Sermon for October 26, 2025 (Revelation 14:6-7) by Rev. David Domanski
Revelation 14:6–7. That’s the historic Epistle for the Reformation of the Church. Says St. John, “I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people.”
Just about every Lutheran before the last century believed that the angel or the messenger referred to in Revelation 14 is none other than the blessed reformer Martin Luther—not that it can be applied to him, but that it is, in fact, a singular and direct reference to the man himself. Here is what Johann Bugenhagen preached at Luther’s funeral in 1546: “This angel who says, ‘Fear God and give him the honor,’ was Dr. Martin Luther. And what is written here, ‘Fear God and give him the honor,’ are the two parts of Dr. Martin Luther’s doctrine, the Law and the Gospel.”
And C. F. W. Walther preached in a sermon just 180 years ago: “These words from the Revelation of St. John are, as you have already learned on other occasions, a prophecy of the Reformation of the church established by God through Luther three hundred years ago. The angel, the one sent by God, who flew through the midst of heaven is Luther, and the eternal Gospel that he preached is Luther’s doctrine” (“Reformation Sermon on Revelation 14.6–12 (1845),” Treasury of C. F. W. Walther, tr. Joel R. Baseley, vol. 4 [Dearborn, MI: Mark V Publications, 2008], 112).
Here’s something interesting. Sermons and commentaries from the last one hundred years don’t believe that Revelation 14 specifically refers to Martin Luther. That may be the reason that many Lutheran churches no longer use Revelation 14 on the Festival of the Reformation. It’s not as persuasive to them, and, after all, Romans 3 does, in fact, capture the theology of the Reformation in a beautiful way.
However, this change is probably not due to us having a better understanding of the verse—there is no new data or insight. Rather, it is that Bugenhagen and Walther, and Lutherans in those days didn’t consider it silly or strange to say that an event as momentous as the Reformation could have been prophesied in the Scriptures. Especially Lutherans at the time of Luther actually believed that Luther, by the power of the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, had set them free from bondage … And that is no small thing.
Walther puts it this way: “Before [Luther’s day], nearly a thousand years of spiritual darkness had settled over all of Christianity. . . . The light of the pure Gospel was lost nearly everywhere. . . . The Book of Books, . . . the Holy Scriptures, lay in the dust, right in the midst of Christianity. . . . All of Christianity was under the yoke of slavery. . . . The anti-Christ, foretold in Scripture, the Pope in Rome, ruled on his throne of Satan. . . . Christianity languished in fearful despair and anxiety. Thousands had, in their previous predicament of sin, cried out in vain, ‘What must we do to be saved?’ But there was no answer” (Walther, 110–11).
It was really bad. Worse even than war. Worse than food shortage. Worse than nakedness. Our fathers in the faith recognized that it could not get worse, more desperate in this life, than when a person does not know, cannot find, the gracious God revealed at last in the Good News of Jesus that Luther discovered in the Scriptures and proclaimed so clearly.
For Luther, the whole anti-Christian system of infused grace, conditional penance, mitigated forgiveness, and mystical and philosophical gunk that confused the Church could not satisfy his yearning to know that God was his friend and not his enemy. The Roman Catholic system at the time was well arranged to raise money, but not to deliver a clean conscience to a person from under the burden of the flesh.
Therefore, God blessed Luther with an especially penetrating desire to understand the Bible, the heavenly message, and there, by God’s grace, Luther found relief at last. Christ is his Savior from sin. God the Father declares him righteous in love. And Christ is your Savior too. His death on the cross has taken away your sin, given you eternal life, despite your sin, entirely apart from any works of yours. No credit belongs to us poor sinners, but all glory for our salvation and our confidence belongs to God alone. That was Luther’s preaching.
And so it’s really not a stretch to conclude, as many Christians have, that Luther was the angel, the messenger, who preached to the entire earth—to “every nation and tribe and language and people.” Today, we give thanks to God specifically for Martin Luther and his teaching which reformed the Lord’s Church, of which we are members.
We thank God for Martin Luther and the for the doctrine he proclaimed with such clarity in his day and ours. Whether he is the angel in these verses may be up for debate, but we can’t overstate the importance of the Reformation; after our Lord’s life and death and resurrection, and after the courageous work of the apostles, the most important event in Church history is the Reformation. We do well to remember this with thanksgiving to God. Amen.