The Reformation of Martin Luther

Introduction

The month of October is when the epochal event known as the great Reformation of the sixteenth century is remembered. Regarding the beginning of that great Reformation, tradition has it that on October 31, 1517, the Roman Catholic monk Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses to a church door in Wittenburg, Germany. Luther had no idea what he was starting. His act in that sense was small and innocent. His act was not a premeditated and conscious act to break with the Roman Catholic Church, to change medieval society forever, or to bring Europe into the modern era. But Luther’s act was a sincere attempt to have a debate about what he found seriously wrong in Roman Catholic doctrine. He confessed that he was a good monk and a good Roman Catholic. Splitting from Rome was the action farthest from his mind. Yet his act stirred the hearts of the people and stirred up the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church.

There had to be—the divine must—a split from the Roman Catholic Church so that Rome could continue down the road of destruction upon which God had set her and so that through the truth a new path for the church would be opened. Nailing the Ninety-five Theses was one small act, and its effect was unknown to the one who performed it. If Luther had known—humanly speaking—where his act of nailing theses to a church door would lead, he never would have done it.

The human instrument of reformation is exactly that—merely an instrument. He is an instrument upon whom the Spirit of Jesus Christ lays hold and uses for his purposes, while the instrument himself does not fully understand the implications of his actions or where they will lead.

However, human instruments are not unwilling. Reformation as an observable event is preceded by reformation as an invisible act of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of his people. He causes light to shine in their hearts and causes them to understand with new minds. He opens their ears and causes them to hear. He enlightens their eyes and causes them to see with new vision. What heretofore they had accepted as the status quo becomes intolerable, and what they had received as the truth is revealed to be a lie. The Spirit gives to them love and conviction of the truth, and he gives to them hatred of the lie. And the Spirit moves them to act in mysterious ways so that what they do is in fact his work. Thus the Holy Spirit is sovereign over the course, effect, and fruit of reformation.

Since there is nothing new under the sun, so it seems to happen with every reformation: One small act and then a maelstrom of opposition and a sure and certain effect for the salvation of some and the hardening of others. That is because the reformation of the church—the true reformation of the church—is not of men but of God. The power of reformation is not the words of men but the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the king of the church. The Spirit is self-effacing, and he pushes forward Jesus Christ. When the Spirit does so, he uses small acts that as far as man is concerned should amount to nothing. Yet by those acts the Spirit awakens both the faith of his people through the light of the gospel and the furious opposition of the kingdom of Satan. As Luther said in his Reformation hymn “A Mighty Fortress” concerning Satan, “One little word shall fell him.” The gospel always did and always will turn the world upside down. The gospel turns upside down the world of individuals, churches, and whole nations.

When Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, Germany, events overtook the man. Within approximately two weeks, through the actions of Luther’s friends and the rapid reprinting of his Ninety-five Theses, all of Germany had heard about the monk from Wittenberg. Over the next several years, the whole European continent with its kings, emperors, popes, governors, and kingdoms was shaken by the controversy.

It is true that Luther’s act changed the world forever. The modern world is simply inconceivable without that event of the sixteenth-century Reformation. Not all of that can be attributed directly to the action of Martin Luther, for there were other forces at work, such as the rise of nationalism, the end of feudalism, and the invasions of the Muslim Turks. The Reformation, however, was the main engine that moved medieval Europe into the modern age. In his excellent biography of Luther, Eric Metaxas made a concerted effort to establish that Martin Luther’s action was the first push that started a complex, Rube-Goldberg-machine of events that explains the world that we live in today: enabling modern democracy, freedom of conscience, popular protest, pluralism, and such like.¹

However, the social-political changes brought by the Reformation are not of interest to us. Rather, the massive changes to the church and to church doctrine demand our attention. Doctrine, it must be maintained, is the heart of any reformation. The issue is not the sins and abuses of members of the church, but doctrine—the truth of Jesus Christ—is the issue in reformation, and doctrine was the issue in the sixteenth-century Reformation as well. Luther was not a politician, a social activist, or a cultural transformer, but he was a believer and a minister of the gospel. His contributions as a believer and a minister are of utmost importance to Reformed believers and the church of Christ in the world today. If the modern world is inconceivable without Luther, the church and specifically the Reformed faith are certainly inconceivable without Luther. Reformed believers who adhere to the doctrine of sacred scripture as that is faithfully summarized in the three forms of unity—the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dordrecht—are the children of the Reformation and specifically of Martin Luther because of their doctrine. Above all else the Reformation was a doctrinal event.

Of specific interest to us is the change to the believer’s understanding of himself and of the truth of his salvation. With the change of doctrine came peace and assurance into the conscience and experience of the believer in this world of sin, darkness, change, and upheaval. The Reformation brought assurance again into the possession of the believer and made assurance his most valuable possession. The Reformed doctrinal heritage is above all one of comfort for the believer in this life of sin, sorrow, and tears. The Heidelberg Catechism makes comfort its theme in the treatment of doctrine. For this the Reformed in particular owe Martin Luther an enormous debt of gratitude. He was God’s servant to bring this truth, long buried by Roman Catholic false doctrine, back to the light and into the confession and preaching and thereby into the souls and experiences of believers and thus to give them peace with their God.

Before the Reformation Martin Luther was a sick man. His malady was his utter lack of assurance about the salvation of his soul. However, the purpose of this article is not to focus on his sickness, to glorify it, or to present the struggle of Martin Luther for assurance as the norm for the believer. The norm for the believer is the full assurance of faith that all his sins are forgiven him merely of grace, for Christ’s sake, and that everlasting righteousness and eternal life are his. This is the norm for the believer’s whole life. He lives in this assurance, and he lives out of this assurance.

That Martin Luther did not have assurance was the result of the faithless apostasy of the church of his day from the truth of the gospel. The terrible sickness of Martin Luther had a definite cause, specifically the Roman Catholic false doctrine of works-righteousness. Luther’s terrible malady had a definite cure, namely, the gospel-truth of justification by faith alone. With the rediscovery of the gospel, the disease was cured and the patient was healed. The medicine that healed Luther’s dreadful disease is the main focus of this article.

Luther’s Early Life and Spiritual Crisis

Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Saxony, in 1483. Of his younger life we know very little, except that he was raised in the popular religion of Germany’s peasant people, which was a kind of synthesis between paganism and Roman Catholicism. His father, Hans Luther, was a successful entrepreneur in copper mines. He was also diligent in attending to the education of his son and spared no expense to advance it. Hans had grand plans for Martin. Martin would train for a career in law. With that training and career, Martin would move out of the class of the petty bourgeois, make a name for himself, and perhaps become an advisor to some notable prince. More importantly, in days before government care of the elderly, Martin would be able to support his parents in their old age.

Martin progressed rapidly in his training and graduated from the university with honors. As a sign of faith in his son, Hans presented Martin with an enormously expensive copy of the law code of the day, which was the textbook that formed the basis of all his future schooling. As a youth, Martin evidenced no concern at all for the salvation of his soul, nor was he plagued by doubts. He was bright, cheerful, a diligent student, and obedient to his parents and church.

In July 1505 at the age of twenty-one, Martin experienced one of his many spiritual crises. He had been in a brooding mood and was becoming increasingly uncomfortable and uneasy about his salvation, although he told no one. As he was walking along the road from home to school one afternoon, he was overtaken by a fierce summer thunderstorm and caught in an open field by the lightning. After being thrown to the wet ground by a close lightning bolt, he cried out to his patron saint, “Help me, Saint Anne!…I will become a monk!”²

All Luther’s biographers are quite certain that his cry was not merely a spontaneous outburst by the overwrought Luther but was the culmination of the brooding spiritual struggle that had been consuming him for the past six months, during which time he had been in fear of his salvation and thinking about abandoning the study of law and becoming a monk.

Luther stuck to his oath to become a monk. In two weeks he completed the preparations and found a suitable monastery to enter. He entered the strictest sect of the Augustinian monks at Erfurt, Germany, in 1505. Only then was his father informed, and Hans Luther was enraged.

An Attempted Solution

The reason that Luther entered the monastery is not at all a mystery. He entered the monastery because the Roman Catholic Church taught and teaches that the surest road to heaven is monkery. A man who followed the rules of the order of the monks that Luther had joined could advance by a sure and plain road to merit his salvation. The prayer that was said over Luther as he entered the monastery makes this plain:

Hear, O Lord, our heartfelt pleas and deign to confer thy blessing on this thy servant, whom in thy holy name we have clad in the habit of a monk, that he may continue with thy help faithful in thy church and merit eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.³

That is the theology of Roman Catholic works-righteousness in its rawest form. That was Luther’s solution to his crisis of assurance because that was what his church had taught him to believe. To understand Luther, one must understand that he was not a rebel against the Roman Catholic Church from his youth up but that he was a meticulously obedient son of his ecclesiastical mother. He received the instruction of his mother church concerning the way of salvation, and he diligently followed that instruction. Before 1517 Martin Luther was a loyal son of the Roman Catholic Church who took seriously her teaching about the way of salvation.

As a faithful son of the church, no one was a better monk than Martin Luther. In an effort to soothe his troubled soul, he scrupulously obeyed the rules of the Augustinian order. He spoke of his diligence in following the rules of the order that he had joined in efforts to achieve peace with God:

I was a good monk and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.⁴

As a monk, Luther tried every remedy offered to him by Roman Catholic theology, from confession, to the merits of saints, to good works, to mysticism, and to a pilgrimage to Rome.

Part and parcel of the Roman Catholic system of works-righteousness is the idea that confession is a work that man does and that by confessing sins, as a work, man is able to achieve pardon for those sins. Confession is the work through which pardon is received. Without repentance there is no forgiveness. Repentance comes first, and forgiveness comes later. In his desperate search for assurance, Luther was assiduous in confessing his sins.

At times his confessions exasperated his superiors. One of the confessors to whom Luther would at times pour out all his sins—every thought and desire—for up to six hours at a time finally reprimanded him, “Look here. If you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive—parricide, blasphemy, adultery—instead of all these peccadilloes.”⁵ Luther would pour out his soul; then as he was leaving confession, he would remember some bad thought or an evil motive that he had forgotten to confess, or he would wonder whether he had confessed enough. Through all those efforts he gained not one ounce of assurance.

At other times Luther was puffed up and said, “I have done nothing wrong today.” Then doubts arose, and he said to himself, “Have you fasted enough, are you poor enough, have I done enough?”⁶

It was a problem of conditions for Luther.

Roland Bainton, the great biographer of Martin Luther, made this perceptive comment about all Luther’s considerable efforts and works to gain assurance of salvation:

For those who are troubled by particular sins the Church offers forgiveness through the penitential system, but pardon is made contingent upon conditions which Luther found unattainable.⁷

Bainton concluded, “Luther simply had not the capacity to fulfill the conditions.”⁸

The problem with Roman Catholic doctrine is not a simple overemphasis on works, but works are made the conditions for salvation. The problem is also not a matter of conditions without grace or conditions fulfilled by grace. But the problem is grace versus conditions.

Salvation is either all of grace, or salvation is by conditions. Salvation is either all of the Lord, so that there is nothing man must do to be saved, or salvation is in the way of man’s fulfilling conditions first. A theology in which man must do something in order to be assured of his salvation has no grace but only works. Grace and works are two absolutely antithetical principles. The conditions that man must fulfill can be raw and explicit, or they can be disguised cleverly by flowery language, but all conditions remain the same in essence: There is that which man must first do before God does what he promises to do.

Conditions were the issue for Martin Luther.

It is not as though the Roman Catholic Church does not teach grace, but she teaches grace as being offered through the sacraments and enabling man to fulfill the conditions of salvation, to will the good and to perform the good, upon which willing and doing a man’s salvation hinges.

Luther came to discover that man cannot and never will be able to work, to confess, or to repent his way to the assurance of salvation because of who man is. In all Luther’s monkery as he looked into himself—and he looked deeply—the deeper he looked, the more he saw that he was sinful all the way down and all the way through. That sinfulness was not just in Luther, but that sinfulness is who man is. That is every man, woman, and child. They simply do not have the capacity to fulfill conditions—either to work, to will, or to repent their way to salvation.

Herein is exposed the heart of Luther’s malady:

He tried the way of good works and discovered that he could never do enough to save himself. He endeavored to avail himself of the merits of saints and ended with a doubt, not a very serious or persistent doubt for the moment, but sufficient to destroy his assurance.⁹

Roman Catholic theology is conditions fulfilled by grace, and that theology destroys assurance. A summary of Luther’s critique of Roman Catholic theology is that Rome made the promise of salvation a condition and made faith a work upon which that condition depended.

Luther’s Anfechtungen

Because of that Roman Catholic doctrine, Luther was driven to despair. He suffered terrible assaults of doubt and terror as a result of his sins and his inability to will or work his way to assurance. He reported, “I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated him!”¹⁰ Luther had fallen into a dark abyss that he called his anfechtungen, a German word that refers to the pains and terrors of hell that came on him. In a letter to Philip Melanchthon dated August 2, 1527, Luther described his experience in that terrible abyss:

For more than a whole week I have been tossed to and fro in death and in hell, so that I am still drained of all strength in my body and am trembling in all my limbs. I have lost Christ completely and have been shaken by the floods and storms of despair and blasphemy.¹¹

Bainton described that abyss as “all the doubt, turmoil, pang, tremor, panic, despair, desolation, and desperation which invade the spirit of man.”¹² Luther was at his wit’s end. His body was emaciated, and his spirit was frayed. He was exhausted with his efforts, and he had no peace in his conscience for all his suffering and works.

Such is the result of a works theology. It is a theology of doubt, fear, terror, despair, desolation, and desperation, which reminds one of the Philippian jailor’s response to the apostles when he felt the presence of God in the jail and was going to kill himself, until he was arrested by the apostle Paul and the Holy Spirit.

The Cure of the Malady and the Man

In the monastery Luther’s superior and man to whom Luther confessed his sins was Johann von Staupitz. He saw in Luther a sound, intelligent, and thoughtful man in spiritual agony. Staupitz came up with what Bainton called an “audacious, if not reckless,” proposal.¹³

Staupitz was ahead of his time. He studied the Bible, something very rare at that time, and was exceptional among the monks. He was a kind of evangelical before there was such a thing. He frequently comforted Luther with the truth of Christ’s death for sinners, although that teaching was totally at odds with Roman Catholic doctrine. Staupitz himself never left the Roman Catholic Church, although he was the means by which Luther would leave.

To help Luther, Staupitz proposed to the young man—who would hear no counsel from his superiors; who had exhausted himself physically in religious vigils, prayers, and fasts; and who was on the verge of a nervous collapse through his spiritual struggles—that he study to become a teacher of the Bible and a doctor in the church. Staupitz gave up his position as Bible instructor in the University of Wittenberg in order for Luther to take that position. That was going to be Luther’s salvation and the instrument to deliver the church from the oppressive and damning theology of merit and works for salvation. Luther would no longer be able to focus on only himself, but he would have to study the word of God and come to grips with the meaning of the word of God. By that means God drove Martin Luther to uncover the solution to his malady.

Luther threw himself into Bible study and instruction with the same zeal as he did his monkery. As he studied the scriptures, the truth of the righteousness of God especially troubled Luther. He struggled particularly with Romans 1:17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” This verse has to do with the proclamation of the gospel. In the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed.

What is “the righteousness of God”?

In wrestling with and coming to understand the meaning of “the righteousness of God,” Luther had what he called his toilet experience because the meaning of Romans 1:17 burst in on him as he sat on the toilet:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love…yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God…Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless I beat importunately upon St. Paul at that place [Romans 1:17] most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.¹⁴

Luther had murmured against the God who not only crushes sinners with their original sin but also in the gospel supposedly demands works and indeed perfection of sinners. Because Luther had understood the phrase “the righteousness of God” as the righteous demands of God upon sinners proclaimed by the gospel, Luther essentially had believed that believing is man’s work and that for his salvation man by grace must do the good that is within his power. Luther had tried that, and he found that it was impossible.

But is that what the gospel teaches?

Is the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel another form of the law?

Is there that which man must do to be saved?

The solution came to Luther while he was sitting on the commode, and he explained:

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed,” as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates…

And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “Righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.¹⁵

By that insight Luther tore down the Roman Catholic false doctrine of works-righteousness. And that was a solid basis from which to tear down the whole Roman Catholic system of works-righteousness—including Rome’s corruption of the sacraments, her teaching regarding penance and indulgences, and the like—and to form the church anew in the image of the gospel of Christ. This is the precious truth of justification by faith alone without any works, including works that a sinner does by grace, such as repentance. Unacceptable before God is man, an ungodly sinner, on the basis of his doing, suffering, sacrifices, or repentance. But the ungodly sinner is acceptable before God on the basis of what Christ Jesus has done—his holy works and perfect atoning death—by faith alone, which God grants to believers in his free mercy. Their works cannot add to this righteousness; their evil works, by which they are rightly judged as ungodly, cannot detract from this righteousness. It is the righteousness that is in Christ by his cross, that is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith, and that is always and ever received by faith alone.

It is true that this discovery was not the end of Luther’s assurance problems. Especially in 1527 Luther again struggled with doubts and fell into his dreaded anfechtungen. However, he admitted that those doubts were of an entirely different kind. Those doubts were worse than his previous doubts. Luther said about those doubts in 1527 that if he was not contending with Satan’s most accomplished demon, then he was contending with Satan himself. Whereas in his previous doubts, Luther had not known the solution and a way out and thus seemed to be lost in an impossible labyrinth of works, in his later doubts he knew the way out. He made known his extreme anguish to his minister Johannes Brugenhagen and asked him to pray that Luther’s faith would be strengthened. The way for Luther to come out of his doubts and to be delivered from them was clear, and he took full advantage of it. The way out was by faith and the strengthening of faith in the righteousness of God freely given to the ungodly sinner through the gospel by the gift of faith. Faith is confidence that God is one’s God for Christ’s sake.

Luther explained this confidence of faith in a sermon:

What is the Gospel? It is this, that God has sent his Son into the world to save sinners, Jn. 3, 16, and to crush hell, overcome death, take away sin and satisfy the law. But what must you do? Nothing but accept this and look up to your Redeemer and firmly believe that he has done all this for your good and freely gives you all as your own, so that in the terrors of death, sin and hell, you can confidently say and boldly depend upon it, and say: Although I do not fulfil the law, although sin is still present and I fear death and hell, nevertheless from the Gospel I know that Christ has bestowed on me all his works. I am sure he will not lie, his promise he will surely fulfill. And as a sign of this I have received baptism. Upon this I anchor my confidence. For I know that my Lord Christ has overcome death, sin, hell and the devil for my good. For he was innocent, as Peter says: “Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.” 1 Pet. 2, 22. Therefore sin and death were not able to slay him, hell could not hold him, and he has become their Lord, and has granted this to all who accept and believe it. All this is effected not by my works or merits; but by pure grace, goodness and mercy.¹⁶

Luther once said, “If I could believe that God was not angry at me, I would stand on my head for joy.”¹⁷

The truth of justification by faith alone is the end of doubt, not as it arises in the sinful flesh of man, but as doubt is driven away by faith in the gospel.

Luther found the solution to his terrible spiritual malady in Jesus Christ as the only righteousness that a man needs in order to be right with God and as the perfect and sure ground of eternal life and peace with God. Justification by faith alone is the heart of the Christian’s assurance and without which there is no assurance of salvation.

The truth of assurance, the gift of assurance and the reality of assurance, is not found in a lifelong quest for assurance along the way of struggle and by following various steps. Assurance is not found in more confessing, more study, more self-denial, or more repenting.

That a believer is not assured and does not possess assurance is abnormal and atypical, and the lack of assurance is a terrible malady. The truth of assurance is that it is found by faith, by faith alone, in Jesus Christ as our righteousness as ungodly sinners before God.

This must be the case: By faith, not by works, but by mere faith, the believer receives the full and free pardon for all his sins. By faith he freely receives the righteousness of Christ imputed to him. By faith he knows God as being at peace with him and that he is at peace with God, although he is a great sinner and has not kept God’s commandments but has broken them all. By faith the believer knows that God is for him and never against him for Christ’s sake. By faith the believer knows that Christ died for him and all his sins. By faith the believer knows that God elected him and loved him from all eternity and that nothing—not height, length, breadth, depth, or any such thing—can separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus. By faith the believer knows that since Christ’s work is perfect and God will finish the work begun in him, he will certainly persevere unto eternal life and that God will never leave him nor forsake him. What is necessary for the assurance of justification that is lacking in mere faith?

Assurance is also in the believer’s own conscience and experience by faith. Assurance is not something outside the believer but is in him, as faith is in him and as God’s judgment of him by faith is in him in his conscience. Assurance is a matter of the believer’s subjective experience of his salvation. Assurance is a matter of the believer’s confidence and conviction in the world from day to day about God as his God and about how the believer stands before God in the judgment both in his conscience every day and as he will stand in the last day. Nothing is more important than that to the believer. And if a work, no matter how little, is interposed between the believer’s reception of this free gift, there is no assurance for him at all. For Luther it was not merely that Rome gave him a must-do list in order to have the assurance of his salvation but that Rome gave him anything to do at all in order to have the assurance of his salvation.

Specifically, assurance is also an assurance for the final judgment. The verdict that sounds in the believer’s conscience now cannot be and will not be changed on the final judgment day. The justification of the believer in this life is exactly as it will be in the final judgment. It will be the judgment of the believer based on the perfect atoning death and righteousness of Christ freely imputed to the believer without any of his works being the ground of that judgment. He will appear before God in that great day as he appears now before God, namely, by faith in Christ’s perfect work and not on the basis of any of his own works.

Assurance is thus also a matter of how the believer lives in the world. One’s life in the world is determined by his relationship with God, specifically by whether one has or does not have assurance of salvation and of God’s favor. Assurance is vital to the Christian life.

Assurance was vital to Luther’s abounding work. Because he had the assurance of his salvation, he stood boldly at the imperial Diet of Worms in 1521 before the whole world—before the emperor, all the princes of Germany, and the papal representatives—with the threat of death hanging over his head. When Luther was asked to recant his writings, boldly he declared, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me, Amen.”¹⁸ That boldness of Luther at Worms characterized his whole career as a reformer in his battle against false doctrine on all sides. He was no longer a monk shut up in his cloister and helping no one, but he was preaching the truth of justification for the church and against all opposition. He feared God and not men. Luther loved God above all else, even his own life, for the free gift of righteousness and salvation.

All those who profess to be great proponents of the holy life but who deny the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and with it all the doctrines of grace, choke off the Christian life and make it impossible for the believer.

To this mass of unbelief, I add the present doctrine of the Protestant Reformed Churches, which is essentially Rome’s doctrine: There is that which man must do to be saved, and good works are not to be slighted when treating the assurance of justification. Professing themselves to be concerned for the holiness of the church, the members of the Protestant Reformed Churches deny the one doctrine that is able to work holiness in the hearts and lives of believers by giving them the assurance of their salvation, out of which comes real piety, steadfastness, and abounding good works of thankfulness.

Was that not true in Luther? He was led by his lack of assurance to the worthless life of a monk sequestered in a cloister, unmarried, and unconcerned with the world outside and only for the salvation of his own soul. He was led by that lack of assurance even to blaspheme God, doubt God’s goodness, and question both God’s righteousness and grace. Is that not true always if a person lacks assurance? If one’s works count toward his righteousness, then those works cannot be gratitude to God. If one’s works count toward his righteousness before God, then those works can be performed only to earn, merit, and receive from God or out of fear of damnation. All such works are damnworthy before God.

Besides, gratitude and love for salvation freely bestowed are the great motivators to good works, a gratitude and love that no one will have who is not justified by faith alone. Assurance, the precious assurance of God’s favor toward a man or woman, is one of the main fruits of the Reformation for the believer today. The believer who holds fast to the truth of the gospel and believes that truth of the gospel has assurance.

Assurance is no mean fruit. Canons of Dordt 5.12 explains the vital place of assurance in the life of the believer:

This certainty of perseverance, however, is so far from exciting in believers a spirit of pride, or of rendering them carnally secure, that, on the contrary, it is the real source of humility, filial reverence, true piety, patience in every tribulation, fervent prayers, constancy in suffering and in confessing the truth, and of solid rejoicing in God; so that the consideration of this benefit should serve as an incentive to the serious and constant practice of gratitude and good works. (Confessions and Church Order, 175)

Assurance for the child of God is the real engine that drives the Christian life of gratitude and good works. Without assurance there is only unbelieving, crippling, even blaspheming doubt. Basic to assurance, necessary to assurance, and without which there is no assurance is the truth of justification by faith alone. It is necessary especially today against the Protestant Reformed Churches that we maintain that the justification of the ungodly sinner is the assurance of that ungodly sinner of his justification. Assurance and justification are simply synonyms.

In Luther’s struggle for assurance, it was the work of God to open Luther’s eyes to the truth of justification by faith alone then as the believer’s gift of assurance, but then also as the source of the whole Christian life of holiness, faithfulness, and energetic labor in God’s kingdom.

Our Reformation

Luther’s experience is in essence no different from our own. We were in bondage to a doctrine of man’s works for assurance. Man had to be a good person. He had to be a repentant person and an obedient person, and then and only then could he be justified in his conscience and experience. That is a theology of doubt, despair, and hopelessness. That theology enslaves those who hear it, destroys their assurance, makes all their works wicked, and robs God of his glory for salvation in Jesus Christ. The content of this theology has been abundantly presented and irrefutably damned on the pages of Sword and Shield. The theology that a man must repent before he is forgiven overthrows the Reformation of 1517.

Against that very same doctrine, the Holy Spirit raised up his man Martin Luther.

Against that doctrine the Reformed creeds in Belgic Confession article 23 warn:

In approaching to God [we must not follow] the example of our first father, Adam, who, trembling, attempted to cover himself with fig leaves. And, verily, if we should appear before God, relying on ourselves or on any other creature, though ever so little, we should, alas! be consumed. (Confessions and Church Order, 52)

And in article 24 the Belgic Confession teaches that

though we do good works, we do not found our salvation upon them; for we can do no work but what is polluted by our flesh, and also punishable; and although we could perform such works, still the remembrance of one sin is sufficient to make God reject them. Thus, then, we would always be in doubt, tossed to and fro without any certainty, and our poor consciences continually vexed, if they relied not on the merits of the suffering and death of our Savior. (Confessions and Church Order, 55)

No Reformed believer should be without assurance because the doctrine of the Reformed creeds is a doctrine of assurance. It is the doctrine of grace, and thus it brings assurance with it to all who believe it as the very gospel itself. The corruption of this doctrine by the introduction of works-righteousness steadily and irresistibly erodes assurance. It was this reality of the false doctrine of doubt that lay at the root of Martin Luther’s malady. His poor conscience was continually vexed, and he was always in doubt, not because he lived a life of ungodliness and sin, but because he was not taught the gospel.

On this anniversary of the Reformation begun in 1517, every one must consider for the sake of his own assurance and salvation whether the doctrine of justification by faith alone, a doctrine of salvation without conditions, is his doctrine, specifically as that relates to his justification. There is nothing—not obedience, repentance, willing, or working—that man must do to be saved, justified, and assured. If this is not the theology that you are being taught, I beg you to consider whether the theology that you are being taught teaches you that your salvation depends in some sense on your works, whether that theology is not the terrible theology of doubt, and whether your ministers are no better than Roman Catholic priests. I also beg of you for your soul’s sake and for the sake of precious assurance to forsake that theology and to embrace the gospel of assurance recovered by the Reformation and specifically by Martin Luther and delivered to the Reformed Protestant Churches by the work of the Holy Spirit. Embracing this doctrine, the believer then can rejoice truly without hypocrisy in God’s work through Martin Luther.