“This World, With Devils Filled”: Luther’s Answer And Ours
A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on Reformation Sunday, October 27, 1974
Text: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God . . . ” Ephesians 2:8
Readings: Joshua 1:1–9; Ephesians 2:1–10; John 16:26–33
Seen from forty thousand feet this is a fair and beautiful world. The other day I flew in from the west coast over a pure and sparkling desert, then the folding, blue ranges of the Rockies with their misty turrets, then the quilted plains soaking up the riches of the autumn sun, till leveling down slowly over the flaming tints of New England. Even at five thousand feet New York itself is a dream city on such a day, and rises to meet you as a tapestry of streets and parks and bridges, as a glittering jewel in its silver setting of rivers and ocean. This is when you really want to shout: “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”
Halfway across the continent the air traveler who can’t spend all his time looking out of the window consumes the last unnecessary calories on his tray (I never knew what calories tasted like until I met airline food) folds up his table, and picks up the morning paper. In a few minutes it’s a very different world he is seeing. Somewhere up in the Maritimes a storm has struck and pictures show families hopelessly digging out their belongings from the wreckage. In the Bronx a young woman has been found murdered in her apartment. School children in Boston and Brooklyn are scratching and stoning each other because some have black skins and others white. A picture of a mother and daughter from West Africa in the last stages of starvation cries out against the food that has already been wasted on this plane and calls out to the great breadbasket that stretches endlessly below us. He turns the pages. Human beings have been torn to pieces in Ireland in the name of religion. The Holy Land is the target of warring powers. Somewhere diplomats are conferring so that there may be some pause in the race for weapons that can destroy every living creature on this planet. Then page after page reports the suspicion and the cynicism with which we have come to regard the political scene. It’s a different world the traveller sees when he looks again through that little window.
“And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us”
wrote Martin Luther, and we now know what he means. Fifty years ago these words would have had a curiously antique flavor. “With devils filled?” That’s the way they used to talk, poor dears; we know better now: devils went out with Santa Claus: there’s nothing wrong with the world that better education and a little Christian optimism won’t be able to cure. Now we feel closer to Luther than to the blinkered idealists of the recent past. And to be closer to Luther is to be closer to the Bible. For the Bible tells us that this world, created to declare the glory of God, is a fallen world, and that humankind, made in the image of the Creator, has been enslaved by demonic powers. This doesn’t mean that the world is bound for hell and that every human being is some kind of monster in disguise. But it does mean that there is a mystery of iniquity abroad that defies the simple solutions of human ingenuity. There is such a thing as sin which, as Karl Menninger has recently pointed out, has been strangely neglected by the modern Church.
Has there ever been a time since perhaps when Luther lived when ordinary men and women have been more baffled and dismayed by the virulence of human passions, the sheer irrationality of the evil things human beings can do to one another? Particularly in this country where ideals have glowed so brightly and hopes have been highest we are going through a period of shock, anxiety, and near-despair. We know exactly what Luther meant when we sang of “this world with devils filled” that “threaten to undo us.” The trouble in the Church has been that we have wanted to hear the Good News without first taking a hard look at the bad. We have sometimes spoken as if our redemption was little more than a helping hand to humanity in its rise to perfection, and that the Son of God didn’t really need to die to save us from our sins. It’s time to see again in all its grim, demonic depths, the predicament of the human race, the fearful question to which the Gospel gives its answer. Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Paul, and Jesus himself would echo in this spiritual struggle the old military maxim: “Never underestimate the power of the enemy.”
We need to be saved. Let’s hear that word again with its full Biblical weight, without any undertones of sticky pietism. We need to be saved from evil in all its forms—individual, social, and cosmic. That’s why Jesus taught us to pray: “Deliver us from evil.” He believed the evil to be in us, in the world, and in an invisible sphere of the demonic. (The correct reading of the prayer is probably: “Deliver us from the Evil One.”) The salvation the Bible speaks of is not some kind of religious emotion. It is health, total health of body, mind, and spirit, for the individual and for the whole human family. The New Testament declares again and again that it is for this that we are being saved as members of Christ’s Church. Being saved is being rescued, not only from the hell we make for ourselves, as for the colony of heaven God is establishing on earth.
It was because Luther found the answer to this question of salvation, first for himself and then for the Church and the world of his day, that he was able to sing: “Though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, We will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.” He found the answer in the Bible, where it lies still today. Nowhere is it more clearly expressed than in the seven monosyllables of our text: “By grace are you saved through faith.” They summarize the whole content of the Bible. They express the dynamic of the Gospel which keeps springing to life again whenever the Church gets drowsy and over-organized. They offer to you and me today the only real antidote to anxiety and confusion. In them we hear the truth of the Gospel through which we can face the world, the flesh, and the devil unafraid. “We will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.”
“By grace. . . . ” The view from forty thousand feet was not all an illusion. There is a glory in the natural world and in the works of man that reflects the joy of the Creator who still sees the universe he has made “and behold, it is very good,” and also the dignity and aspiration of human beings created in his image. Neither Luther nor Calvin was blind to the beauty of the natural world, and each of them knew how to enjoy human company over, respectively, a stein of beer and a glass of wine. They were not the grim, sour-faced ecclesiastics of popular imagination. If they knew what it was to see a world filled with devils, they also knew how to see it filled with angels. The point is that, like the Bible, they took both the angel and devil seriously. That is: they saw the terrible force of sin in human nature but believed in the grace that can lift us up to our angelic destiny. In a demonic world they chose to live by grace.
Does that mean simply that the Gospel invites us to look on the bright side and throw our weight on the side of goodness in the human struggle? Can this Christian answer to our fears be adequately described in the words of Studdert Kennedy as “backing the scent of life against its stink”? There’s truth enough in that to hold on to, but the word “grace” in Scripture and the life of the Church carries a profounder meaning. Sure, it’s grace when we see this city sparkling in beauty on a fresh Fall morning; it’s grace when a little boy disarms your anger with an absurd remark; it’s grace when a stricken family gives thanks and takes courage in a memorial service here; it’s grace when we hear the happy stories that never appear in the morning paper. But the Bible tells us that these signs of grace flow from the great rescuing love of God, a love that shines through even the bloodiest pages of the Bible story, a love that comes to a climax with the coming of Jesus Christ. “We beheld his glory,” says the apostle, “full of grace and truth.”
When we use the words “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” we are not only thinking of the perfection of his life, the blazing signal that God has not given up on the Adam of his design. We are not only thinking of the way in which the love of God reached out through him to the lonely,