I recently came across this beautiful passage where Martin Luther remarks on Christ and His bride, the Church:
“Here this rich and divine bridegroom Christ marries this poor, wicked harlot, redeems her from all her evil, and adorns her with all His goodness. Her sins cannot now destroy her, since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up by Him. And she has that righteousness in Christ, her husband, of which she may boast as of her own and which she can confidently display alongside her sins in the fact of death and say, ‘If I have sinned, yet my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned, and all His is mine and all mine is His,” as the bride in the Song of Solomon [2:16] says, ‘My beloved is mine and I am his.’ This is what Paul means when he says in 1 Cor. 15[:57], ‘Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,’ that is, the victory over sin and death, as he also says there, ‘The sting of [22] death is sin, and the power of sin is the law’ [1 Cor.15:56]”
Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty, Trans. W. A. Lambert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 21-22.
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