Some five hundred years ago, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his list of 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. It was these “theses” or principles, of course, that triggered the Protestant Reformation, and in so doing changed the history of the modern world.
Most of Luther’s theses had to do with his rejection of the practice of selling “indulgencies” in the Catholic Church of his time – a means of raising money for the church which claimed that people might pay to have the souls of loved ones or others released from “purgatory.” Although this may seem like ancient history to most of us in the modern world, and most of us may not know what a single one of Luther’s 95 theses was, there are some timeless lessons to be found there.
In his very first thesis – which formed the basis of those that followed – Luther (citing Matthew 4:17) wrote: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said, ‘Repent’, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.” This statement was a remarkable one for its time. The Vulgate – the Latin version of the Bible used by the Catholic Church – translated the command to repent in Matthew 4:17 with the words paenitentiam agite, meaning “Go, and do penance.” But Luther found that in the Greek text of the New Testament the word for repentance used by the New Testament writers was metanoia, which has nothing to do with penance and means to change one’s heart and mind – to be changed or converted.
This deeper and more accurate understanding of the concept of repentance had a direct impact on Luther’s first thesis, for we obviously cannot constantly be doing penance throughout our whole lives; but as Luther stated, our lives as believers should be ones of ongoing repentance in the sense of continual change and ongoing conversion.
The truth that Luther had learned was that all of the Christian life is repentance. Certainly, the Bible speaks of a primary repentance when we first turn to God from our own sinfulness (Acts 2:38, 11:18), and we might call that “Repentance with a capital R.” But the Scriptures also show that our initial Repentance is followed by an ongoing repentance (with a small “r”) that is the continual mindset of the Christian. This does not mean constantly dwelling on our mistakes and failures, but continually and immediately repenting when we do find we have come short of God’s way.
We see this ongoing or additional repentance throughout the Bible. We see it frequently, for example, in the psalms of David where he expresses repentance on many occasions. We see it in the New Testament in scriptures such as Revelation 2:5 which commands members of the church to repent of errors into which they have fallen, and in 1 John 1:8-9 which tells us that: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
This is the ongoing reality that the apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote: “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him” (Colossians 2:16). Just as we begin our Christian lives with repentance and faith (Acts 2:38), so Paul says, we must continue – in repentance and faith.
We know that it is the Spirit of God that leads us to initial repentance (Romans 2:4), and as his Spirit continues to live in us (1 Corinthians 3:16) we are continually guided to repentance from ongoing mistakes and sins. The Scriptures are clear that this ongoing repentance is not done to try to earn salvation, but as a natural result of salvation occurring in our lives and our desire to become more and more like God. In other words, we are forgiven our sins through the occurrence of Repentance at the beginning of our Christian lives – but we continue to ask God to forgive us and spare us from the consequences of our sins after that point. Every small “repentance” reaffirms our original “Repentance.”
In reclaiming the concept of ongoing repentance Luther discovered something that every Christian must discover and act on also: that true repentance is not just an inaugural event in our Christian lives, it is also the very basis of our life in Christ from that time forward.
The concept of ongoing lifelong repentance is not a message that is commonly heard in many churches, but it is a message that we need to nail firmly to the doors of our hearts and minds.
Jesus was not the only messianic figure to appear in ancient Palestine. The Jewish people of the first century were waiting for a messiah who would rise up to free them from Roman rule – and a number of seeming messiahs did appear (Acts 5:37). Two of the most important of these supposed messiahs were Simon bar Giora and Simeon bar Kosevah. You may not have heard of these individuals, but for many they were of life and death importance in their day, and their stories carry a message we can all learn from.
Simon bar Giora (died AD 70/71) was probably born during the later life of Jesus or only a few years after Jesus’s death. He was one of the many patriot leaders who emerged in Judea as a result of Roman oppression and misrule, and he eventually rose to prominence as the head of one of the major Judean factions during the First Jewish-Roman War. These patriot leaders gathered large followings and attacked both the Romans and those seen as Roman sympathizers. They appear to have been motivated by religious as well as political concerns and Simon apparently proclaimed liberty for slaves and the oppressed, very likely following Isaiah’s message (Isaiah 61:1) of the Lord’s Anointed who would bring good tidings to the humble and proclaim liberty to the captives – just as Jesus had done (Luke 4:18). But while Jesus did not claim to go beyond this point at his first coming, Simon embraced the following words of the prophecy which were that the anointed would also “proclaim … the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:2).
Simon was a physically powerful man, and his victories against the Romans exhibited good leadership and strategic thinking as well. Even the Jewish historian and Roman collaborator Josephus – who clearly hated Simon – was forced to admit that the leader “was regarded with reverence and awe, and such was the esteem in which he was held by all under his command, that each man was prepared even to take his own life had he given the order.” In fact, Simon was acclaimed by the people as their messianic savior, yet when the tide of war turned and the Romans eventually defeated Simon, he was taken to Rome and executed there. In Judea, in the wake of the brutal Roman victory and resulting destruction of the Jewish temple in AD 70, Simon was soon forgotten.
Simeon bar Kosevah – also called bar Kochba – (died AD 135) achieved even greater fame with the Jewish people, convincing them of his anointed status at the time of the Second Jewish-Roman War. This second Jewish rebellion took place sixty years after the first and lasted approximately three years. During that time Bar Kosevah tried to revive the Hebrew language (by then largely replaced by Aramaic and Greek) and to make Hebrew the official language of the Jews as part of his messianic ideology. Although he was widely accepted by many Jews as the messiah who would free them from Roman misrule (he was even said to be the messiah by Akiva, the most famous rabbi of the time), Bar Kosevah also made many enemies. He did not unify the people, and according to the early Christian writer Eusebius, he executed many Christians for their refusal to fight against the Romans.
Bar Kosevah was also not a great military strategist or leader and despite many early victories achieved with an army of over 200,000, his downfall to the Romans was inevitable. After his defeat and death, most Jews soon forgot his messianic status and later Rabbis changed his name – calling him “Bar Koziba,” meaning “Son of the Lie.”
After the disastrous Second Jewish-Roman War, messianic hopes and claims diminished, but when the Jewish Talmud was composed, it made several predictions for the arrival of the messiah, including the year 440 (Sanhedrin 97b) and 471 (Avodah Zarah 9b). Around this time a Jew named Moses of Crete claimed that he was the one the Talmud had predicted. Promising that, like his biblical namesake, he would lead his followers through the water and back to the Promised Land, Moses convinced many of his fellow Jews to leave behind their belongings and march directly into the sea. Moses himself disappeared, but many of his followers drowned. He too was soon forgotten.
But these and other claimed messiahs all teach us something important about the Christian faith. While the death and resurrection of Jesus is often disparaged by cynics and disbelievers as just another messiah story, perpetrated by those who did not want to give up their messianic hopes, it is clearly different. Despite the expectations and whipped up emotions of the followers of the many supposed messiahs, not a single one was believed to have been raised from the dead. The followers of each of these pseudo- messiahs simply accepted their leader had been killed, and their movements disappeared almost overnight. This was not so, of course, with the early Christians who, had they not believed that Jesus had been resurrected, would have simply done the same as the followers of every messianic figure before and after him, and given up.
That the early Christians did not give up their hopes is obviously based on the great many individuals the New Testament tells us were witnesses to the resurrection. As N. T. Wright has written: “We are forced to … account for the fact that a group of first-century Jews, who had cherished messianic hopes and centered them on Jesus of Nazareth, claimed after his death that he really was the Messiah despite the crushing evidence to the contrary” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 562). The followers of no other messiah claimed anything like that. The good news of Christianity is that Christianity is not just another messiah story.
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