LUTHER’S INK STAIN
Some of you may know someone who has visited the WARTBURG CASTLE in Eisenach, German. The tour guide regularly points out to the black spot on one of the walls of the room which Luther occupied during his benevolently intended imprisonment. Let me share the legend connected with it is this spot. One night during this mournful solitude, when suffering from great depression, because, as he himself expresses it in a letter to Melanchthon, dated May 24, 1521, "I do see myself insensible and hardened, a slave to sloth, rarely, alas! praying--unable even to utter a groan for the Church, while my untamed flesh burns with devouring flame"--the great Reformer dreamed that Satan appeared to him with a long scroll, in which were carefully written the many sins and transgressions of which he was guilty from his birth, and which the evil one proceeded to read, mocking all the time that such a sinner as he should ever think of being called to do service for God, or even of escaping himself from hell. As the long list was being read, Luther’s terrors grew, and his agonies of soul increased. At last, however, rousing himself, he jumped up and exclaimed: "It is all true, Satan, and many more sins which I have committed in my life which are known to God only; but write at the bottom of your list, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.’" Then grasping the inkstand on his table he threw it at the devil, who fled. The memorial of the event being left in the ink-splash on the wall.
No picture can be painted too black of God’s peoples’ disobedience, backslidings, and apostasies. No human lips can sufficiently describe the heinousness of God’s peoples’ sins and transgressions. But when all the long and lengthy indictments have been read, write at the bottom of the list, the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin (Jer. 31:37; Lev. 26:44).
From a sermon by Dennis Davidson, Satan Rebuked & Man Cleansed, 2/25/2010