The church is not supposed to be a wild game preserve, but the place where God’s people live in safety.

“She has become a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every impure spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal.”  (Revelation 18:2b)

It happens every now and again – some tourist visiting a wilderness park or game preserve gets injured or killed.  Why does that happen?  Maybe because people imagine that a wilderness preserve is kind of like a zoo – as if the animals understand that they are to be viewed and to leave the viewers alone.  Sometimes it’s because people in our modern world have just lost touch with the truth that there are still critters out there which can seriously injure or kill if you get to close – and they will if they get the chance.  Sometimes it’s because people just don’t know how dangerous wild animals can be.

Martin Luther knew that the visible church was a troubled place with regard to what was being taught.  The teaching that the sinner must produce his own righteousness in order to be at peace with God left him with no rest.  Always he asked, “Have I done the right things?  Have I done enough?”  His conscience was in agreement with the church of his day:  no he had not.  It was the light of the gospel that finally showed him that the righteousness he needed to stand before God was provided entirely by God through the perfect life and innocent death of Jesus.  Luther came to understand how true these words from Revelation 18 were in his day.  The visible church was haunted by spiritual untruths.

It still is.  False teaching creates fear.  It pecks away at the truth.  It carries all kinds of spiritual harm.  How does it get into the church?  Sometimes it springs from the fertile imagination of the human mind - pure human invention.  Some of it creeps in from the world’s popular view of religion, a kind of “pious consensus of human opinion about religious matters.  But some false teaching is the work of evil spirits.  Paul echoed the words of today’s text when he told Timothy, “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 2 Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.”  (1 Timothy 4:1-2)  Somehow, sometimes, in some way Satan finds a way to inject false teaching into the visible church through people who have lost the ability to distinguish truth and error. 

What are we to do?  We are to cling to the Word of God – all of it.  We are to grow in the Word of God by hearing it and studying it.  Here at Ascension, we stand on the Word.  We are not stiff-necked about it, but we are principled.  We strive never to be cocky about standing on the truth of God’s Word, but we are committed to that Word.    We do this because we know that only through God’s Word will we have the certainty of our faith of which Luther spoke:  “Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a thousand times. This knowledge of and confidence in God’s grace makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and with all creatures.” (LW, Vol. 35, pp. 370-31)  Come and stand with us!