Martin Luther lived through a series of pivotal historic movements, and he charted a course that saw him leave his own indelible and prophetic mark, that being the Protestant Reformation, which he is considered to have fathered. Abhorred by the selling of indulgences, Martin Luther begins his attack on the church with a series of influential writings, which leads to his excommunication. But the Reformation could not be stopped.

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Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

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Part 25: Martin Luther

At a time when priests, cardinals, bishops, and other clerics were living in open sin and rebellion against their own Catholic laws, such as that of celibacy—and countless Scriptural precepts besides—certain clerics who aspired to something more pious were aggrieved enough to act upon their strong convictions. One such cleric was Martin Luther, a local preacher and respected university professor of theology, who dared to challenge the corrupt establishment. He lived in a time when Catholic men bought their ecclesiastical office—a practice called simony; when popes flaunted and openly supported illegitimate children; when convents and monasteries were leisure dens, over which monarchs and Catholic noblemen appointed their unqualified sons and daughters as abbots and abbesses. But author James Reston, Jr. in his book, Luther’s Fortress, also states that:

“The period of 1483 to 1546, Luther’s lifespan, was an era of giants: Henry VIII in England; Francis I in France; Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor presiding over most of Europe; the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VIII in Rome; and Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople. It was a time of conflict between Charles V and Francis I in Italy, the sack of Rome in 1527 by Protestant forces from Germany, and the siege of Vienna by Suleyman in 1529 and 1532, when the Ottoman sultan threatened to spread the dominion of Islam all the way to the Rhine River. It was the time of Christopher Columbus and the opening of the New World, of Vasco da Gama and the opening to India, and of the Renaissance with its luminaries: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Albrecht Dürer, and Machiavelli.”

It was also the time of Israelite slavery and oppression at the hands of Hamite Africans and Gentile Portuguese and Spanish explorers, who were vested with authority by the Roman papacy. Martin Luther lived through all of these moments, and would himself add a memorable page to the annals of history. Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany in 1483. His father, a Saxon, was himself a man of peasant stock who earned his living as a miner but later owned several foundries, or copper smelters. Luther’s parents were austere in the extreme, a fact he complained of in his later years. He was often punished severely as a child, which left him in states of depression and anxiety. Despite a slow academic start, in that he was caned excessively for not preparing his Latin lessons correctly, Luther later aspired to become a lawyer, at the urging of his father.

Those plans changed in 1505, however, when, at nearly twenty-two years of age, he was struck by a bolt of lightning while walking toward a village in a thunderstorm. He had been knocked to the ground, and in terror he cried out to the Catholic patroness of miners and protector from storms, an apocryphal woman known as St. Anne—this was a holdover from Greek mythology and ancient pagan religions that appointed a deity over agriculture, another over the weather, and different deities over various aspects of nature and life in general. Well, St. Anne was supposed to protect miners, mining being the business Martin Luther was born into. This deeply rooted superstition compelled him to beg the supposed saint—believed to be the mother of Mary—to save him from death, a favor he would return by becoming a monk. Seeing he was still alive after two weeks, Luther, to his parents’ regret—and somewhat to his own—kept his word by selling many of his books and walking into an Augustinian monastery at Erfurt to become a monk.

By his own admission, Luther was no common monk either. “I kept the rule so strictly,” he said, years after the experience, “that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his sheer monkery, it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.” A life of austerity, shaped through days of fasting and sleeping in the freezing cold without the protection of a blanket, along with many acts of penance, was an outflow of the misery Luther suffered while he lived as a monk. During one of his confessions, he was told to love the Creator, to which he replied in a burst of emotion, he did not love him. In fact, he hated him.

It was not until he came across a Latin Vulgate translation of the bible that Luther began to experience a change of heart. In his day, the Scriptures were not readily available to the masses—not even to monks—as Drs. Paul Maier, Joel Biermann, and Ken Schurb, explain:

“He had heard readings from the bible before but never realized they all even came from the same book. Because in those days the bible was regarded as a very dark and obscure document which only the clergy could properly interpret.
“Now remember, Luther is born right at the advent of the printing press’ discovery, but it was still in its infancy and books were still rare. If you had a book it meant somebody had to hand copy that book. And so bibles, they were very expensive because you had to copy every single line of every single bible by hand, but in Luther’s time growing up, there were bibles that were very rarely found.
“Luther was very much aware, as were all Christians at the time, that the church said, ‘Now, you need our help in order to be able to understand this. You need guidance, expert guidance to interpret this very myster...