The Father.8

"I have said this from the beginning: there is much in your lives that I could condemn,

but I have come with another message,

given to me by the One who is the truth.

This is the message that I speak to the world."

-Jesus

"If our Lord God in this life—in das Sheisshaus *—has given us such noble gifts, what will happen in that eternal life, where everything will be perfect and delightful?" 

—Martin Luther

For those, like me, not entirely familiar with the specifics of the Reformation, Eric Metaxas, in his book Martin Luther, recounts that the moment that changed the world is not without amusing irony.  While sitting on a toilet meditating on Romans 1:17 "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith," Luther suddenly realized that he'd been angry at God for demanding a righteousness he desperately wanted but fell woefully short of in his self-abasing efforts to achieve.  More so, he realized he was part of an organized deception to convince people they could purchase that righteousness through a system that had usurped Jesus alone as mediator between God and man.

The moment was not lost on Luther nor the place where the revelation occurred. That place, to be precise, was a "Sheisshaus" - German vernacular for "shithouse, lavatory, sewer." If God would meet Luther while attending to the unsavory business of defecating, was it not a simple and profound reminder that God Himself had entered this "Sheisshaus" to redeem and resurrect its inhabitants? Compared to the glories of heaven, this life is a "Sheisshaus" filled with sin, misery, death and "shit". "For God to come into this foulest world is for Him already to come most of the way into Hell. This world is the antechamber to hell and eternal death, and unless we allow the God of life to come here, we do not allow Him to redeem us.  He cannot redeem and resurrect what is not foul and dead, but we are both." 

All mankind's monuments hailing human attempts to be "good without God, to impress God and be like Him without His help" are "far worse than excrement could ever be, for they pretend to be good and beautiful and true and holy, but in reality" hide the devil's sinister and diabolical counterfeit to the glory of God.

Metaxas expands: "The specific point here is that the infinite and omniscient and omnipotent creator God of heaven did not descend to earth on a golden cloud. He came to us through screaming pain, through the bloody agony of a maiden’s vagina, in a cattle stall filthy with and stinking of dung. This is how humans enter the world, and if God would enter the world as a human being, he must enter it that way. It was the only way to reach us where we are and as we are, and because of his love for us he did not shrink from this approach, vile and difficult as it must be. Luther saw in this the very essence of Christian theology. God reached down not halfway to meet us in our vileness but all the way down, to the foul dregs of our broken humanity. And this holy and loving God dared to touch our lifeless and rotting essence and in doing so underscored that this is the truth about us. In fact, we are not sick and in need of healing. We are dead and in need of resurrecting. We are not dusty and in need of a good dusting; we are fatally befouled with death and fatally toxic filth and require total redemption. If we do not recognize that we need eternal life from the hand of God, we remain in our sins and are eternally dead. So because God respects us, he can reach us only if we are honest about our condition." Ibid, page 123 (emphasis added)

This is the message Jesus still speaks to the world! Meditate on that today, toilet or no toilet!