# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 12 22_S103
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...liberty one hopes for everything, better times, better people; indeed, people speak of liberty as though she were the goddess of the world, and unbelievers, who believe in no God, fall down before the image of civil liberty, as before their god, from whom alone all good is thought to come.

However highly Christians may value civil liberty as a precious gift of God, it is nevertheless not the liberty which Christ has promised and brought to them. Christ says rather that his Christians would always be the oppressed and persecuted, and that every Christian must be subject to whatever authority he is under, wherever he is. The liberty in Christ can be possessed even by the poorest slave, and the freest citizen may still bear the spiritual chains of slavery from which Christ has freed his own.

Furthermore, evangelical liberty is also not a freedom from God's Word, will, and order. When someone here is admonished to do something that God's Word commands, or warned against something that God's Word forbids, one must often at once hear the words: We live here in a free country, we have come of age, we will not let ourselves be put in chains. Even those who wish to be Christians make themselves like the world, join in its deceitful trade and dealings, take part in its pleasures; they carry on vanity with it, and give this conformity to the world the splendid title of Christian liberty. In particular we see our youth in great licentiousness; scarcely are our children out of school when they mock our discipline, and no longer wish to obey anyone; they despise their parents, pastors, teachers, and masters; they already look forward to their civil coming-of-age, when they intend to shake off all discipline and order completely. And why do they do this? They think and say: We are in a free country, therefore we wish to be free and subject to no one. But this is not the liberty of Christ, but of Satan, in whose cords such would-be free persons are held captive. Ah, poor people! Poor, unhappy youth! What men leave you free to do is not therefore left free by God; the custom and liberty of the land is not the custom and liberty in the kingdom of Christ! Ah, many a one will someday cry out alas and woe over the liberty he took for himself, when for it he must lie there in the eternal bondage of death.

"If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed," says Christ. This evangelical liberty consists chiefly in three parts: 1. through faith the Christian is free from the punishment and dominion of sin; his sins are forgiven him, and he is driven and governed by the Holy Spirit, so that he need not, like an unbeliever, follow the lusts of his flesh as a slave, but can resist sin and the world and overcome them; 2. the Christian is free from the yoke of the ceremonial and civil laws of the Old Testament; 3. the Christian is free in this, that no human churchly order may be forced upon him as necessary to salvation, though he may, in turn, also voluntarily help establish and keep all sorts of human orders. In these three points consists the jewel of Christian liberty.

In today's Gospel we are led to an important part of this liberty, namely, to the freedom of Christians from the Sabbath of the Old Covenant; to this we now direct our further devotion.

Text: Luke 14:1–11.

The second part of the Gospel just read treats, my hearers, of humility. Since I spoke to you about this only recently, let me today direct our attention chiefly to the first part of our text. Here Christ heals a man with dropsy on the Sabbath day, and the scribes and Pharisees take offense at it. This calls upon us to consider once more the important doctrine of the Sabbath. I therefore now set before you:

The freedom from the Sabbath of the Old Covenant which Christians have obtained through the Gospel;

we shall consider

1. from what Christians have become free through the Gospel, and

2. from what Christians have not become free through the Gospel.

1.

The Sabbath, that is, the day of rest, or the holy observance of Saturday, the seventh day of the week, is, my hearers, no human ordinance, but a holy institution of the great God.

On the Sabbath day God had rested from the works of creation, and on that same day God had led the people of Israel out of the slavery of Egypt; this day was therefore to be the day of remembrance for both of these great works of God.

When God made known the holy Ten Commandments to the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, he also called out: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." And how this day was to be kept holy — this too God himself revealed and commanded. On the Sabbath only works of divine service were to be performed: God-hallowed assemblies were to be held, sacrifices offered, prayers made, God's Word preached, read, and heard; by God's strict command, on this day no one else was permitted to do any work — not the manservant, nor the maidservant, nor the cattle, nor a stranger, if he sojourned as a guest in the land of Canaan. By God's strict commandment no fire was to be kindled for cooking food, no burden carried, no journey undertaken — in short, nothing was to be done that could disturb a complete bodily rest. And all this was so strictly commanded that whoever did even the slightest work, his soul was to be cut off from the people of God, and he was to suffer death. In the Fourth Book of Moses, chapter 15, we are told: Once a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day; the offender was at once brought before the whole congregation; then Moses inquired of the LORD for counsel, and the LORD said: "He shall surely die; the whole congregation shall stone him outside the camp." Then the whole congregation led him out, and stoned him, so that he died.

However holy and inviolable the Sabbath day had to be for the people of God in the time of the Old Covenant, it was nevertheless by no means instituted by God for all time. According to God's will, the whole Old Testament, with its external, ecclesiastical, and civil laws and institutions, was by no means to remain forever, but was to serve solely as a preparation and provision for the appearing of the Savior of the world. Most of the Jews, to be sure, were so blind that they thought they should keep the external ordinances of God in order thereby to become righteous and blessed. But God's intention was quite different. God bound all the children of Israel, through strict civil laws, into one people separated from all the heathen, who were not to mix with any other, so that in due time the truth of his promise might be made manifest, that Christ, according to the flesh, truly descended from Abraham. God laid upon the Israelites a heavy yoke of external laws, in order to test and exercise their obedience, to keep them in outward discipline and order, and to awaken in them a longing for the liberty of the times of the Messiah. God gave the Jewish people all sorts of churchly commandments concerning holy places, holy acts, holy buildings, and holy times, which were meant to be nothing other than pictures and types pointing to the time in which the promised Christ would fulfill all things. Thus Jerusalem, with its temple, to which all Jews had to hold fast, was a type of the one, true Christian Church; the commanded bloody sacrifices were types of the one sacrifice which Christ offered on the cross at Golgotha; the institution of the high priest with his functions was a type of Christ, the true High Priest, who entered by his own blood into the interior of the veil, into the Most Holy Place of heaven, and obtained an eternal redemption. The commanded burning of incense was a type of the gift and grace of prayer especially given to Christians in the New Testament; the outward cleansing was a type of the inward, and bodily fasting a type of spiritual abstinence. To this also belongs the institution of holy times, such as the new moons, the great Day of Atonement, and the Sabbath. The Sabbath was a type of the Sabbath, or rest, of Christ at the end of his work of redemption in his grave, and a type of the constant Sabbath which Christ wished to establish even here in the hearts of his believers, until he brings them to the eternal Sabbath in heaven.

With the appearing of Christ, therefore, the whole outward framework of the Old Testament has reached its end. The civil law of the...