It is (Re)-Written: Protestant ep 5/7

SO LITTLE TIME TO DO SO MUCH

"I am small and despised: yet do not I forget thy precepts." (Psalms 119:141)

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“Toward midnight that Sunday evening, December 7th 1941, the buzz of conversation was stilled as Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, burst in. Hitler rasped irritably at him, but saw that Dietrich was waving a paper: the British press agency Reuters had just announced that the Japanese had launched an air strike at the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Hitler joyously proclaimed, ‘The turning point!’ He bounced out of the bunker and ran through the darkness, hatless and unescorted, to show the news bulletin to Keitel and Jodl. To Walther Hewel he rejoiced: ‘Now it is impossible for us to lose the war: we now have an ally who has never been vanquished in three thousand years, and another ally,’ referring to the Italians, ‘who has constantly been vanquished but has always ended up on the right side.’” - (David Irvin, Hitler’s war pg 471) How wrong he was. America was indeed the sleeping giant. Unlimited reserves of oil and essential minerals, twice the population of Germany, extensive and fertile farmlands separated from her enemies by two massive oceans and a president itching for a fight. The US had been despised as a nation of playboys and racketeers. Well war is a racket. Addressing the nation, President Roosevelt urged his countrymen to sacrifice and give everything to the war effort, “In times of crisis, when the future is in the balance, we come to understand with full recognition and devotion what this nation is. The task that we Americans now face will test us to the uttermost. Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much”. All industries were converted to war production. Civilian goods were rationed. The whole nation was at arms with sixteen million mobilized men. A country that first had an army so small and ill-equipped that German Generals joked of arresting them rather than fighting, would in a few years quite literally destroy the Axis and emerge a superpower.

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We know that God “calleth those things which be not as though they were.” (Romans 4:17) He sees you not as you are, but as what you can become through association with Him. The war against evil now needed a champion, but from whence would God find one?

“God selected the reformers of the Church from the same class whence he had taken the apostles. He chose them from among that lower rank, which, although not the lowest, does not reach the level of the middle classes.” (D’Aubigne Hist. Of Reformation pg 50)

This as the excellent D’Aubigne states, was to demonstrate that the working was of God and not man. They were not dummies, but were simple hearted men. The enemy of souls would never see this one coming. See how God builds a man. Luther’s father, John Luther, was foremost a lover of books. He read incessantly and believed that maxim which describes the mind as a sponge meant to constantly absorb knowledge from the fountain of life. Any man who knows more, even just a little more than the average, is naturally designated as a leader by his peers. True to this, John swapped the tedious employment of mining for the work of Chieftain of his neighbors in his later years. God was preparing our champion, for now his father’s love for knowledge, and his new found position enabled young Luther access to Reuchlinists and men of letters, who quite often visited the home and tussled minds in discussions.

Furthermore, there is a powerful influence in a godly father, as not only knowledge abounded in the home, but prayer ascended from the lips of Luther the elder in the hearing of Luther the younger. A deep reverence for the divine was the result of an unbroken divine father-son pattern since a father is the first impression of God a child can have. Here we see Luther as a boy coming to the realization that God is self-sacrificing, viciously knowledgeable and unbelievably humble. His mother was covered with those graces of female humility that are the most precious forms of beauty. No quarter was given to self-aggrandizement or pride, she governed herself with honesty and mental fortitude. In anger, John may have severely punished our champion, but Margaret would come along and dress whatever unnecessary wounds festered. How we ought to strive to give such homes to future generations. How we ought to prepare them for to continue the fight. From this nothingness, despised by nobility in their expensive dresses and attires, lavish dinners and promiscuous bed chambers, from this nothingness, God would awaken a giant to shake the very throne of Rome.