Status Updates From The Captivation Of The Will...

The God whom we discover ourselves is always a hidden God, literally a God not preached. The climax of this hiddenness is that God robs us of all our claims to work salvation by ourselves. Ultimately no preachers can then remain the subjects of their own fantasies. The only way to overcome the problem of the hiddenness of God not preached is by God preached.

Apart from Jesus we are on our own. Luther could even say that apart from Jesus God is indistinguishable from the devil. And apart from Jesus we have to attempt to redo God more to our liking or do what most moderns do, dispense with him altogether. But the gouty foot laughs at such doctoring.

So, Luther could say that unless one has the Spirit of God one does not perceive one iota of what is in the Scriptures. One may have a grasp of the external clarity and be able to quote profusely and learnedly, and yet because there is no sense for the internal clarity, one does not understand what Scripture is about at all.