renaissance, you see a recovery of reading and a recovery of math and of sciences and all this, but not truly a recovery of the gospel.

The gospel, in a true sense, was behind walls, imprisoned inside the monasteries.

What had been replaced with was a powerful system of a connection of church and state where the Pope is appointing the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and the two of them had this kind of marriage of power and authority that regulated the churches through Europe as people are coming out of the shock of the Dark Ages and are recovering reading and writing and poetry and science and all this, it was very much a threat to the survival of the Catholic Church and this political arrangement that had been made.

And so the sacred system and the spiritual superstitions of the world had to be maintained during that time period.

And so this is the time period where this idea of the sacraments take on a huge, huge force where your way for salvation is through the sacramental system or the sacred system of the Catholic Church.

You can experience forgiveness of sins through penance, through a priest.

The priest has to be ordained by the church.

And that structure alone, the sacrament of ordination alone, really held the Roman Empire together.

If you were to buck against the Roman Empire, your marriages would be invalid, your burials would be invalid, your confessions would be invalid.

I mean, you were left in a dark, dark place, subject to the whims of demons and goblins.

I mean, that's the world that Luther was born into.

When you hear about the lightning storm and him hiding behind a tree and him, you know, afraid that he's gonna die, he's living in a world where there are goblins in the trees, and he believes that.

I mean, that's the that's the world he's wrestling with at this point.

The not just the sacramental system, but the the idea of icons, the idea of relics.

The church could reach a certain stature in significance by having different relics, and so the proliferation of relics, and these little governors and protectors and kings and executors, governmental officials would have power and authority if there were relics inside of their jurisdiction, and so the multiplication of relics, of course, Luther would quip later there were enough nails, supposedly from the cross of Christ and churches in Germany to shoe every horse in Saxony, hair from Jesus, milk from Mary, and so on and so forth.

This is where Luther was.

And the question that Luther began to deal with in a very serious way was, you know, in a sense a timeless question.

What must I do to be saved?

Luther starts this quest with a bit of a clean conscience, I think, really wanting to know what it would take to be saved, not occurring to him that the answer would be outside of the Catholic Church.

That was the furthest thing from his mind.

Remember, he was stuck in the lightning storm, he cried out to God, he made a vow to St.

Anne that if he was spared his life, he would become a monk.

That wasn't him running from God, that was his act of tribute.

That was him running to God in the only way he knew how.

It was through him becoming a monk and then reading the Word of God that he discovered the gospel.

And I mean discovered the gospel in the same way that Christopher Columbus discovered America.

I mean, it's a giant continent and it's always been there.

The gospel, in a sense, wasn't hiding, but it was indeed hidden.

Now, it's a bit anachronistic to describe Luther as the first person to ask these questions, or the first person to discover this, and of course that's not that's not true.

There are scores of other people, but God providentially and uniquely used Luther to free the gospel from the captivity of the Catholic Church.

But there, of course, were others.

I mean, you could go a hundred years before Luther with Hus in Prague, where he was asking those same questions as a Catholic priest, and he started directing people to the answer that salvation was through faith alone, that you could have your salvation by placing your faith in Christ, that it wasn't a system of works, but a system of faith.

And that, of course, got Huss burnt at the stake.

They put him on trial, they stood him in front of a uh, you know, a council, they ripped his priestly robes off of him, they put his hat back on him and ripped that off of him, and then burnt him alive.

A hundred years later, it was Luther who would demand answers from priests, not very geographically far away from where Hus would be martyred.

Luther argued with priests and with cardinals and eventually with the emperor himself, excommunicated by the Pope.

Luther's basic driving question was, What must I do to be saved?

Following Luther was Tyndale.

As Luther, of course, ended his disputation with the Catholic Church.

He was smuggled away by a German authority, a German king, who hid him in a German castle to keep him out of the clutches of the, you know, the Spanish emperor and the French influence and the Holy Roman Empire.

Very much political divisions at stake in this.

Luther was protected by the German political class, not because they were Protestant-friendly, but because they didn't want Spanish kings executing German politicians or theologians or anybody for that matter.

And so Luther gets safe passage and he's put in a castle where he learns to read Hebrew and begins teaching Hebrew and translates the Bible.

And William Tyndale is coming from Europe, and William Tyndale wants to translate the Bible into English, but he doesn't know Hebrew, and Tyndale sits under Luther's preaching, and Tyndale takes the doctrines of the Reformation back to Europe where it spreads there.

Tyndale, followed by Coverdale, who we get the Coverdale Bible from him, who finished Tyndale's work, who, through his uh discipleship and his network, discipled Lady Jane Grey, who would be Queen of England.

Replacing King Edward, the boy king who died, was a girl king who arranged a handful of days.

And you see the doctrines of Luther taking root in London.

Very king and queen of England.

Of course, that was short-lived as Lady Jane Grey was made into a martyr by Bloody Mary.

Lady Jane Grey was known for rejecting that the Catholic Mass was necessary for salvation.

That's a significant doctrinal point.

It's rejecting the sacramental system.

Across the water, back in Europe, was Calvin also riding Luther's wave.

Familiar with Luther's writings, Calvin arrives in Geneva and builds a whole movement.

People were fleeing all over London and England and Scotland from the reign of Bloody Mary, and they were fleeing down to Geneva and finding respite in Calvin's Geneva.

One of those people was John Knox, who fled from Scotland, and he comes and sits under Calvin's preaching.

And so you start to see this network developing as Sindel sat under Luther and John Knox sits under Calvin and Knox would return and the Scottish Presbyterian Church takes off.

This can all be traced back to Luther's preaching.

So much so that by the end of the 1500s, you're seeing gospel lights from the Capitol in London, gospel lights in Scotland, gospel lights in Geneva, Gospel lights in Wittenberg.

You see the Puritans being expelled, bringing the gospel lights to the Americas.

And so by the end of the 1500s, you could legitimately say, after darkness, light, post-Tenebrus lux.

And that all gets traced back to that day, October 1517, October 31st, where Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door.

Now, when you read the 95 Theses, you recognize obviously Luther was not a Protestant.

When he nailed the 95 Theses to the door, there was no such thing.

You read the 95 Theses today, and they sound relatively Catholic if you read them today.

They're an appeal to the Pope.

Luther is writing the Pope.

He's pretending that the Pope wouldn't, doesn't know about the indulgences.

The Pope must not know what the Bible says compared to what the indulgences are.

Certainly, the Pope would side with the Bible if he were aware of what the Scripture said and how horrible the indulgences were.

The Pope is the Pope after all.

If he knew this, he would shut down the whole indulgence system.

That's how the 95 Theses read, almost with naivete.

Almost like if only the Pope knew what was happening in Catholicism.

It would be within the decade that Luther would discover, oh, the Pope knew all right.

He was profiting from it.

That realization is what drove Luther away.

And uh Luther was passive in that sense.

I mean, he was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church.

When the Pope excommunicated him, he wrote the Papal Bull that said there's a boar loosed in the Lord's vineyard by the name of Martin Luther.

Burn his books.

And Luther responded, of course, by burning the bull and then taking a wife.

And when he got married, it was all over.

It was clear he was not coming back to Rome.

This allowed Luther the freedom to start to frame his theology in an accessible way.

And his theology, I think, can be framed around the five solas.

The best way to tackle the five solas is through five questions.

And so I'm going to guide us tonight in our remaining time through the five questions of the Reformation, and you're going to see how each question is answered with one of the solas.

And the first question, of course, is what must I do to be saved?

What must I do to be saved?

That's really the first and fundamental question.

That's where Luther enters this topic.

What must I do to be saved?

Now, as we go through these five questions, you will recognize that all five of them are worded in a way that is designed to drive off works.

There's always the perennial temptation of works to enter back into your confidence, to for you to climb the fence on the narrow road and climb the fence back out to the wide path, the path of self-righteousness, the path of trusting yourself.

There's that perpetual temptation because it's in human nature.

We want to be responsible.

We want to trust in ourselves.

And so these five questions are all phrased and worded to ward off works.

So if the question is, what must I do to be saved?

You think, what's the normal answer to that question?

Well, the man-made religious answer is always good works.

Be a good citizen.

Try hard, work hard, be good, be gooder.

Pay your taxes, help your neighbors, be a good citizen.

And you can see why that kind of teaching is so appealing, especially to those in political authority.

If you can create a worldview and an ethos that prioritizes good citizenship and complacency among people, it results in people paying their taxes and being relatively docile.

When church and state are married, you can see how that would be a threat to the gospel that leads to the dark ages, the errors of darkness.

But the reformers, breaking free from the shackles of darkness, answered the question this way What must I do to be saved?

The answer is sola gratia.

You are saved by grace alone.

In other words, what must I do to be saved?

You must do nothing to be saved.

It is an act of grace.

Salvation comes from grace.

Perhaps your Bibles are open to Titus 2, verse 11.

Titus 2:11

Just one little phrase there to draw your attention to.

God is a gracious God.

Gracious just means he reveals himself, he gives himself.

Grace by definition goes to those who don't deserve it.

If you deserved salvation, it would not be called grace.

It would be wages, and it would be the reward of good works.

It was J.I.

Packer who said, quote, when it comes to salvation, there is only one point that one needs to make.

God saves sinners.

Amen.

God saves wicked people, sinful people, people who don't do good and don't try to be gooder.

That's the picture of God's grace.

It is unmerited favor, to use the language of Titus, unmerited favor.

The whole point of salvation is that we don't deserve it and we can't earn it.

Now, while this is a motto of the Reformation, it is a truth long before Luther.

In fact, you can go back to Augustine, who wrote, quote, The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord must be understood as that by which alone men are delivered from evil.

This is Augustine.

Grace of God alone is how men are delivered with evil.

Augustine goes on to say, quote, without God's grace, people do absolutely no good thing, whether in thought or will or affection or in deed.

Now, Augustine is going against the Pelagians.

The Pelagians taught that people had an island of goodness in them uncorrupted by the fall.

The fall brings spiritual death to everybody, but the Pelagians taught that every person has the capacity for goodness resident inside of them that can be activated, and from that island of goodness, that was their language, an island of goodness inside of them, from the island of goodness in the sea of depravity, that island of goodness can sprout forth good works and good deeds meriting the person's salvation.

And Augustine rejects that and drills home using the language that would later be the language of the Reformation.

No, people are saved by grace alone.

There's no island of goodness in them.

People don't have the capacity to do good works to earn salvation.

They're not able to.

This is Ephesians 2, verse 1, that describes us as slaves of sin.

Ephesians 2:1

Or Paul uses the language of dead in sins and trespasses.

Or in Romans, we're enemies of God.

Luther put it this way in his book, Freedom of the Will.

Quote, fallen humanity lacks the ability.

Sorry, bondage of the will.

I quoted to Edward's book there, bondage of the will.

Luther writes this, quote, fallen humanity lacks the ability to make spiritual decisions or accomplish righteous acts.

Free will without grace, and this is such a good sentence.

Listen to this.

This is Luther.

Free will without grace makes the person a permanent prisoner of evil.

Free will, but no saving grace of God, and you are a prisoner to your own desires.

You get whatever you want.

And what you want is to be in custody to your own sin.

A couple years ago, I did a survey of a soccer team that I coached, and I asked them, how do you how does one get on a soccer team?

This is a couple weeks into the season when they assumed they were already on the team, so the question caught them off guard, I'm sure.

What are the ways you get on a soccer team?

And the answers boil down to basically two categories of answers.

By high school, it's no longer my parents are making me.

That one has faded away.

But the answers are I signed up for it, or I tried out for it.

Those are basically the two answers.

We often take that thinking and apply it to religion.

How does one get into heaven?

I sign up for it or I tried out for it.

Those are the two categories of thinking we have.

God's grace shone in your heart.

It's divine initiation.

The only way a sinner can be saved is if God chooses to save them.

But praise be to God that we have exactly that kind of God.

Amen.

We have the kind of God that chooses to save people.

That's the good news.

1 Corinthians 1, verse 30.

1 Corinthians 1:30

It is by his doing you are in Christ Jesus.

And I pray you understand this point.

In our American society, it's this first point where we get so tripped up over.

We get so tripped up over this because we have this idea of equal opportunity.

It's built into the American ethos, the American worldview that, you know, equal opportunity for everybody is the right way to structure society.

Certainly, God must structure the world that way.

So we're so quick to discount God's sovereignty and salvation, but let me just reason from your own language.

Let me use the kind of words that we use in Christian needs all the time to help you with this.

We're so quick to say God is sovereign over the weather, aren't we?

Think of the church activity yesterday.

They had beautiful weather for it.

We were expecting to have to serve hot cider, and we made it cold cider.

Sean had been running around telling everybody, pray for the weather for like two months.

We're like, brother, you can't know the weather two months from now.

He's like the farmer's almanac says it's gonna be cold.

You better pray for the weather.

And of course, it's beautiful weather, and we are so quick to say God is sovereign over the weather.

Oh, it's wonderful the Lord bless you with a child.

Or you're struggling with infertility, and you know the Lord is sovereign, and we recognize God is sovereign over the birth of children, over the rain, over your jobs.

We get that.

Trials in your life, we say God is sovereign over these trials, we generally get that.

I'm telling you, he's sovereign over salvation as well.

If salvation was based over some kind of goodness in us, then it would be wages and not a gift.

But salvation is based on grace.

Grace isn't a thing that God has, it's an attribute of him, though.

Grace can't be traded like a commodity, it can't be handled like an object, it can't be bought, sold, or earned.

It can only be freely given by God.

And what does God give when he gives us grace?

The answer is that he gives us grace.

Us his son, which leads to the second question.

When God shows us grace, how must I respond?

Now you can see how when you word the question this way, it is designed again to ward off works.

Because when you this is the Catholic teaching.

The Catholic teaching is that God initiates salvation with grace, and that grace then energizes your works.

You could even see some Catholics that would say, no, you are saved by grace.

This is a standard Catholic teaching that salvation comes by grace.

A Roman Catholic has no problem affirming that salvation comes by grace.

It's the alone part that stumbles them.

And if you push through that alone gate, you can even get some Catholics to go through the alone gate.

The God saves you by grace alone.

Now the key question, how does one respond, is the response works-oriented.

What must I do in light of the grace of God?

The answer of the Reformation is you respond sola fide.

Your only response is faith.

The response to the initiation of God's grace, the response to the initiation of salvation.

God causes the sun of his grace to shine on your dark heart.

Your only response is faith.

Faith is the human heart's response to God's saving grace.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for.

It's the evidence of things unseen.

It's what unites Jews and Gentiles in the church.

It's what makes you a child of Abraham.

You have faith like him.

It's what gives you the ability and the willingness to serve Christ and to follow him and to count the things of this world as loss and rubbish for the surpassing joy of knowing Christ.

That's faith that does that.

By faith, you recognize the false religions of the world as instilling works righteousness.

By faith, you abandon trust in your own works for salvation.

By faith, you cast all of your hope on Christ.

This is not a natural faith.

It's not like you see everybody else sitting in a chair, and so you exercise faith and you sit in the chair.

It's not like faith in the car where you don't know how the engine works or the brakes work, but you drive the car anyway because you see everybody else doing it and it's never crashed on you before.

This is not like that at all.

The kind of faith that you respond to God's grace with is a supernatural, world-defying kind of faith.

It's supernatural.

It's not natural.

It's supernatural given by God.

It's contramundum was a common phrase in the Reformation.

It's against the world.

It's a faith that turns the world upside down.

It's a universe tilting, Holy Spirit given gift from God.

It's the eyes to see the invisible, the heart to love Christ, whose own heart loved the unlovable.

And this gets to the key element of salvation: that you're being justified by God.

That God declares you righteous by grace through faith.

That your righteousness is credited to you because of faith.

God shows you grace, your response is faith, and your faith is counted to you as righteousness.

Faith is opposite of works.

Works is meritorious, faith is a gift.

Salvation is not that God does 90% of it and you do 10%.

Oh no.

God does not through grace energize your lives to do works that are meritorious.

No, no, no.

Instead, Luther said, we maintain that man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.

And when Luther said that, he's quoting Paul.

We maintain that people are justified by faith apart from works.

It was Calvin who said this was the most important doctrine of the Reformation.

Calvin isolated this second sola as the key which unlocked everything else.

Calvin wrote, quote, Sola fide is the first and keenest subject of this controversy.

Now the Catholic Church, of course, responded to the Reformation by in the Council of Trent, saying, quote, if anyone says that by faith alone the sinner is justified, and by that they mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification, let him be anathema.

And so this really is the key.

That's what Calvin meant by that.

The Catholic Church said, you want to say you're saved by grace and faith, that's fine.

But if you say that it is faith alone that justifies, that is not fine.

In Catholicism, that is antinomianism.

That's saying there is no law.

You can live however you want to live.

For Calvin and Luther, that was, who were obviously not antinomians, but for Calvin and Luther, that was the danger worth embracing.

Would some people use grace as a license to sin?

Certainly.

But that's exactly what Paul was fighting with with the Romans, wasn't it?

Paul preached grace so hard he had to circle up with, oh, and by the way, yes, you're you're justified through faith alone, but let's not use that as an excuse to sin.

In contrast with the Council of Trent, Paul told Peter, quote, man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith.

That's Galatians 1.16.

Justification is not posting bail, it's not getting time out for good deeds, it's not getting your sins forgiven based on God's experienced or expressed love.

No.

Solafidae is you responding through faith alone and being justified on the basis entirely of your faith.

You could say it this way the key element of your salvation is faith.

Now the first two questions are obviously linked, as Paul says in Ephesians 2.8.

By grace we have been saved through faith.

The Bible often pairs grace and faith together.

Grace is God's initiation, and the human response to that is faith.

Faith itself is a gift of God, Paul says in Ephesians 2, verse 8.

Ephesians 2:8

So you can say we are saved by grace through faith, and this itself is the work of the Lord.

Or Romans 3.26.

God is the justifier of him who has faith in Jesus.

Martin Luther also would write, quote, if the article of sola fidae is lost, all Christian doctrine is lost at the same time.

You lose this one, you may as well lose everything else.

So how does a person then get right with God?

We answer that we are justified by faith apart from works.

That is such a key phrase there.

We're justified by faith apart from works.

In other words, by faith alone.

Which leads to the third question.

What's the object of our faith?

The third question, what's the object of our faith?

Who do we place our faith in?

What do we place our faith in?

Is there any room for works here?

Do you have room to receive God's grace alone?

Respond with faith alone, but why not say that your response in faith alone is faith in the efficacy of your works?

I receive God's grace alone, I respond by faith alone, that faith is in God's holiness and God's kindness to recognize that my works are meritorious, that my works deserve some kind of salvation connected to them.

That could be one way to respond.

And that too would undo the doctrines of the Reformation.

So the answer the reformers gave to this is that the object of your faith is solus Christus, in Christ alone.

You don't put your faith in a religion, and you don't put your faith in works.

You put your faith in Christ and in Christ alone.

Other religions can put their faith in Christ, of course.

In Islam, Jesus is a prophet, but they don't put their faith in Christ alone.

The object of saving faith is exclusive in Christ alone.

And Jesus says the same thing in John 5.39.

Jesus says the scriptures bear witness of me.

It was Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, who said, quote, Our only comforter, redeemer, savior, and mediator with God is Jesus Christ, through whom alone we obtain grace, help, and salvation.

So God initiates grace to you.

You respond with faith.

The faith, the object of that faith is in Christ and only in Christ.

He's the God man.

He's the God, the very God, the firstborn of all creation, the Lagos, the one word that moved the universe into existence.

This is why Thomas called him my Lord and my God.

Paul calls him in Titus our great God and Savior.

He has many names in the scripture, but only one identity, the Savior of the world, which he did become the Savior of the world by becoming man and bearing our sins in his own body.

He, his atonement is what bears our sins.

Our sins were accredited to him.

He dies and suffers for our sin, so that his righteousness becomes ours.

That's why he's our substitute.

You need atonement.

You need somebody to forgive you of your sins.

If the first question is, what must I do to be saved?

What you're getting at is that your sins condemn you before God.

How do you get your sins expiated?

How do you get your sins off of you and forgiven by somebody else?

The only way that can be is through Christ alone, not through works.

You cannot do good works to atone for your sins.

Atonement only comes through the shedding of blood.

And the only blood that removes your sin from you is the sinless blood of Jesus Christ.

Colossians 2, verse 13, because of Christ, God has forgiven us all our transgressions.

Colossians 2:13

So the object of your faith is only Christ.

There is no room for faith in works.

And the testimony of Scripture here is unassailable.

There's no other means to salvation.

There's no other method, there's no other mediator.

There's only Christ in Christ alone.

Hebrews 9, verse 26, Christ appeared once to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Hebrews 9:26

This is why Paul says, listen, I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

You want a good definition of Christus solus, solus Christus, there's only thing Paul says, I want to know.

The only thing I want to know is Christ.

And him alone.

Acts 4 12.

There's salvation in nobody else.

There's no other name under heaven by which people have been given to be saved.

The doorway to heaven is only as wide as the shoulders of Jesus Christ.

And you follow him.

The object of faith is Christ.

We understand that it wards off works.

You don't put faith in yourself, you don't put faith in the saints, you don't put faith in a treasury of merit that other people, and this is standard Catholic teaching, that other saints have died with a surplus of righteousness, a surplus of merit, you have access to that.

That would be faith in the works of someone else.

No, the only object of your faith is Jesus Christ.

Well, this leads to the next question in the Reformation.

Where did you get that from?

Like who told you that?

Come on, Luther.

This is stuff of revolutions.

Who made you a theologian?

On what authority do you believe this?

Why do you believe some German washed-out monk?

He was a washed-out lawyer, afraid of lightning, who became a monk and gets booted out of the monastery, spills the wine at mass.

Why do you want to follow a slacker-loser like that?

Who told you it's from grace alone and faith alone and Christ alone?

When you have the massive testimony of the Catholic Church and the Catholic magisterium behind it, you want to take on centuries and centuries and centuries of church history, including the emperor and a whole line of popes?

Who do you think you are?

Or to say it more delicately, on what authority do you believe this?

Obviously, the Bible teaches salvation is this way, but why not also combine this with the sacramental system of the church?

Why can't you take both?

Why can't you say, yes, I'm saved by grace alone and faith alone and Christ alone?

But that's just one stream of salvation.

There's another stream of salvation, both streams flowing from the throne of God, one in Christ alone, through faith alone, by grace alone, and the other through works, as distributed and monitored by the Catholic Church.

After all, Peter had the keys and he established those keys in Rome, and he's the one that binds and looses, and so that authority is resident in the church, and the church dispenses it.

This is the argument.

The church doesn't keep all that merit and glory for itself, it dispenses it through the sacramental system to give it to you.

And so, of course, these things aren't taught necessarily in the Bible, but the sacramental system is enshrined in church history, and it's a means by which the church dispenses grace.

So why not believe the gospel and the sacraments?

Take them both.

False dichotomy flag.

Believe the gospel and go to Mass.

And the answer, and this is the one that produced more martyrs than probably any other point, is sola scriptura.

That scripture alone is our authority when it comes to these questions.

The world is filled with those offering their ideas about salvation, offering their ideas about God, people who say, My Jesus wouldn't do this, to which we reply, it doesn't matter what your Jesus would do, it only matters what the Word of God declares.

So there's not two streams of authority that bind the human conscience.

The only stream of authority that binds the human conscience is the word of God.

Luther said it this way: quote, the truth of Scripture comes first.

After that is accepted, one can determine whether or not the words of a man are accepted as true.

You can argue about theology, you can argue about 10,000 theological categories.

There's great liberty inside of Christianity to disagree on secondary and tertiary issues.

Is Sunday the Christian Sabbath?

Is Saturday the Sabbath?

In what way do the Ten Commandments still apply?

There are so many questions.

The church's relationship to Israel, baptism for believers or for babies.

There's a million questions that we can disagree on and still go to heaven when we die and be total friends and have good conversations about it.

As long as we grant that Scripture alone is the authority.

But if you reject that, you can have a conversation with somebody about infant baptism when they appeal to tradition and church history and extra biblical authority.

You can't have a conversation with somebody about the role of the Sabbath in the Christian life if you're not agreed that the Bible is the one that's giving you the answer.

That's solo scriptura.

The scripture alone is your authority.

And that's why Luther says, you believe that one, then we can have great conversations.

There's no other authority in which we can build our lives or ruler worship other than scripture.

No other authority at all.

And that's because scripture alone is inspired.

Paul says, all scripture is breathed out by God.

It's profitable for teaching, rebuke, reproof, correction, training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

And apart from the foundation of sola scriptura, then darkness remains, of course.

When Tyndale, this is what got Tyndale executed.

When Tyndale was excommunicated for his desire to translate the Bible in English, he wrote, quote, I defy the Pope and all his laws.

If God spares my life, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more scripture than he does.

Tyndale wasn't joking.

If God spared Tyndale's life, the plowboy would have more authority to tell you how to be saved than the very Pope himself.

And God did not spare Tyndale's life, but his prophecy still came true.

Tyndale had a dynamite chain it to his body.

Their goal was to blow him up.

Instead, they tied the chains too hard, they strangled him to death and blew him up anyway.

And yet, the plowboy with the word of God knows more about salvation than the Pope.

It's astonishing what the word of God has done in the world.

Its messengers can be imprisoned, but the word of God is never imprisoned.

Pastors can be put in chains, but God's word is never chained.

Christians can make errors all the time.

God's word will never make an error.

It's inerrant.

Churches can pass rules and congregations can vote on bylaw changes and all these other things, but they don't bind the conscience.

The only spiritually binding authority is the word of God.

It alone is sufficient for life and godliness.

It's the front lines of the battle between light and darkness, is the battle over the authority of the Word of God.

That's why we say the Bible alone has inherent authority.

And this is why you this is why Protestants reject the perpetual virginity of Mary, not because we have an issue with Mary, but because it goes against what the Word of God says.

We reject that the sacraments are necessary for salvation because they defy what the Word of God says.

We reject that there are seven sacraments anyway, because they're not described that way in the Bible.

We reject the existence of purgatory because it's not described in the Bible.

We reject that the Pope has authority over the church because that is extra biblical authority by definition.

And we say all that not because we're picking fights with Catholics, but because we believe in the scripture alone as our binding authority.

And to compromise on the perpetual virginity of Mary, or to compromise on Jesus having brothers or sisters, or to compromise on the existence of purgatory, or to compromise on the sacredal system, to compromise on any of those things is to give away the game by compromising on authority and saying, you know what, maybe there is authority outside the Word of God about salvation.

Remember, at his trial, Luther was asked, Do you recant your books?

We're gonna, you know, we'll kill you, Luther.

I'm summarizing.

We'll kill you, Luther.

Do you recant?

They stacked up all his books.

Remember, they put his books on a big table and stacked them all up and said, Do you recant?

And Luther, remember, his first answer was, Can I get a day to think about it?

And they said, Yes.

That was that's the craziest part of that trial to me.

Like it starts and he says, Can I get a continuous till tomorrow?

And all right.

Different world.

And he comes back the next day and he tries to get around it.

And he says, you know, a third of these books are about the German people.

Do you want me to deny the Germans?

A third of them are about stuff the Catholic Church agrees with me on.

I can't possibly deny what the Catholic Church says is true.

What would you do to me then?

Maybe a third of them you might have a problem with.

And the Inquisitor takes a different approach.

And says, Do you grant that there are things in your books that contradict the clear teaching of the church?

Enough of the games.

There's stuff you wrote that contradicts the teaching of the church.

What do you say?

And Luther said, quote, unless I'm convinced by the whole the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, or by evident reason, for I can believe neither Pope nor counsels alone, as it's clear that they themselves have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves numerous times, I consider myself convicted by the testimony of the Holy Scripture, which is my basis, my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

That's solo scriptura.

Well, what's the goal of all this?

Why does all this matter?

Why can't, to borrow R.

C.

Sproul's title, why can't we all just get along?

What's at stake here?

Well, the answer to that question is the glory of God is at stake, and the glory of God alone.

As works enter back into salvation, as authority outside the Bible enters into the spiritual life, it robs God of his glory.

And just the very analogy of two streams of authority flowing from God, you can see how that dilutes just the image or the metaphor of the two streams, dilutes the glory of God.

So you can answer the question what's the goal of all this in two ways.

One is your soul is at stake.

If you get these wrong, you get the gospel wrong.

You end up on the wide road and you end up in hell.

But there's another thing at stake beyond your salvation, and that's the glory of God, not the glory of man.

And that's why this is the final truth: solideo glorious.

God alone receives the glory.

This truth is captured best, I think, in Romans 11, 36, for from him and through him and to him are all things.

To God be the glory forever.

Amen.

This is the truth that is under the surface of all the others.

It's the central issue, it's the supremacy of the glory of God in all things.

Calvin referred to the whole world as the theater of divine glory.

We're all actors moving about quorum deo before the face of God, living to bring him glory.

God alone is the audience.

This is captured by Psalm 19.

The heavens declare the glory of God.

The sky proclaims his handiwork.

Day after day pours forth speech.

Night after night proclaims knowledge.

There's no place Where his words aren't heard or his voice isn't evidence, the whole universe testifies to the glory of God.

And when we say that, we mean God's visible glory from Mount Sinai all the way to the person of Christ.

We mean God's intrinsic glory, who he is and all of his attributes.

We're called to live in such a way that the world sees the beauty and the majesty of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit through our faith.

And nothing reveals the glory of God to the degree which his word does.

His word is the window.

You know, your life and your words, they're reflections of God's glory, but the word of God is the window to God's glory.

When we sin, we fall short of the glory of God.

When we receive forgiveness, we confess our sins.

We receive forgiveness through faith in Christ.

We magnify God's glory.

God acts in us to show his glory, Ephesians 1.16.

God saves us for the praise of his glory.

Ephesians 1.16 says he does this by sending Jesus to be the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his nature.

That's Colossians 1.15, who dies on the cross, raises from the dead to display the fact that he is the Lord of glory.

And thus in the gospel message itself, all things work towards the glory of God.

The Son of God, who is the very image of the glory of God, comes to earth as a human being, bears our sins, which he can do because he's sinless, God's glory is sinless.

He's crucified, offering salvation and showing that God is a Savior by nature.

He rises from the grave on the third day, displaying that he's the Lord of life.

And the glory of God can't be killed or crucified or marred in that sense in any way.

He can declare, I will not share my glory with another, as he does to the prophet Isaiah.

And he doesn't share his glory with another.

Instead, he saves us by bringing others into salvation through faith in him.

That makes Jesus Christ the source of glory, the means of glory, the object of glory, and the end of all glory.

It's all him.

Or again, in Paul's language, all things are from him, to him, and through him, to him be the glory forever and ever and ever.

That's solely Deo Gloria.

You take those five together, and you have a pretty hefty fence against getting works and salvation.

You're always on the lookout, though, because our flesh is deceptive and our hearts love to make ways to puff up.

But by reminding ourselves of these precious gospel truths, the truths of the reformation, it keeps the darkness of works righteousness away from our hearts and drives us to the Son of the glory of Christ.

Lord, we're thankful for these truths.

That Christ is before all, in all, over all, through all.

All things are from him, through him, to him, so that he receives the glory.

It's your glory alone that we want to live for.

We don't want to be glory thieves.

We want to instead show the world your glory.

We're thankful for this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.