James’ Reformation Day Ramble (And Show and Tell)

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line on Reformation Day. Probably not what most people are saying, and it'd be nice if we had something up there.

But hey, it is Reformation Day, and I would much rather talk about the

Reformation than all the other stuff going on today in the world, and certainly the people celebrating evil and all sorts of weirdness regarding pagan religion and everything else going on.

But hey, there are some people doing that kind of stuff too, but that's life. It was just very strange that I was just, for some odd reason, corresponding with someone on Twitter who

I thought was a Muslim. I know left Islam for a while, maybe went back, maybe he's left again,

I don't know. But all I had done is someone had very helpfully put together a single thread of the daily

Chesterton quotes for today, which were all against the Protestant Reformation.

And I had saved that, and I posted it, and I said, public service announcement,

Chesterton was a Romanist. And he took offense as a

Muslim, or maybe he's not anymore, I don't know, to my use of the term Romanist, which of course has deep historical relevance.

I point it out, I'm going to stay with that, because it is an accurate description.

It's funny, I've had Roman Catholics argue that I shouldn't use the term Roman Catholic, even though Roman Catholics always use the term

Roman Catholic, but they just want to be known as Catholics. And now the Mormons don't want to be known as Mormons, they want to be known as, well, is

Latter -day Saints okay? I've forgotten what the list is, because that seems a little bit short.

It's not LDS, and it's not Mormon. Maybe Latter -day Saints long enough, I don't know.

Nobody cares, and nobody's going to care five years from now what any of that was about anyways.

But the point is, we live in this super, super, super sensitive age, where almost nobody knows anything about history anymore anyways, and hence doesn't understand that I think it's perfectly appropriate to use the term

Romanist, because of the reality that Roman Catholicism focuses the central aspect of its attention not on the

Church of Rome, but on the Bishop of Rome. Now, historically, the reality is that the

Bishop of Rome's stature and power was first established by the

Church of Rome, and the fact that Rome was the imperial seat, and hence the

Church in Rome had tremendous authority. And then slowly over time, and it's a discernible development if you look at Church history, slowly over time, the

Bishop begins to rise up and eclipse the

Church of Rome at that particular point in time. And so you can see in Stephen and Stephen's interaction with Cyprian and North African bishops, and then later

Zosimus' interactions with Augustine and more

North African bishops, you encounter this growing

Roman claims of supremacy that are rejected by the Church of that day.

This is not, not, never has been, no serious person could ever say this is some universal apostolic tradition.

It is not, by any stretch of the imagination. There's just too much in Church history, it says.

Otherwise, but isn't that the issue? Who knows anything about Church history these days? Well, as most of you know,

I really enjoy teaching Church history. I had a lot of fun recently telling the story of the

Munster Revolt and what took place there. And if you want to hear that stuff, by the way,

I've been doing it as a, I think we're up to 68 episodes in Church history.

You can go to the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church page on Sermon Audio and pull those down.

And there was two solid weeks plus a little bit of the third week, just on Munster itself, which would be a great story.

Maybe we'll just do a whole dividing line someday where we just do that story because I had to break it up into pieces. And then

I forgot one of the most important pieces I had to tack it on at the end. So anyways,

I love teaching Church history. But, of course, this particular subject goes back to the earliest period of time.

Well, you know, it is contemporaneous now that I think about it. In fact, Rich said he got a phone call from a

Roman Catholic fellow by the name of Scott Butler. And I did debate

Scott Butler. Rob Zins and I debated Scott Butler once. So we're glad that we do have the videotapes of that.

The Scott Butler meltdown. It's on YouTube. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I guess he's written a 700 page book.

700 plus. Has to be at least as long as any of St. Genesis books. So, yeah, that's, trust me, that's what that's all about.

But I said, hey, the next time Scott calls, make sure to remind him that he is still holding hostage and will not release to the public the videotapes of my debates with Mitch Pacwa in January of 1990.

For which he once won $5 ,000. But, hey, come on, this is now a historical thing. You really should just do the right thing.

Do the honest thing and get him out there. But anyway, there are folks who have attempted to defend the

Roman Catholic system in some rather interesting ways. But what

I was saying was it's sort of contemporaneous that time period. That was 1990.

It was also the first year that I taught church history at Grand Canyon University. Was that when

I was scholar in residence? Was that the next year? I forget when it was. But the first class that I was taught to teach after graduating from seminary was church history at Grand Canyon.

And so right around that same time period is when I was starting to do debates with Roman Catholics.

And I will never forget City of the

Lord, Tempe, Arizona. Roman Catholic place. It was two debates over two nights.

First was at Northwest Community Church. With both debates with Jerry Matitix. December of 1990.

And I think there are only audio recordings of those.

Yeah, there was no video. That was too long ago. But in the town came

Jerry Matitix and Scott Hahn. Now, I'm not sure that Scott Hahn wants anyone to be reminded of the fact that he and Jerry were once peas in a pod.

Buds converted together. They were the face of the coming wave of conversions to Roman Catholicism.

I don't think Catholic Answers wants to be reminded of how invested they were in Jerry Matitix these days either.

Though I still have the hard copies of This Rock magazine in dusty boxes.

Very dusty boxes in the other room. With the pictures of Jerry Matitix on the inside and all that kind of stuff.

Anyways, it was right around that time that Jerry Matitix and I had the debate at City of the

Lord. And it was on the papacy. And that just seems like the first time that they were ever faced with someone who started drawing upon the deep, rich, historical material that many at the

Reformation had, that had been being presented literally for hundreds of years.

And that Reformed scholars and historians had been presenting information you'd find in such

Lutheran scholars as Chemnitz. Or you'd find the infallibility of the church.

You'd find in the multi -volume historical works that were popular years ago, but now you only find very, very rarely these days.

And no one's reading anymore, certainly not in our seminaries. But they just never ran into this stuff before.

And there were people, there were Roman Catholics getting up and walking out in disgust from a

Roman Catholic location. Oh, slamming the doors, and oh yeah.

And this was a debate with Jerry Matitix. And moderated by none other than Scott Haunt.

Who was very unhappy, very unhappy with both of us by the end of the debate.

But there was only one reason why he was unhappy, and that was the Roman Catholic side had lost and lost badly in that particular debate.

Again, it's on Sermon Audio, I'm sure. You can look it up from December of 1990, long ways back.

We're coming up on a full 30 years ago.

Both Jerry and I were young bucks back then. Lots of hair, and let's see, 90, that December I turned 28.

So yeah, I was all of 28 years of age. Are you looking something up? Oh, you posted it on Twitter.

Okay, alright, so there's something there that you can look up in Twitter. And there you go.

So, we have been dealing with this stuff for a long, long time.

There is so much in church history that militates against the modern

Roman Catholic position. And of course, today, I woke up this morning hearing about someone that I've known, not really well, but known, who had become

Roman Catholic. Did you hear about that? You didn't hear about that. I'll tell you about it later. But someone who used to come into our chat channel fairly regularly went off and did exactly what

I've warned people against. You go off to the big schools. You want to get the academic acclaim.

The only way to do that is you can't be one of those Protestants.

The best way to get in is to be a Romanist. And so he swum the

Tiber. I read his blog article on it. It's just your standard, I will trade in what

I used to say about the gospel for the never -ending cycle of penances, so that people can see how brilliant I really am.

And it's sad, but not at all surprising. They went out from us to demonstrate they're not truly of us.

Any person that can trade in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ for the treadmill of penances, you never valued it.

You never valued it. I don't care what you say. You never valued it.

You know that. What's amazing is that any thinking person today, with Pope Francis sitting upon the

Cathedra Petri, which as Cyprian said, all bishops sit upon. But anyways, we won't go into that right now.

But with Francis as the Pope, why on earth anyone would be converting now, when any serious recognition of what the historical claims of the

Roman Church were, in comparison to the reality of Francis?

I'm sorry, you just have to suspend all historical reasoning to be able to make that move right now.

And that's what's going on. So yeah, it's

Reformation Day, and the issues still matter. They still matter a great deal.

And church history still matters. And the reality that Roman Catholics in general cannot handle church history in a fair manner, because they are told.

The dogma of the church teaches that this is what was taught in the past, and this is the universal view of the church.

And so anything, you know, it became a common, almost joke, in dealing with gerrymantics in those first, you know, seven or eight years.

I think Jerry and I debated 13 times, if I recall correctly. The last one,

I think, was in Utah, of all places. Good old Jason Wallace set that one up. But it just sort of became a joke after a while, that, you know, everybody in the early church believed what

I believe. And if anybody didn't, then they weren't really part of the early church. You know, it was just this, it was so circular.

It was so, yes, this is the universal view of the church. And anybody who disagreed, we just simply dismissed them as having any meaning to the universal church.

That's not how you do church history. I can allow the early church fathers to be who they were. A Roman Catholic cannot do that.

Not maintain the claims of Rome. I mean, if you want to abandon the claims of Rome, okay, you can do whatever you want.

But the faithful, believing Roman Catholic has to find in the early church substantiation of those claims.

And there's just too much counter -evidence. I do not have to turn

Ignatius into a Reformed Baptist, or Tertullian into a Reformed Baptist, or Athanasius into a

Reformed Baptist, to appreciate every single one of them, and to appreciate where we would disagree with one another. I don't have to do that, because I have an objective, unchanging standard called

Scripture. They can't do that. They have to twist history, and unfortunately have done so even in allegedly infallible documents, in making claims of the universal agreement of the church, when there was no universal agreement on those particular issues whatsoever.

And so, we are reminded of that on this Reformation Day, 501 years ago.

Can you believe that that celebration was already a full year ago? It is amazing.

I was noticing last month, the stuff coming up on my Facebook feed from a year ago, and there we were in Germany, and tracing the life of Luther, and what a wonderful time that was, and I can't believe that was a year ago.

In some ways I can, in other ways I can't. But already to 501, and as I said at the time, all that means is that now we're looking at events in 1518.

And what I should be doing, and I've just been too busy to do it, is, you know,

I think we missed, unfortunately. Yeah, we did. I should have made reference to the

Heidelberg Conference, which was... I don't have any of my notes. I've got nothing in front of me right now except Romans 327.

I was going to talk a little bit about that. We'll try to get to it. 328. But it was sometime,

I think during the summer of 1518, was the meeting of the

Augustinian Order in Heidelberg that resulted in Luther's laying out his understanding of justification, and that was the very point in time when

Martin Bucer was won over to his perspective.

And why is that important? Well, Martin Bucer becomes extremely important in Strasbourg.

He becomes extremely important in the life of John Calvin. I was just lecturing this past Sunday.

We're finishing up the Church History series dealing with Calvin, and I was talking about one of the few enjoyable periods in Calvin's life.

I mean, the guy had a 27 -year headache. Give him a break. You know, we are so wimpy, to be honest with you.

We are so wimpy. The things that debilitate us, and yet these men put up with so much more than we did.

But there was a time period in Calvin's life where he was sort of happy. It's when he got married to Idelet de

Beur in 1541. It was during the few years that he was in Strasbourg pastoring the

French congregation there, and Martin Bucer, an important person in his life at that particular point in time.

But it was Bucer who at the Heidelberg disputation came to embrace those perspectives.

I'm scrolling back here. Sorry, I'm getting close enough that I'm just going to go ahead and find it.

Because I might be able to show this. Well, I'd have to unplug and plug, but the world wouldn't end if I did that.

I'm getting pretty close here. Man, I have a lot of pictures. I take a lot of pictures. That's good. Okay, I'm getting close there.

I only have just the one because it sort of gives you an idea of how things are over in Europe as to history and things like that.

I have a picture of where the disputation took place.

And I was told that I was fortunate to be able to get it. Because of the fact that very frequently the plaque, which

I'm trying to find here, is parked on top of. It is in a parking lot, which means that the location itself no longer exists as far as a specific building is concerned.

And it is right at the edge of a line of cars.

And so sometimes people will park their car.

Come on, there you go. Okay, so it was 26

April, 1518. Yep, so we missed it. Okay, working?

Okay, so you can see here are the vehicles up here.

And so sometimes there's just a car sitting on top of this. You can see why. And then

Martin Luther. They put this down here.

It almost looks like a cover to the sewer cover or something, doesn't it?

But the point is you can't always get to take a picture of it because of the fact that it's sometimes covered by a car.

But that also gives us – I should have remembered on the 26th of April of this year to say something about that.

But I neglected to do so. And so I apologize for that.

Let me put this up here real quick. Well, actually, let me go back.

There we go. Have you – I don't think I showed this before.

What? Oh, you had zoomed in. This is a picture of a very famous painting that hangs in the castle in Marburg in Germany.

And this is of the great Marburg colloquy. And it's a great picture.

Because you have – this is Butzer. I think this is

Butzer and Melanchthon.

This is Melanchthon. I think this is Martin Butzer. And this is a zoom in, so I've cut off some of it.

Sorry about that. There are other identifiable – I think Ocolumpatius is in here. And Prince is over here on the side.

But this, of course, is the center of attention. Well, there's two centers of attention.

This is Zwingli, and that's, of course, Luther. And you do get the sense that Luther –

Zwingli is respectful, that he's making strong arguments. But you get the sense with the arm up like this that Luther is basically repulsed, having none of it from Zwingli.

And Luther just was not kind to Zwingli. He said, you are of another spirit. He rejected

Zwingli as a Christian. But here's the key.

And I'm going to – right there. There's the key. No, you're good. There's the key. There's Luther's finger, and he has written on the table the famous Esti.

If you see it upside down, sort of cock your head, you can see it in Greek. Esti is – this is my body.

And so there are a number of people at the

Marburg Colloquy that were convinced by Zwingli's argumentation rather than Luther's argumentation on this very issue and then the very complicated

Lutheran view of the ubiquity of the body of Christ and how that works with everything, and it's challenging.

But yeah, that's hanging there at Marburg even to this day, which is fascinating.

That was a great place to visit. Here's the room in which the colloquy took place.

You can pretty much tell it's the same room because you can look at that painting and you can see the columns and the spires and stuff like that.

And so that's how it's set up today. There's my wife walking toward me over there. So neat to get to go visit those types of places.

It was fantastic. And by the way, just in passing, I took this on my –

I think I took this on my cell phone, if I recall correctly. But this was from walking up to the castle.

And see that structure, that tall structure up there? Most people think that was the inspiration because the

Brothers Grimm wrote – this is where they lived, and so they wrote in this area. And so most people believe that that structure right there was the background or context for Rapunzel and Rapunzel's hair and the tower and all the rest of that stuff right there.

Not the cell tower over here, but that tower right there.

So yeah, there you go. Yeah, there's some cool stuff. Cool stuff there indeed.

And when we went to visit the Heidelberg Castle, this guy was our guide.

I may have mentioned this guy to you. If you ever go to Heidelberg, okay, and they are offering you a guided tour, get this guy, okay?

He did not leave character until we were completely done. He stayed in character the whole time.

Not only was he tremendously well -versed on the castle and all things related to it, but he was a riot.

He was so good. You could tell he loved – you can tell when somebody's doing something they really enjoy doing, and he really enjoyed it.

But I started getting into it with him for the fun of it to see if I could get him out of character and to throw him some curves.

Hey, I've taught history. So once we were done and he was willing to get out of character, then we started talking and found out that he had done his master's in history under a friend of mine's mentor over at Trinity College Dublin.

And so we had some connections there and stuff like that, and it was a lot of fun.

So if you go to the Heidelberg Castle, it's a great, great tour, but see if you can get that guy because he was super -duper -duper good.

Just too much fun, and he would not go out of character.

He just wouldn't do it. Here is a – this is one of the dumbest things that they ever did.

This is Pastor Josh Bice. Most of you know him. He's been on the program.

You know him from the G3 Conference. There's Josh standing in the Luther shoes.

Now, only a few years ago, none of this was here. There was a little plaque that you had to get flowers – flowers – that you had to get leaves out of the way to be able to see it.

At least that's what Michael Fallon right there told me and my wife walking behind him. But then in preparation for the 500th anniversary stuff, they put this up, and since this is where Luther stood – here

I stand, I can do no other – they put these size Shaquille O 'Neal shoes there so you can put your feet in there and stand where Luther stood.

Yeah, I mean, seriously, that – I don't know who thought that up, but they should have their feet glued in there as punishment for it.

And as I have mentioned, that's obviously at Worms.

And the reason that the building is not there is that it was a wooden building, and wooden buildings tend to burn rather easily.

And the building was burned down and never rebuilt during warfare in what year?

Well, it's real easy for us to remember what year it was. It was the year 1689.

So, if you're a Reformed Baptist, you can always remember when the prince's building there in Worms burned.

We didn't burn it, I want people to understand, but it was in 1689 when it was burned.

And there you go. Just one other – this is me witnessing to our

Muslim bus driver. I don't want to leave that up to him. I don't want to get him in trouble, but he was from Turkey, and he was the only person

I talked to that my German was better than his English. So, I was the one struggling to do my part in German rather than him doing his part in English.

So, anyways, I'm not sure why I decided to start doing the history tour here, except it is

Reformation Day, so it sort of makes sense to do this. I don't see where I put the picture of this, but this is when we were in Erfurt.

Here, for example, Martin Luther's cell in the monastery – oh, you zoomed in.

This is his cell in the monastery in Erfurt, an important place there.

And I thought I had – oh, well, there's lots of nice pictures there.

I thought I had somewhere in here – it may have gotten dropped in later – someone sent me a picture.

If you've watched the Martin Luther movie, they shot it there in the monastery at Erfurt.

And you can actually see there's this one scene where Luther and Staupitz –

Luther is mopping the floor, and Staupitz is down on the floor with him, and they shot it right there.

You can tell exactly where it was, where the cameras were, the whole nine yards.

In fact, there's

Michael Fallon standing in that hallway, but I took a picture from the other direction, and that's the hallway where they shot that.

If you've seen the – that was 2004, wasn't it? Yeah, it was 2004. It's that old, the 2004

Luther movie. That's where it was shot there in Erfurt. And, of course, we've already talked about –

I hope you know what this is, because I'm pretty sure we've shown this before. But that is the terror hole.

That is the – this is at Eisenach. This is the Wartburg Castle in Eisenach in Thuringia, Germany.

And Fritz Erba, the Anabaptist, was lowered down through that hole and kept in that location, in that cell, for seven years before he died.

And this was done by Protestants. And there's a YouTube video – it's less than five minutes long – that I would highly encourage you to look at that we shot right there.

It was quite the experience to be there.

And that evening, we had a wonderful time together, just a magical dinner together in the restaurant down below the castle there at the

Wartburg Castle in Eisenach. It was magical. And you'll notice we invited our guide from down at Eisenach.

He gladly came up, and then there's our bus driver. We were very, very kind to our bus driver, because we are

Christians, and we wanted to talk to him about these things. So, yeah. And there's a – it's a pretty decent –

I think it's a pretty decent shot, actually, that I took. And I didn't have the nice camera

I have now. If I had the nice camera, I'd have a lot more stuff. But there is the Wartburg Castle there in Germany.

And so it would be right up in this area here is where Luther's room was, where he did the translation of the

Greek New Testament. Well, the translation of the Greek New Testament into German, obviously. Duh. But that began the process of his publication of the

Bible, which would have, just as the King James and the Geneva and stuff had huge impact, massive impact upon the

English language, Luther's translation, the Luther Bibble, huge impact upon the

German language as well. Very, very, very important. And then, you know,

I still – I don't know. I can't imagine not using this as my avatar and Facebook ID and everything else.

How am I going to beat that? Huh? Yeah, how am I going to beat that?

There I am preaching, and this sermon is available on YouTube, preaching from the high pulpit in the

Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, Germany. That's Luther's pulpit in the high church in Wittenberg, where the

Reformation itself began. And so I apologize for any slaughtered

German that I used there, but I did my level best. I truly, truly did.

So there you go. And so, yeah, we had a great deal of fun there.

I was just telling you, brother, totally, totally changing topics here for a moment.

But I'm just – obviously, today, I'm on the whatever -I'm -thinking -about thing.

Just, yeah, it's a stream -of -thought type thing. I was just telling a brother,

I said, you know, I used to hear people say that they'd come back from Israel, and they would say, oh, man,

I was just changed by my time in Israel, and it's changed how

I look at the Bible, and all the rest of this stuff. And I was always rather skeptical, to be honest with you.

And it's not that I haven't wanted to go. It's just that a lot of people had told me that it was extremely commercialized.

You sort of jump off the bus, take some pictures, buy some trinkets, and leave, type thing. And so I get back, and I had to come back early, but I still saw a lot of great stuff, and I actually have a picture up right now.

This is a picture that I took looking out across the

Lake of Gennesaret, Sea of Galilee, from the very beach where Jesus and the disciples would have come ashore after the walking on the water incident in John 6.

Why do I know this? Because this is how you get from the beach to the synagogue.

And we know exactly what the synagogue was. Well, the synagogue that stands there today is the first century synagogue.

It's a different issue. It's probably a little bit later, but they would have built it on the same site as the original synagogue anyways.

So you're only talking 50 yards one way or the other.

There isn't any question that Jesus walked along this seashore right at this point.

And, of course, this is looking from where I had the opportunity of presenting on John 6, which was preached there in the synagogue in Capernaum.

And I have trouble even saying Capernaum. It's Capernaum. And since our guide kept mocking us for our mispronunciation of place names, it sort of stuck.

But the point is, you can see over toward Gadareah, over on the right -hand side there across the lake, you can see anywhere on the lake, anywhere on the shore, you can see the other shore from north, south, east, west.

It's not that big. I mean, it's a lot of water. It's not a small lake.

But it's not that big. And that stunned me.

That really, really shocked me. It's such a small country.

I took a cab from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. So that's from Jerusalem.

We drove right past the border with Palestinian areas on the way to Tel Aviv, which is on the ocean on the other side, 45 minutes.

Same amount of time it took me to drive to Chandler today in the Valley of the Sun is the width of the entire state of Israel.

It is tiny. It had to have been because everybody was walking back then.

But anyway, the point is that, well, let me show you this.

There is a 99 % chance that our

Lord exposited Scripture and taught right there.

Right there. That is the first century synagogue at Migdal.

Now, Migdal may not automatically raise something in your mind until you go

Mary Magdalene. That's Mary of Migdal.

This would have been Mary's synagogue. This is where Mary would have gone.

And the Scriptures specifically tell us that Jesus, during his ministry, taught in the synagogues in Galilee.

And this is a first century synagogue in Galilee. And Galilee ain't that big a place.

So there is a 99 % chance that those stones heard the words of Jesus.

Now, do you notice how the stones go up and down?

Let me see if I've got... Yeah, look at the mosaic here.

Do you see the waves? Do you know what that is? Earthquakes. Earthquakes.

The vast majority of the damage that you see, it's earthquakes. That's an active region.

And so much of what we see today, you can just see the folding of the earth as it has been uncovered.

And so here is synagogue, first century synagogue, that Jesus would have taught in.

And does that impact how I look at the Gospels? Yep.

I didn't think that it would. I don't know why I didn't think it would. I just didn't really think that it would have the kind of impact on me that it did.

But it really, really did have that kind of impact.

And I'm sorry, for some reason I must have taken those pictures. See, I took pictures of two different cameras.

And what I have here is pretty much only the stuff I took on my cell phone. But, for example, this is the spring.

There's only one spring in the area that could possibly fit the description of Gideon's activities.

And when he brought the men to see how they would drink, remember? When he cut the men down to 350?

This would have been where it was. And, oh man, it's that spring clear. The water is just gorgeous.

You can drink straight out of it. It's great. Well, we did. We survived it one way or the other. We did.

But I think, yeah, there's where it comes up and then comes out.

As far as I understand, this is the only possible spot that it could have been.

Does that impact how you deal with things? Yeah, it does.

And so, I honestly now would...

I'm sorry. Every time I look down, I see something. There's Emilio teaching.

And see that obvious metal thing there? That is the outline of where the high altar would have been in the ancient manifestation of this.

See the huge big tree and stuff? This is one of the high places that Jeroboam built. You hear about the high places and how the good kings would destroy them.

The bad kings would build them. Here it is. We're outside the city of Dan. And if I recall correctly, yeah, there's the ancient...

This is the oldest surviving archway from the ancient world.

3 ,800 years old. And this is the ancient entrance to the city of Dan.

And then there is, I think... Yeah, there is the Israelite entrance to the city of Dan.

And it was under these trees right here that the Ostraca was found. That is the earliest reference to David found anywhere.

Only, in fact, to my knowledge, the only reference to David. I could be wrong about that. But this was definitely the earliest found right there.

Again, I will minimize photos here so I do not continue to be distracted.

I honestly would... If you get the chance,

I would highly recommend. I was saying to my brother, I didn't have this view before I went over there.

I have it now. It does provide you with an element into which to place your exegetical work.

I consider it helpful in Christian ministry to have the background, to have that knowledge.

I think that's great. I think that was important. Before I run out of time,

I need to go back to what I said I was going to do when we started. Sorry.

And I apologize to those of you who listen primarily on audio. Because show and tell with pictures didn't tell you much.

And hopefully made you want to go, Oh, I'd like to see what those look like. Well, there you go. You might want to take a look at those.

But what I had mentioned that would be appropriate on Reformation Day, how

I ended up in the ancient city of Dan from where we started,

I'm not really certain, but that's okay. You just have to forgive me. This is sort of a stream of consciousness type experience today.

But what I did want to do at the start was to comment on something in Romans 3 that would be relevant to October 31st.

And that is, again, I'm not sure.

I just brought up photos again. I'm a bad man. Yeah, sorry about that.

I thought that at one point I had taken a picture when we were in Wittenberg of one of the stained glass windows.

And the reason I did, from within the castle church, was that when

I was in the pulpit preaching, I looked across the church, and one of the windows directly across from the pulpit, and I wasn't there, but I motioned toward it at one point and pointed at it at one point during the sermon, is, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, you can't see it, but I did say that I pointed at it, and we caught that.

I'm pointing at it just across the way, because in the stained glass there is

Romans 3 .28, and specifically, For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

And so we have, Lagidzamitha gardikai usthai pistai anthropon chorus ergon namu.

For we reckon or consider to be justified by faith a man apart from works of law.

And as you might know, historically, one of the accusations that modern

Roman Catholics place against Martin Luther is that he added to Romans 3 .28.

He added to Romans 3 .28, because in the

Luther Bibble, and I believe that,

Let's see if it's there. Interestingly enough, the 1912

Luther Bibble does not have that. They've changed it.

I wonder if that would cause Luther to spin in his grave. I think it probably would, knowing

Brother Luther. But they don't, I don't think that I have the old version of the

Luther Bible in my stuff here, so I can't show it to you. But he, in Latin anyways, rendered

Romans 3 .28, sola per sola fidem, or solum fidem,

I'm not sure how it would be, but anyway, by faith alone. And Roman Catholics will say,

See, he couldn't make his case simply from the

Scriptures. He had to change the Scriptures. Well, if you notice the context, where then is boasting?

It is excluded by what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. And so the context itself is creating a contrast between works and faith.

So that when Paul says, We maintain that a man is justified by faith, apart from works of the law, there's nothing else you can add in.

And so by faith alone, apart from works of the law. Nothing can be added to this as the grounds of justification.

But what is interesting and maybe helpful to you is to know that Luther was not, in fact, doing something new.

A lot of people think that he was. He was not. The reality is that the

Nuremberg Bible of 1483, now remember, the Reformation begins in 1517.

Luther is pushing this in the early 1520s. And so nearly 40 years earlier, the

Nuremberg Bible of 1483 had allein durch den Glauben, allein durch den

Glauben, alone, allein, only, through faith.

The Italian Bible of Geneva in 1476 and then even in 1538, so this is after the

Reformation, had in Latin per sola fide, sola fide, faith alone.

So this was in Geneva. But these were

Italian Bibles in 1476. So that's long before Luther.

And so that means he was not alone in his understanding at this point and that there were people before him.

In fact, some have said that at least initially he was following them. I'm not sure there's really a strong argument to be made there as being able to trace the information or anything along those lines.

But the point is that this really remains key to the issue of the

Reformation to this day and to the Gospel to this day. And that is, we maintain that a man is justified pistae chorus ergon namu, by faith, apart from works of the law.

Now, that does not denigrate the law, for as Paul himself is going to say in verse 31, do we then nullify the law through faith?

May it never be. On the contrary, me genoita, we establish the law.

But the means by which we establish the law is that we establish the proper purpose of the law and then the fulfillment of the law in Christ Jesus, in his sacrificial death, and then in the imputation of righteousness,

Romans 4, 4 -8, that comes after this. Sadly for many today, these are esoteric theological issues that, why does this really have to do with me?

And it has everything to do with you. It has everything to do with every man in every culture at every time because this is what

God has done. This is the way, this is what God has done to bring about salvation and to bring about peace for himself is the gospel, and we need to understand what that gospel is.

And it is so easy for the church today to become distracted with so many different things and to lose sight of what's truly important and what's truly central.

That's seemingly what's going on today. So, as you're trying to find that bag of Mars bars that you bought for this evening or whatever else it might be,

I hope you'll actually remember that the most important thing to remember today is what happened 501 years ago.

Did it happen on this specific date? Was it exactly the way that it's been represented?

We talked about all that last year. We don't need to repeat that.

But the Reformation remains absolutely central, absolutely vital, and we should be thankful that we continue to live in light of it even though many of those today who have the freedoms they have and even the theology they have because of it are willing to compromise on so much of what was central to not only

Luther but those who came after him. So we need to stand firm, stand strong.

Once again, sorry for wandering all over the landscape today. I have no idea how

I'm going to describe this. How are you going to title this? Today's Ramble.

Okay, now you were waving at me. Okay, Amazon smile through Friday, 10 times the amount that they normally give.

So if you have designated us as your Amazon smile thing, that also reminds me to remind everyone of what

I said a week ago in regards to the Travel Fund. And evidently a couple of you, thank you very much.

You took my hint. I was just sort of in passing pointing out that October is our 35th anniversary in ministry.

And so I just sort of in passing said, hey, you know, we could have done something. Give $35, give $350, and I think a couple of people did exactly those things.

Thank you very, very much. That's very encouraging. But also to remind you of the Travel Fund on the

Donate page. And there's something else you wanted? Tim Bushong says that his

Mighty Fortress is our God is on YouTube. Hit it. So just put in B -U -S -H -O -N -G and Mighty Fortress and rock out.

All you want there on. It is. It is the day to do it. Let's face it.

You should put that on repeat on your headsets and just rock out to Tim Bushong's edition of Mighty Fortress today.

Because if you do it tomorrow, people will look at you like you're just a little bit strange. So do it today.

Do it today. Anyways, thanks for putting up with the stream of consciousness dividing line today.

But I hope the pictures were interesting. At least something I said was interesting. We'll see you next week.