A friend emailed me this past week an opinion piece by nationally syndicated columnist Charley Reese, who informed, “When the Protestant Reformation began, St. Nicholas was largely dropped from the season except in Holland, where he was known as Sinterklaas. Dutch settlers brought him to New York, where he was Americanized as Santa Claus.”

I was reminded of a sermon my pastor, Richard Jordan, gave this past Halloween about how, while the Catholic calendar recognizes Nov. 1 as “All Saints Day” to worship spooks and goblins, the Protestant calendar marks the Sunday nearest Oct. 31 as Reformation Sunday, honoring Martin Luther’s instigation of the Protestant Reformation.

It was on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1517, that Martin Luther tacked onto the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany his famed 95 Theses.

Wikipedia says of the event, “This was not an act of defiance or provocation as is sometimes thought. Since the Castle Church faced Wittenberg's main thoroughfare, the church door functioned as a public bulletin board and was therefore the logical place for posting important notices. Also, the Theses were written in Latin, the language of the church, and not in the vernacular. Nonetheless, the event created a controversy between Luther and those allied with the Pope over a variety of doctrines and practices.”

Of course, to say it “created a controversy” is a vast understatement. Luther’s 95 Theses were published in pamphlets that were distributed, not just across Germany, but all over Europe and Christendom, resulting in the Reformation!

Jordan gives this account of what transpired:

“It all began really back in the 1400s when Guttenberg developed the printing press and you have a period in Western history that’s called the Renaissance.

“Marco Polo’s book is credited, historically, as the starting point that tipped the dominoes over resulting in the discovery of America. Polo traveled to the East—to India and China and that part of the world—and came back to Europe with spices and great treasures and silks and so forth, writing a book about his travels and the wealth he saw; the culture he saw in the East.

“This became something Europe wanted and that’s where the impetus came to find a trade route by sea, not land, to the East.

“There was a great ferment of knowledge and learning and expanding out of the feudal system, and the thing that made it so blazingly successful was the invention of the printing press—moveable type so that you no longer had to write a book by hand.

“Anyone could now write and publish and there was an information age revolution that’s only been matched by the computer information age of today—it was that big of a change taking place.

“The first book Guttenberg put off his press was the Guttenberg Bible, and the Word of God began to be disseminated and propagated.

“Luther was born in 1483, thirty years or so after this invention of the printing press. His dad was a miner and very poor, and he was determined Luther would be better educated and have a better future than he did.

“Luther, as a young man, had a real deep sense of spiritual things and was conscious of being lost—having a sense of sin and wanting peace with God—so rather than pursuing the business career his dad wanted for him, he went into a monastery.

“There, he sought constantly, through penance, fasting, prayers and all the various kinds of exercises to try through his own activity and religious deeds—his rites, his ceremonies, etc.—to find peace with God

“One day, the head of his order came to give sort of an inspection of the monastery and wrote that, ‘I found Martin Luther in deep exercise of spirit concerning the matter of his salvation.’ He counseled Luther to read his Bible, and pointed him directly to Christ—through whom alone there is salvation and fellowship with God—and specifically to the book of Romans.

“And as Luther began to study Romans, as you probably know the story, Romans 1:16-17 blazed out upon the page: ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith.’

“When Luther translated that into German, he actually wrote, ‘The just shall live by faith alone.’ He added a little word to the text there but it made up those Four Solas, as they’re called (Sola is the Latin word for only): faith alone, God’s grace alone, Christ alone and the Scripture alone.

“Those (Solas) became the foundation for the Protestant Reformation. Believers gathered together around the Pauline truth of ‘justification by grace through faith plus nothing.’

“Well, after Luther got saved, he was in Wittenberg, studying the bible, teaching and writing; living a rather obscure life frankly, but learning.

“In the meantime, Pope Leo X was building St. Peter’s basilica there in Rome and needed money. He needed pocket money for his own rather extravagant tastes, and money was short, so he decided on using the sale of indulgences. That is, ‘You give me money and I give you a pass to go sin.’

“The sale of indulgences had always raised a lot of funds for the Roman Church, so they decided to extend the scope of the indulgences. They would lower the price, which would mean more people could get them. If you lower the price of something, more people buy them and the income of the church goes up.

“And Pope Leo had an entrepreneur with great skill to help him. It was a (Dominican friar) by the name of Tetzel and he was a good salesman. Tetzel traveled around and came to a village close to Wittenberg, and, according to this book I have, it was with ‘eloquent patter and ribald buffoonery’ that he marketed the indulgences.

“Tetzel even came up with this little ditty that went, ‘No sooner will the pennies clink in the box than the keys will click in purgatory’s locks.’ In other words, ‘Put the money in the box and we’ll get somebody out of purgatory for you.’

“And that was the last straw for Luther. He tried to get the people in his area to do something about it but got nowhere. So Luther, out of frustration, understanding the nature of the opposition he faced, wrote these 95 Theses and took them down to the door of the Castle Church and nailed them to the wall.

“They were copied down by others, printed and sent out as tracts all over Europe. And Luther, because of that, got into trouble. Up until that time, he had never really questioned the authority of the pope, but now Luther was beginning to be called into question about what he was teaching.

“Upon being called to answer before the pope, Luther realized the Word of God was not the basis upon which any decisions were made, and he went back home and began to study the Scripture to find out why the pope had the authority to do what he did, and what he discovered was that the papal authority wasn’t built on Scripture, but rather upon traditions and some falsified ideas; some goofball religious kind of stuff that came along and was passed down and nobody questioned.

“Nobody had really thought of all this until this point, and when they began to look at it, they learned that the foundation upon which the house and the throne of the pope was instituted was really suspect.

“And so Luther began to be very suspicious and wound up, by the time of the Diet of Worms, in correspondence back and forth with the pope, calling him ‘Your Hellishness,’ instead of, ‘Your Holiness.’

“Luther even says in one place that ‘if the pope isn’t the Antichrist, no one will ever be.’ Now, Luther, in his theology was a little more premillennial than that, but in his practical theology he was an Amillenialist. It was, ‘Brother, the pope is the Antichrist!’

“And what he did in these 95 Theses is, first, he denounced the pope for his abuse of authority, and then he denounced the (Roman) church in general for their abuse of materialism, and then he denounced the system of indulgences specifically. So he got everybody mad at him.

“Point 62 of the Theses says, ‘The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.’ Now, that’s as true today as it was back then. The gospel is the center of the church; it’s what we’re all about—without it we don’t have a purpose to exist!

“Therefore, Luther concluded, anything, no matter how good or right or noble it might be, that obscured the gospel was wrong and needed to be changed or gotten rid of.

“Now, he hadn’t always seen it that way. Remember, he’d been religious; he’d been in the system. But he found the truth of the book of Romans and that truth carried him out of the system.

“Luther was a man of war. He understood the character of the opposition he faced and when called upon (by the Church) to give answer, he wrote back, ‘I simply taught, preached and wrote God’s Word. Otherwise, I did nothing. The Word of God did it all.’

“That message, in the face of that kind of religious tyranny, was a strike at the heart. He wrote, ‘Do not think that the gospel can be advanced without tumult, trouble and uproar.’ He understood the issue he was fighting. He understood that when he stood for the Word of God, he stood for the grace of God, and he was willing to put his neck on the line to do it.

“In one of the debates with the papist, he faced one of their most skilled logicians, who literally boxed Luther in—as though he needed to be boxed in—to where (Luther) had to clearly state that he had no authority but the Scripture and that the Council had been wrong; therefore the pope and the Church were wrong and, therefore, the pope and the Church were not infallible.

“With this, a hush went across the crowd. His inquisitors had the power to execute him for such heresy, and it was then that he made the famed statement, ‘I am conquered by the Scriptures, quoted by me, and my conscience is bound by the Word of God. I can do no other. I cannot, I will not recant anything since it is unsafe and dangerous to do anything against conscience.’

“That great statement—‘My conscience is bound by the Word of God’—is probably one of the most far-reaching echoes of the Protestant Reformation.

“And I tell you, the people who believed what the Protestant Reformation brought to the fore, were there before Luther. They’ve been there all along, just like we’re here right now.

“They never got a lot of press or a lot written in history, or a lot of acknowledgment, just like we don’t get much press or notoriety today, but we’ve had the brethren all along there.

“And when a man like Luther, who was a very prominent individual, came to the forefront with the blaze of the truth, it was what produced the Reformation. Luther never set out to reform anything. He just set out to preach the Word and the truth is what reformed—in fact, the truth revolutionized the world of that day and changed the face of Europe!

“It changed the entire face of Western civilization and made the Renaissance into something it could never have been before. And the liberty that you and I have today as Americans—and the reason that America has been the lighthouse of freedom and a different kind of example to the whole planet; and the reason that light has gone out now and the ship is sinking—is all based upon that truth that ‘my conscience is bound by the Word of God. I can do no other than what it says.’

“Listen, our country was not founded simply by Christian people. There were many Christian people involved in it, but even the unsaved people, even people who didn’t name the name of Christ, had been so impacted by the Word of God and the truths of God’s Word—not religion, not papism, not paganism, but by the Word of God!

“They’d been so impacted by that. Their culture had been so cleaned up by the preaching of the gospel that they were able to give attention to principles that bring about that kind of liberty.

“This goes back to the Magna Carta—which is from about the same time—and so forth, and you need to understand, folks, the thing that produced those things was God’s Word and the preaching of the grace of God. You and I have been privileged to enjoy the fruit of hundreds and hundreds of years of forefathers who stood and proclaimed these things.

“What’s happening today in our land, as we talk about immigration and so forth, is culture comes with people as they come into your midst. Do you know today, in forty short years, Catholicism’s become the largest single religious influence in America? It’s the largest single denomination on the Supreme Court. It’s the largest single denomination in the U.S. Congress.

“Most of you, the people you listen to on the radio and think are great political commentators are Roman Catholics. The conservative movement is headed by Romanism; Jesuit-trained Romanists. The liberal movement is headed by and led by Jesuit-trained Romanists. And you’re unaware of it.

“What that means is if you went into their midst and joined them in a cause, you could join them as long as you don’t bring the Word of God with you. But when you bring the Word of God, you bring division and contention because their basis isn’t that Book!

“The greatest thing you can do for the culture you live in is preach the gospel, taking the Word of God ‘rightly divided’ and holding that message up and preaching that. I recommend you vote and be a good citizen in every way you can, but the best citizen you can be is one who preaches that Word and gets that Word out in the culture and into the neighborhood where you are.

“Our culture here in the Chicagoland area is basically Roman Catholic and Lutheran-based. They control the religious culture here. In the south, the Baptists control it and they’re just about as strong there as Catholicism is here. Now it’s a different kind of culture, but it’s still a religious culture and it’s still the legalism of religion, and the rigidity of it, and the blindness of it, frankly.

“You know, you need to remember who you are and where you come from historically. We have a great heritage as an assembly. We have a great heritage as Christians; as Bible-believing Christians.

“Luther’s situation was that more than being a religionist, he was a Bible-believer when it came to these things and it stood him apart. Now, a lot of things stood him apart that he didn’t have time to figure out. The issues he faced caused him not to look more carefully at some of the important matters that we who have stood on his shoulders have looked at along the line.

“But you and I need to remember that admonition in Col. 2:8: ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.’

“There’s a war out there, folks. There’s a spiritual battle you and I face that’s no less real than in the day Luther lived, or the day of our forefathers.

“In fact, much of what the real enemy is today is the same they faced—religious tyranny that seeks to take away the Word of God and chain it to a pulpit or college classroom lectern, leaving the simple man, lady or child of God out in the pew without God’s Word and, for peace, looking to religion.”