(please read these Reformation articles in numbered order)
Every generation tends to think they know a little more than their parents.
There are exceptions, such as the pioneer days of American history, when we had a package of information, of values, that we passed on to the next generation intact.
The next generation knew where they were, where they stood, and what was important.
And they picked it up, and there was a consistency.
Then we started thinking, “We can do better than that. We’ve got to move ahead. We’ve arrived.”
So every generation thinks they’ve arrived—better than the previous.
And in a few advances in technology, in industry, in medicine, that may be true.
But man does not keep getting better as we wish.
And the same phenomenon happens in the church eras.
God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, and then a few others.
And then it starts happening.
The church leaders (they weren’t called church then), the religious leaders can’t resist adding a few more rules of their own to what God had said, and then a few more.
After awhile the people become weary of the all the rules (which don’t actually speak to their hearts) and drift away from God.
The Children of Israel turn away from God, and God sends bad stuff, and they turn back to God, and then they have revival.
Other times they discover something that has been covered up.
Josiah finds God’s Book in the ruins, and they have a revival.
This is repeated and repeated and repeated.
And by the time Jesus comes along, it is out of sight, out of control ridiculous.
Jesus blasts the religious leaders of the day, and they hate Him, and they kill him.
And as soon as Jesus is gone visibly, His followers do the same thing, and face the same fate.
Fast forward.
Anytime in these two thousand years since, when anyone stuck to the real message of God in the Bible, they were hated, and often eliminated.
The most dramatic time for this to play out was five hundred years ago with the Reformation.
People were killed left and right, by the church, for getting the Bible into the hands of the people.
Martin Luther was the exception (escaping the stake burning), because the printing press got the Message—the Bible—to everyone, and the church couldn’t stop it.
Praise the Lord—people read the Bible for themselves, and the world was changed ever since ! ! ! ! !
Then what?
History starts over, doing what it does best—repeating itself.
Human nature is irresistible, and opportunity for power—in the church—grows again.
The Catholic Church gave up only as much power as they had to give up, to prevent violent revolution.
The new church had found the real message of salvation by grace through faith alone.
But they didn’t shed all the trappings that got the old church in trouble.
Luther himself didn’t want to start a new church—just fix the old one.
That wasn’t going to happen, and so to this day the Catholic Church has held on to salvation by Jesus PLUS . . . (a bunch of unbiblical garbage).
And the very church that uses Luther’s namesake (to his chagrin from the grave), and others, have created systems of control over their people that qualify for severe warnings from the Bible.
And so, REFORMATION IS REQUIRED AGAIN.