Wittenberg Town Church (Inside #1)

Hi, I’m Pastor Lutzer. Many of us are traveling throughout Germany looking at very important sites. Today we happen to be in the Town Church of Wittenberg. There are two huge churches here in Wittenberg. This is not the church where the 95 Theses were placed, but it’s where the Gospel was preached in German, and that’s why it’s so important for us to understand the implications of this Protestant church.

Now, there are many paintings in this church done by Cranach. He was a great painter, and isn’t it amazing that after 500 years, we can still interpret these paintings? I love this one because it really illustrates the Reformation. If you look at it carefully, you’ll notice that the vineyard is divided into two parts. To the left, we have the Catholics. And what are they doing? They are messing up the vineyard. If you look carefully, they are picking up stones and throwing them, and they are also in the midst of weeds, and they’re allowing the weeds to grow. And sometimes they are taking out the wheat and just simply allowing the weeds to grow. And you’ll notice that, in order to illustrate this, here is the Pope, and he is being confronted by Christ. He tries to give Christ money, but of course, Christ doesn’t accept it.

But now let’s look at the other side of this picture. What you have is Martin Luther and his associates. And what are they doing? They are weeding the garden. The reason I like this picture so much is because it illustrates what the Reformation was really about. It’s not as if the Catholic Church did not have truth. They had a lot of truth. They believed in the deity of Christ and other doctrines of the resurrection. They even believed that Christ died for our sins. But how you got in on those benefits, that was another question.

So what were the Reformers doing? The Reformers were weeding the garden, and many of them are pictured here. We don’t need to know all of their identities in order to know that the Reformation took a lot of weeds out of the garden of the Lord and allowed the plants to grow. And of course, that plant is the Gospel of Jesus Christ by faith given to those who believe even today.

This picture speaks volumes. Thanks so much for joining us today directly from Wittenberg, Germany, God bless you.