Martin Luther on Preparing to Die
The most important thing to do is focus our attention on the perfect sacrifice and righteousness of Christ and grasp the certainty of salvation that we have in Him. This can be done through prayerfully using the ordinary means of grace that the Lord has given His people to help them live and therefore to help them die as well
A few years ago, I received this unexpected request from one of my church members with multiple sclerosis: “When you have time, could you please do a Bible study on how to prepare for death?” This person knew that her condition was incurable and, although death still seemed a fairly long way off, she was anxious to receive advice on how to face it. I was taken aback by that request, but I should not have been. This was a very sensible idea. Why wouldn’t every church member be interested in such a Bible study? Yet, I could not remember the last time I preached or heard a sermon on that topic. The Bible is very upfront about the reality of death but also very clear that it is possible to die well. It is perhaps significant that one of the best-known Hebrew words in the Old Testament, the word shalom, which we associate with peace and well-being, first appears in the context of death (Gen. 15:15). Knowing how we may die “in peace” should be an important concern for us all.
As I reflected on this, I was struck again about how common that theme was in Christian sermons and devotional literature until about two hundred years ago. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, decisive breakthroughs in medical research, such as the discovery of germs and anesthetics, made death and pain feel more distant. For the first time in history, being healthy became the norm and being ill the exception. For most people in history, death was an ever-present companion. John Calvin, for example, gives a vivid description of how precarious life felt in his time:
Innumerable are the ills which beset human life, and present death in as many different forms. Not to go beyond ourselves, since the body is a receptacle, even the nurse, of a thousand diseases, a man cannot move without carrying along with him many forms of destruction…Then, in what direction soever you turn, all surrounding objects not only may do harm, but almost openly threaten and seem to present immediate death. Go on board a ship, you are but a plank’s breadth from death. Mount a horse, the stumbling of a foot endangers your life. Walk along the streets, every tile upon the roofs is a source of danger…I say nothing of poison, treachery, robbery, some of which beset us at home, others follow us abroad.1
It is therefore not surprising that Christians felt the need to be trained in the ars moriendi (art of dying). In fact, the idea that the whole of life is a preparation to die was commonplace. As events in the world sometimes bring death considerably closer to us, I believe it is urgent for the church to recover the Christian ars moriendi. What we need in particular is not so much rehearsing general theological truths about death but precisely what that church member asked me: some practical advice on how to prepare ourselves for it. The Protestant Reformers and seventeenth-century Puritans can help us with this because they knew how to face death and how to think about it in concrete terms. They wrote a great deal on the topic but, for the sake of brevity, I will focus on Martin Luther, whose teaching on the matter sums up the Protestant ars moriendi.2
Luther’s view of the Christian life is attractive because of its concrete character. Luther was not simply a theologian of more abstract concepts such as justification but a pastor who preached and wrote to human beings of flesh and blood facing much hardship and who were never far away from death. Luther himself, like his contemporaries, did not expect to live for very long, and he thought he would soon die from illness or martyrdom. It is therefore not surprising that he preached and wrote about death throughout his life. As early as 1519, when he was only thirty-six, he wrote a series of exhortations for his sovereign, Elector Frederick the Wise, who was seriously ill.3 In that same year, he preached a famous sermon on preparing to die, and he no doubt preached many times on the subject. Practical considerations about dying are spread through his writings. We also have fairly precise information about Luther’s last days and his own death that allows us to know that he put into practice what he preached.
Luther can help us because he teaches us how to think properly about death both throughout our lives and when it is near. His insights can be summed up under four headings.
Be Confident but Realistic
First, Luther recognizes that death is frightening even for Christians. He is not so foolish as to believe that the fear of death can be neutralized by stoic fortitude, as certain atheists try to convince themselves. This is a conviction that is often found in his writings. For example, in a sermon on 1 Corinthians 15 preached on October 6, 1532, he says: “The heathens have wisely said ‘he is a fool who is afraid of death, for through such fear he loses his own life.’ This would be true if only a man could act on the advice…They advise that nothing is better than simply cast all such fear aside, to rid the mind of it and to think: why worry about it? When we are dead, we are dead. That is certainly disposing of the matter in short order and completely extinguishing God’s wrath, hell and damnation!”4
Or again, in one of his table talks: “I do not like to see people glad to die…Great saints do not like to die. The fear of death is natural, for death is a penalty; therefore, it is something sad. According to the spirit one gladly dies; but according to the flesh, it is said ‘another shall carry you where you would not.’”5
Yet, because Christ defeated death, Luther also knows that the death of a Christian is fundamentally different. As he says to Frederick the Wise in one of his fourteen consolations: “The death of a Christian is to be looked upon as the brazen serpent of Moses. It does have the appearance of a serpent; but it is entirely without life, without motion, without poison, without sting…We do resemble those who die, and the outward appearance of our death is not different from that of others. But the thing itself is different nevertheless because for us death is dead.”6
This is why the Christian is able to prepare for death in a meaningful way. However, this preparation should take place throughout the whole of life, and this leads to Luther’s next insight.
Think of Death at the Right Time
This is perhaps the most insightful piece of advice and the most challenging for us today. The issue is not simply how to think about death but when. Luther’s oft-repeated advice is that we should familiarize ourselves with death while we are still healthy, while death itself still seems far away. Conversely, we should not stare at death when it is near us but rather focus on Christ. Now it is clear that most people today—sadly, including many Christians—do precisely the opposite. They studiously ignore death while healthy and are caught unprepared when it comes.
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Gods of Sex
Written by Dr. Peter Jones |
Friday, July 1, 2022
The church must either announce the holiness of sex publicly through clear Gospel preaching about the person of God, while showing love to both God and the neighbor (the essence of Twoism); or it must remain silent under the culture’s determination to eliminate all distinctions and to call gospel preaching hate speech (the essence of Oneism). Christians speak the truth about God not for the sake of “Christian nationalism” but for people to meet the love of God both in the person of God as their Creator and Redeemer.This irony is a warning for all Christians who are quite capable of similar sinful actions and who are constantly reminded that sinners in the hands of an angry God, including androgynous practitioners, can also know his forgiving grace if they turn to Jesus, God’s Son, confess their sin, and own him as their only atoning sacrifice.
The Gods of Sex
Why is the LGBTQ agenda now proudly affirmed as a valuable lifestyle choice? Why must kindergarten children be taught how gays think and act? Why does Disney risk losing the parents of their young customers by promoting the LGBT agenda in its movies? Why are there huge annual pride parades in so many large cities? Why are Drag Queens reading to children in our public libraries? Why is Baylor University (among other Christian colleges) happy to make its mark on Christian higher education by chartering Prism to create an LGBT student organization on campus?
In order to answer these questions, please allow me to go back a little in my own experience to show you the roots of the fruits we see so richly exhibited on the branches of paganism through which we walk today.
Pagan Spirituality Lands on Western Shores
Homosexuality is but one option in what might be called “androgyny.” Embedded in the ever-thickening LGBTQ+ alphabet soup is a wide variety of sexual options, all of which erase the male/female distinction: homosexuality, bi-sexuality, transgenderism, a-genderism, drag, and cross-dressing, to name but a few.
The open practice (one might say worship) of androgyny is a relatively recent development. I came to the States as a young European believer in 1964. I found a culture peppered with thriving Christian universities, seminaries, publishing houses, and television and radio stations. Churches were on every corner, pressing the truth of the Christian faith on the culture. Androgyny was nothing but an obscure word used by scholars of the Greek myths. There was no televised Ru Paul Drag Race; no eight-year-olds being encouraged to choose their own gender.[1] But shortly after I arrived, this began to change, as the Cultural Revolution welcomed Eastern spirituality.
Bob Dylan’s astute 1963 song caught the “eschatological” character of the cultural change— The Times They Are A’Changin:
Come mothers and fathersThroughout the landAnd don’t criticizeWhat you can’t understandYour sons and your daughtersAre beyond your commandYour old road isRapidly agin’Please get out of the new oneIf you can’t lend your handFor the times they are a-changin’.
“Changin’” in what way? By the late Sixties, I was a young theological student studying “Death of God” theology. I, my fellow students, and even our professor concluded that the times were at a high point of atheistic secularism. Like Nietzsche, the atheists were killing God. However, in 1974, David Miller, one scholar in the Death of God movement, wrote a book called The New Polytheism, in which he triumphantly announced that the death of God would stimulate the “rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”[2] In the same vein, a generation later, Jean Houston (spiritual counselor who supposedly brought up the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt for Hilary Clinton in the White House) declared: “Now open your eyes and look at all the gods in hiding.”[3] In other words, the so-called “Death of God” was the death of the God of the Bible but also the demise of secularism. It was the beginning of the postsecular era and the rebirth in the modern world of the old pagan notions of the divinity of Nature and of the self. It hailed the New Age epoch where people learned to say: “I am spiritual but not religious.”
What is the essence of New Age spirituality? It is historic paganism. Two thousand years ago the Apostle Paul accurately described the only two religious options we have: “worship of creation” or “worship of the Creator” (Romans 1:25). This distinction is known in theology as the Creator/creature distinction. I have come to use the terms Oneism and Twoism to describe these options. Oneism is the worship of all things created and relies on belief that there are no ultimate distinctions. Twoism holds that distinctions are knitted into our existence, with the fundamental distinction being that between the creation and the Creator. From this “otherness” flow all the distinctions embedded in the creation.
Eastern Oneism’s popularity in the West has caused many Westerners raised on biblical Twoism to take up yoga, trust the enneagram, walk the labyrinth, practice mindfulness mediation or seek the philosophical meaning of life in the teachings and practices of Eastern Buddhism and Hinduism. Multiculturalism seeks to bring all ideas together but, alas, Oneism and Twoism are fundamentally opposed. It is this irreducible conflict that causes the major divisions of contemporary culture.
Pagan Cosmology
Pagan Spirituality
In the early stages of our culture’s newfound curiosity about Eastern religions, people were seeking to come to terms with their personal sense of meaning, but before long there came a yearning for a much fuller expression of this individualistic spirituality. The Jungian and Gnostic scholar, June Singer, made a programmatic statement that others have since put into practice: “What lies in store as we move towards the longed-for conjunction of the opposites [the joining of the opposites]?…Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?” [emphasis mine].[4] Singer called for a coherent, all-encompassing, attractive and religiously pagan account of the nature of existence, which she saw as essentially one, based on androgynous sexuality. She realized that a cosmology or worldview would not function without an essential place for sexuality. She saw androgyny as a means of erasing distinctions and accomplishing “our own new alchemical opus.” She saw androgynous sexuality as being a “witness” to “primordial cosmic unity.”[5] Singer is a true Jungian, conscious of promoting the important sexual element in the coming “new humanism” that Carl Jung envisaged: “The androgyne [the human being aware of being both male and female] participates consciously in the evolutionary process, redesigning the individual…society and…the planet.”[6]
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If Your Church Is Operating Biblically, It Will Never Be Exactly as You Would Have It
If every decision in the church, every matter of how things are down to the finest detail is exactly how I would set it up, it suggests that I am making every decision and insisting on the minutiae of how everything will be and, therefore, not relinquishing authority and decision-making capacity where it should be relinquished.
It is often interesting to me that people frequently assume, because I am the pastor of the church, everything in the church must be exactly as I would have it. I suspect, in part, because of the kind of character I have and the way I communicate, some people assume the church is as it is because I have determined it would be so. Neither is the case.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any particular issues with my church or the things that happen in it. But not everything is the way I would have it. But that is partly because some things are the way they are because they are how others would have it. There are the things I would do differently, but they are evidently not things I have decided to make an issue of. There are then a whole bunch of things that are not how I would have them, but even if I were inclined, I cannot really do anything about because we just aren’t in any position to do so. Then there are the things that all of us would like to be different, but we are unable to do anything about. These things are just the things of any church.
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The Basis for Communion with God
This is the source of communion with God—Someone hears the truths of the gospel, God supernaturally shines light into his heart so that he recognizes the beauty and value of the gospel of the glory of Christ. And when that happens to a person, he will give up everything for Christ; He will value Christ above all else. That is true Christianity.
The king raged with fury.
How dare they say I have no right to be here? he steamed. I have done right in the sight of God. He has blessed me. He thought of all the rich spoils of battle adorning his chambers. I have grown strong. My fame has spread far. I deserve to be here.
“My lord, you must leave!”
What is his problem? How dare he say I must leave? The king picked up the censor to burn incense on the altar. I am trying to honor the Lord with this.
The priest persisted. “It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense.”
The king turned. A crowd of strong priests stood behind Azariah in the doorway.
The priest moved a step closer. “Go out of the sanctuary,” he pleaded, “for you have done wrong, and it will bring you no honor from the Lord God.”
How dare he challenge the Lord’s blessed servant? He lowered the censor toward the altar.
He trembled, the censor dropping from his hand. What is that? White scales appeared all over his outstretched hand. His left leg collapsed beneath him. A sharp pain spread across his forehead.King Uzziah was a leper until the day of his death.He dwelt in an isolated house, because he was a leper;for he was cut off from the house of the LORD.(2 Chron 26:21)
Barriers
“Let us draw near” (Heb 10:19).
The Son of God himself invites you to draw near to the presence of God and enter into the eternal communion enjoyed by the three persons of the triune godhead.
But any reader of the invitation in Hebrews to draw near would have immediately recognized its inherent problem—this God to whom we are supposed to draw near is holy; he cannot tolerate sin. Yet we are sinful.
The fall of mankind into sin destroyed the possibility of drawing near to God. After Adam and Even sinned they no longer enjoyed the privilege of walking with God in the garden; instead they hid from him in fear and desperately tried to cover their guilt with leaves. And ever since that time, any attempt to draw near to God results in a profound recognition of guilt and unworthiness.
The Israelites experienced this when they drew near to Mt. Sinai; when they witnessed the majesty and greatness and white-hot holiness of God, they trembled in fear and begged Moses to go in their behalf. This is the reason that although God inhabited the holy place in the tabernacle and later the temple, no person could enter his presence except the high priest once a year on the Day of Atonement. This is what Isaiah experienced when he saw the Lord high and lifted up in all of his glory and holiness and cried out with, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa 6:5).
Second Corinthians 4:3 says that every person is born in the condition of perishing, and thus the beauty of a relationship with God is veiled to us: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.” Even worse, Paul says that “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (v 4). All people are perishing and blind; all people are depraved. The Bible says that no one seeks after God (Rom 3:11); the natural mind cannot understand the things of God (1 Cor 2:14). And because of this, perishing, blind people do not even recognize the wonder and beauty of communion with God.
The problem with the command in Hebrews 10 is that we have neither the right nor even the desire to draw near to God; we do not have access to him because of our sin. The only way God enabled people to partially draw near to him is through temporary sacrifices, and even then there are barriers keeping us from the very presences of God himself; there is a veil hiding the holy place, only the high priest can enter there and only once a year, and we know what happens if you even touch the symbol of God’s presence, the ark—Remember Uzzah? Even Psalm 100 calls people to come only into the outer courts of the temple, not into the actual presence of God. The people had no direct access.
The point is that we cannot obey this command. God commands us to draw near, but this entering into the presence of God to worship him is not possible.
Or is it?
Through Christ
Hebrews 10 explains the solution to the problem through two “since” clauses. The first is found in verse 19: “Since we have confidence to enter the holy places . . . draw near.” Now the term translated “confidence” in most English translations has the idea of free and open “access” to someone or something. “Since we have access to enter the holy places . . . draw near.” So this verse is specifically addressing our problem. God commands us to draw near to him, but because of our sin we do not have access to him. Yet this verse tells us that such access is possible; it is possible to have access to the holy place of God’s presence.
Here is the first term in our text that is meant to conjure up images of Old Testament worship. The holy place was that most sacred of places in the tabernacle and temple, and several boundaries prevented access to God in this place. The first was the wall that enclosed the outer court of the temple, then was the wall of the temple itself, and finally the veil that hid the holy place where the Ark of God dwelt. In each successive stage, fewer and fewer people had access. No Jew would ever even consider entering the Holy Place; they knew what happened when Uzziah did that.
In fact, if you go to Jerusalem today, you’ll find out that there’s a certain area of the temple ground where it is forbidden to Jews to ever walk, because it may be the area where the Holy of Holies once stood, and no Jew would ever put his foot on the Holy of Holies. So that’s why there are big signs outside the gates of the temple area that say, “Orthodox Jews have been forbidden by the rabbi to enter in this place lest they step on the Holy of Holies.” Orthodox Jews have a fear still today of ever going into the presence of God.
Jesus our Substitute
But Hebrews 10:19 tells us that we have access, not just to the outer court, not just into the entrance of the temple, but beyond the veil into the very presence of God. How can this be? Keep reading: “by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.”
Access to God is possible through a sacrifice, and this is no ordinary sacrifice; this is the vicarious, substitutionary atonement of the Son of God. At the beginning of Hebrews 10, the author revealed the insufficiency of animal sacrifices to purify those who come to God in worship: “For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.”
But this sacrifice can perfect those who draw near. This Jesus is fully man, and thus he can stand as our substitute, and he is fully God, and thus he can pay an eternal punishment to an eternal, holy God that no normal man could. And because of the perfection and eternality of this sacrifice, it need not be offered day after day after day to atone for sin; it is offered one time and the complete wrath of God is fully appeased.
This is what God pictured when he slew the animal in the garden and covered Adam and Eve’s guilt. This is what was pictured when Moses offered a sacrifice at the foot of Mt. Sinai so that the elders of the people could approach God. This is what was pictured each year in Israel on the Day of Atonement when an animal was sacrificed and the high priest entered the holy place to sprinkle blood on the mercy seat. This is what was pictured when the seraph took a burning coal from the altar and placed it on Isaiah’s lips, saying, “your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
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