Spirits, Charms and Rituals

00:00
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Anytime there’s something we must do, and our action has to be first for God to respond. Then we point away from that very core of what is the gospel message. 

00:17
Rich Rudowske
Welcome to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. I’m rich Friedowski. 

00:22
Emily Wilson
And I’m Emily Wilson. 

00:24
Rich Rudowske
We are coming up on Halloween or for you Lutherans out there, we know it’s also reformation. 

00:30
Emily Wilson
Yeah. 

00:30
Rich Rudowske
Priorities, priorities. And we had an interesting opportunity to talk with Dr. Mike Rotelwald, our executive director, on the topic of spiritual warfare and animism, which does have some connections, or at least we’re going to try to make them for Halloween. But before we get into that, we want to invite you to make sure essentially translatable is showing up in all the places. 

00:56
Emily Wilson
Yes, we really have had some awesome guests on there. They’re really great for road trips, I’ve been told. Just kind of an opportunity to engage, hear from different perspectives around the. 

01:08
Rich Rudowske
So that’s what you want to do. Give yourself a reformation treat. Subscribe to essentially translatable wherever you listen to podcasts. 

01:17
Emily Wilson
It’s true. 

01:17
Rich Rudowske
So Dr. Rotelwald is our executive director, has been on the podcast several times. I had the chance to talk with them, and he did his dissertation work related to animism. So he has some experiences about animism, his lucky socks story, for example. And we’ll find that there’s quite a bit relatable when we really stop and think about how we, even as christians, approach the world and think about things like luck, or why am I having a bad day? Or why are things not working out for me? Our minds can so easily go back to ways of thinking that are essentially animistic. And the word of God has something to say to us and to give us hope. 

01:54
Emily Wilson
Right? Yeah. Being able to have that self awareness. Right. Sometimes it’s like taking that step back and being like, okay, well, what’s actually happening? Like, is God at the center of this and just being able to know that discernment and wisdom from the Holy Spirit. 

02:11
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And know that when you experience difficulties in life, you’re not alone. You can read the scriptures and see people who are over and over again, either by their story or even in the psalms, expressing like, is God with me or not? And how do I know? Because what I’m experiencing right now doesn’t feel that way. And yet, even just having that conversation and remembering that God is present builds faith. And that’s really the connection to Bible translation then, because, as Dr. Mike will say, an accurate, beautiful and clear translation of the scripture will provide that source of faith and hope for people who otherwise are left without other ways of thinking about the world, except for how can they get in charge of the situation and get in control of the situation. So, with no further ado, our conversation with Dr. Mike Rotewald. 

03:00
Rich Rudowske
Well, it is great to welcome LBT executive director Dr. Mike Rotelwald back to the essentially translatable podcast. Good to have you with us today. And we are talking about animism. 

03:10
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Yeah, rich, it’s really a pleasure to be here with you again. And I get to talk about animism. I’m going to say, it’s not a well known word. I was talking to someone the other day and I mentioned it and they were like, I don’t know what that is. I’d never heard that particular word before. So it’s not the word itself, which is maybe interesting. It’s the meaning behind what does animism stand for? And I think it’s best understood by explaining what animism is not. So, for example, the christian understanding of the spiritual is that we have a creator God, and our creator God is a God of grace. He’s given us the gift of Jesus Christ as our salvation. That’s a free gift of salvation, and there’s nothing we must do to accomplish it. It’s ours by faith and in gratefulness. 

03:57
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Then we respond and we live our lives which appreciate what God has done for us. So in pure christian religion, then God’s actions first and our response is second. Animism is the complete opposite of that. It arises from our humans condition, and it thinks somehow that we can do something to affect behavior, affect the spiritual world, so that we get what we want. That’s an innate sense we seem to have as part of our human condition. And the spiritual and the physical are somehow linked. So if we can do something to manipulate the spiritual, we get what we want. Or if something bad happens, the spiritual is responsible for it. And so we have to appease the spiritual world. So I’ll give you an example of that. So I’m guilty of animus practice. I’ve been guilty of that. 

04:53
Dr. Mike Rodewald
When I was in 8th grade, I had a pair of socks and I played on the basketball team. And when I put on those socks, I played better basketball than when I did not put on those socks. Those socks were my lucky socks, right? And I took those socks and I did not wash them. I hid them from my mother so that the luck would not be washed out of them. I put those on before every game, and I never did crack the first team, but I had the belief that those socks helped me out someplace, that there was a spiritual component called luck, someplace that was blessing me when I wore those socks. So note my animus, practice my action. First, I put on the socks, the spiritual response gives me what I want. 

05:33
Rich Rudowske
Second, right. Okay. So, yeah, when you start to think of animism that way, then I think a lot of us could reflect and. 

05:42
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Think of, there is nobody that can say, I haven’t done something like that. 

05:45
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So we’ll talk a little bit about in traditional cultures, some of the places that you’ve worked, what does this look like, and how does this affect people’s lives? 

05:54
Dr. Mike Rodewald
In traditional cultures, perhaps animisms practice more deeply than in others, but every society on earth has animus practice inside. You can find that underneath the underlying premise. It’s simple, but the forms and rules of animus practice in specific places are countless. The basic premise in traditional practice is that the spiritual world and physical worlds are intrinsically linked. And so action in one causes action in another. 

06:20
Rich Rudowske
Okay? 

06:21
Dr. Mike Rodewald
There’s no coincidence. If something bad happens, the spiritual world must be appeased. If something good happens, you’ve made the right spiritual, you’ve done the right things, and the spiritual world is happy with that. And there’s a sense that our behavior is linked to spiritual happiness or unhappiness. Usually the spiritual world in traditional religions. And I worked in Africa for many years. And so much of what I know is traditional religion, african traditional religion, there usually is a creator or a high God. And then there are spiritual beings or ancestral spirits, each containing the ability to help or harm humans with their spiritual power, whatever spiritual power they hold. For example, in traditional korean shamanism, they claim that there’s over 18,000 spiritual beings. They are classed in 273 different spirit types. 

07:12
Dr. Mike Rodewald
For the Yoruba of Nigeria, they claim over 1700 subordinate deities to the high God, which is Olo Damari. So the forms, the belief systems are just almost countless. When you’re talking about each traditional society, what has arisen over there, what the belief system is. In addition to these kind of spirit beings that are present in the spiritual world, there’s also something called life force. And life force is kind of an ambient spiritual power of the universe. And it’s thought to be present in physical objects. For example, mountains, trees, rivers, minerals, rocks, they are all believed to have this kind of ambient spiritual power. And if you know the right way to access this spiritual power, you can get your desire met or you can get healed or whatever it happens to be. 

08:02
Dr. Mike Rodewald
So in the animist world, you’re always seeking to access power, whether from a spirit being, from the creator God, who usually is pretty far away, considered to be quite distant, or from this ambient power, which is kind of considered life force. It has many different names like that. 

08:19
Rich Rudowske
Okay, so how does somebody know the right way to access this power then? 

08:23
Dr. Mike Rodewald
That’s exactly. That’s kind of the question. You’re probably thinking, how do you access that power? So there are many ways to access that power or the belief system as such, one of the primary ways that people quickly fall into our human condition is ritual is kind of a primary way to access power. Okay, so if you know the correct sequence of actions, words, you perform them in a certain way, then it’s believed that the spiritual power must respond as you would wish or as one would wish. So there’s a downside. If you perform that ritual incorrectly, then spiritual power can actually turn on you and cause you to have great harm. So you’re kind of between this. In between, you have to do ritual. Exactly correct. 

09:08
Dr. Mike Rodewald
If you call on the name of a spiritual power that brings power to the ritual, if you do something wrong, then that spiritual power can turn up on you. So it’s only in the correct practice that a ritual actually accomplishes the purpose that you want it to do. You bind the power to do what you want to do. The success of that ritual doesn’t depend upon my moral character or whatever it happens to be. It depends upon the correct performance of the ritual. So rituals, it’s the access to power. And it does not matter if someone’s using that for good or what we might term evil. And sometimes that’s what happens, especially in things like voodoo, where spells are put on other people and the power is used in that way through ritual. 

09:53
Rich Rudowske
So then somebody’s got to be an expert to know how to do these rituals and things, right? And if it doesn’t work, then is it because it’s the expert’s fault or does it always work? 

10:05
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Yeah. Well, let me give an example. I was sitting in northern Liberia, in my town. This happened many years ago. There was a young man living next door to me. And suddenly a big crowd was rushing over to this young man’s house. And I thought, well, let me just go over, see what’s happening over there, too. We got over there, this young man was writhing on the floor, and he has foaming from the mouth. I said, what’s going on? And someone said, well, he had a charm, and this charm was to help him get a girlfriend. And it worked really well, but it had some conditions on. It had rituals that you had to maintain that power, the spiritual power in the charm. And he failed to maintain these conditions, and now the spiritual power has turned upon him. 

10:49
Dr. Mike Rodewald
So I found it very fascinating. And then someone said, we need to go see the religious specialists. They’re called Zoes in that particular community that made this charm for this young man. And someone turned to me and said, you have a motorbike. Can you take us out to see this religious specialist, Zoe? And I thought, well, this is kind of interesting. Let me go along with the observe what is happening here? I didn’t have any clue what was happening. We got on the motorbike, went out to this village. There was a man sitting in front of a hut, and as we got off the motorbike, he just held up his hand and he said in the local language, he said, stop. If the problem is fixed, you can go back. And so my friend said, let’s go back. 

11:30
Dr. Mike Rodewald
And we did not explain the question to this man or anything else, but we got back and the young man was walking around. And so from their perspective, what had happened was the power had turned on him. But the religious specialist was able to bind that power to stop him from hurting that young man anymore, which was evident. I looked at it a whole different way, actually. I don’t really understand what happened. I just got to observe what was happening on that. But that’s an example of how religious power is used, or spiritual power is used in african traditional practice. 

12:05
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And then I guess for the sake of our listeners to be clear, there’s something behind it. There’s something actually happening. It seems spiritually, as far as you. 

12:14
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Can, you know, as far as I can tell, yes. 

12:17
Rich Rudowske
Right. 

12:17
Dr. Mike Rodewald
And I have to say, from the west, I’m thinking, did he have an epileptic fic, or was it something explainable by science? I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of thought on that. I can’t explain the witch doctor or the Zoe just telling us to go back without explaining what the problem is. I’ve conjectured a lot, and I’ll find out sometime. 

12:37
Rich Rudowske
Sure. Yeah. So, thinking about the Bible and christians reading the Bible, let’s talk about how having an understanding of animism will help you better understand some of what you see in the text of scripture, what’s going on as God or the people of Israel encounter other cultures and places. 

12:54
Dr. Mike Rodewald
What I love about God’s word is it’s for all people in all cultures. And we tend to read the Bible or understand the Bible through the lens of our own culture. And so we can actually maybe miss or maybe something’s not present. But another culture will read the same text and understand it in a bit different way because they have a different worldview and the worldview of Animus. To read scripture through the Animus lens, people will perceive sometimes text differently than I would perceive that. 

13:26
Rich Rudowske
Now. 

13:26
Dr. Mike Rodewald
The end result is always the same, is God brings faith through scripture and people understand it in that way. But how people get there can be different as we read the text. I love two kings five. It’s a story of Naaman. And I think it’s a great text to illustrate how animists read a text different than I would read a text coming from the west. So I’m going to use that naaman text as an example. I’m going to give some of the highlights viewed through the animus lens. Naaman is a man of great power. He has great position and he’s had won big battles. And so from the animus lens, to do that, you have to have help from the spiritual world. But suddenly he’s got this leprosy or this skin disease, and he cannot figure out what the solution is for this. 

14:16
Dr. Mike Rodewald
All his powers have failed him. But hears about this prophet in Israel that is a great prophet. And so he’s desperate and he has the hope maybe I can get over there and find some healing with this prophet called Elisha. He actually doesn’t know the name of Elisha at that time. And so he takes off on a journey. There’s some really succinct points in there in each verse as you’re reading it through the animus lens. But I’m going to make it a little bit shorter. Just highlight a couple of verses which show animism and this God of grace that we have that’s diametrically opposed. So in two kings, 510, Elisha, the prophet tells Naaman says, go and wash in the Jordan seven times. Your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean. 

14:58
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Now the number seven was a number that was associated with Yahweh, the spiritual power of Israel. So that number is quite. Numbers can be very important in animism. But anyway, he’s given the command of what to do. So Naaman is looking at this and saying, this is the ritual I’m supposed to accomplish. I’m supposed to go seven times and wash in Jordan. But he gets mad and he says in verse eleven, I thought he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper. And you can see Naaman wants this ritual. He’s got to come out and he’s got to stand and call upon the name of his lord, not my lord, but on his God, and wave his hand over the place. 

15:40
Dr. Mike Rodewald
He wants the ritual, and that will cause the cure of the leperate. It has nothing to do with Naaman and his relationship with Yahweh or anything else. He’s just angry. He wants Elisha, the religious specialist, to perform a ritual and unlock that spiritual power to heal to him. So then he continues on in verse twelve. And Naaman makes this kind of animist spiritual confession. And he claims the powers of Syria’s rivers are superior to any power over in Israel’s river. He says, are not Abana and papar the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel? Can I not wash in them and be clean? And you remember I told you that physical, there’s this life force, or there’s usually spiritual powers attached to rivers, mountains, trees, object inanimous thought. So we can see what Naaman’s saying. 

16:34
Dr. Mike Rodewald
He’s saying, my gods in Syria are much more powerful than any God that you have down here. He’s given up. But eventually he is talked into going down into the Jordan river. And it’s amazing to me, animus see this? In the west, we call it coincidence. We don’t make the connection. But he goes down into the river and he does not wash seven times. He dips seven times. In other words, he’s blowing the ritual. And when you blow the ritual in animism, you’re directly challenging. Naaman is directly challenging this. Whatever he thinks is in this Jordan river. And he’s saying, do your worst, hurt me, whatever wants to have to be. We can see a direct challenge. And what happens? God heals him. And Naaman meets a different God. 

17:25
Dr. Mike Rodewald
He meets a God, not from all of his experience, not animism, not anything else, but something when he’s done everything wrong, 100% wrong, this should not have worked. He gets what he was after. And then I think what’s really cool is the new confession that Naaman comes out. Two kings, 515. He says, I know that there’s no God in all the earth, but in Israel. Now, Naaman didn’t just say, wow, I met a really powerful God, or I met one of the most powerful gods in the whole universe. He says there’s no other God like this in the universe. New confession, 100% change around. But it’s a God that acted different than all the others. He had met the God of grace in the waters of the Jordan River. I think that’s just a cool text. 

18:12
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Understanding it from the animus lens and seeing how powerful that Old Testament text is in a way that I could not understand before until my animus practicing friends pointed out all of these underlying meanings that they could see in what was happening, gives us a whole new appreciation of how biblical text acts in ways that sometimes we can’t even see how it works. 

18:34
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And just really that story punctuates the power of, you know, Naaman got exactly what he didn’t deserve. And then if anybody listening and trying to live in a way that’s know, I’ve done a lot of bad things, I don’t deserve anything good. This is the same God that says, yes, you don’t get what you deserve. You get my grace when you trust in Christ. 

18:58
Dr. Mike Rodewald
You’re exactly right on that powerful text in that way. 

19:01
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So this podcast is coming out around Halloween. If there was animism type of holiday in our culture, it’s the closest thing I don’t know. So what does animism look like? Not necessarily Halloween particularly, but just in the 21st century west, where do we see animism in our culture? 

19:19
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Yeah, that’s a great question. As I noted, every society has animus practice. And sometimes I think we would like to think we progress beyond all this nonsense. We don’t believe in ghosts and spirits and everything else. It’s not the case. We do. Animism is present in the United States, in Europe, any of the progressive western societies, we want to say, because it’s part of our human condition, we just naturally go to this particular affinity. Even I was reading, an atheist was talking in a book and reading and said, the problem with atheism is to do good for nothing or be good for nothing, because you always want to think if you’re good, something’s going to be happy, some spiritual being or some force is going to be happy, and you should get that kind of reward out of there. 

20:09
Dr. Mike Rodewald
One example that we have in our society is people wearing crystals. They claim they’re good for health, or they claim they’re good for mental clarity, or whatever it happens to be. What the claim is, you can find them online, you can find them everywhere else with all kinds of claims that go to it. Your action is first. Put the crystal on and spiritual power, ambient power. Life force blesses you. Sports personalities accomplish rituals before contests, especially if you watch a baseball player. Sometimes they get up. They do have a little elaborate ritual because they’re going to hit the ball better than if they don’t do that. And there’s almost a fear if I don’t do that ritual, then I’m not going to be able to play as good. It’s my basketball story. 

20:51
Dr. Mike Rodewald
In many ways it’s our human condition which causes us to do this. We can even find it within the Christian Church. An example you can find in the prosperity gospel movement. By the way, that’s huge in Africa because the prosperity gospel movement can be just another form of animus practice. The whole thought is that if you give to God, then God will give back to you. So note the action. The action is my actions. First I give to God and then God will give back to you. So God’s action is second and you’ve taken what God’s done for us and you’ve turned it all the way around and becomes animus practice in that way. We tend to like those things because it seems like we’re in control and that’s not the case. An subtle example and I’m going to use Christianity again. 

21:37
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Okay, so we can think that if I go to church every Sunday or I give a certain amount of gifts or if I following somehow following rules, that earns God’s favor in a certain kind of way. No, we do those things because we’re responding what God has already done to us. So even in the christian church we find much animist practice. I heard an example where the prayer where a woman was lamenting that her group had just prayed, not prayed hard enough, she had a prayer group and said we just didn’t pray hard enough. And that’s why God didn’t respond to our prayer. That is, again, that’s animus practice because if we just pray harder, God has to respond to us. 

22:16
Dr. Mike Rodewald
It can be very subtle at times, but again, just note that sequence is always, if we’re saying that our action has to be first and God is going to respond to our action, we’ve gotten it wrong. We’re guilty of animus practice even within the christian church. 

22:34
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, even with the simple phrase like the prayers go up and the blessings come down. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. But essentially it’s animus. I don’t know. It is. 

22:42
Dr. Mike Rodewald
It becomes, it’s in danger of slipping over into the animus. If we start to believe that it’s because we prayed that God has, that God responds. 

22:51
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So the positive way of stating it then is a christian life is a life lived in response to God’s grace. It’s always in response. The action from God happens. 

23:02
Dr. Mike Rodewald
That’s right. And our human condition fights that at all times and tries to put us over into the animus practice and even in the west. 

23:09
Rich Rudowske
So how might our blindness to animism in our culture or other cultures create barriers to the gospel? 

23:14
Dr. Mike Rodewald
When you gave me the outline on this, I thought about that quite a bit. How does our blindness to what barriers that we don’t even know, because our human condition is creating these barriers and we’re moving into animus practice. And what we need to keep, from my perspective, is anything which points away from the gospel message raises barriers to the understanding of this God of grace whose action is first. And we live our life in response to that. If we think anytime there’s something we must do, and our action has to be first for God to respond, then we point away from that very core of what is the gospel message where the church is established among animus practice, people with a lot strong animus practice, people will always understand the church through their own lens. 

24:04
Dr. Mike Rodewald
I was in a church in southern Africa during the Lord’s supper, and a group of visitors had come to celebrate in the church, and they also attended Lord’s supper. And when they filed away from communion, they went clockwise. And there was a big uproar in the church because some members of the church felt that you’re supposed to file away counterclockwise, because if you didn’t, you messed up the efficacy of Lord’s supper. You did not get the blessings that you might have thought you were supposed to get because you didn’t accomplish the ritual correctly. So people always look at the church through the lens, their own lens. And the animus lens seems to come up quite often. During the reformation, there was also much misunderstanding over the Lord’s supper. 

24:50
Dr. Mike Rodewald
The laypeople used to conspire with priests, and they would take the elements from the Lord’s supper and use them for their own purposes, which was maybe to take it home, put it under your pillow, and then you would have good health or good wealth or healing. And the practice of dipping the wafer into the wine and then giving the, distributing it straight to the person attending communion at that time was developed so that people couldn’t pocket the wafer and take it home and use it for their own particular animist practice on the way. So people see the rituals of the church through animus lens, unless they’re taught correctly and understand it according to this God of grace that we’ve been talking about. 

25:29
Rich Rudowske
Wow, that’s a big statement, because I think that there’s a lot of ritual in church which is good, but then it’s very telling that if somebody doesn’t understand, then they’re just going to think that this is just the right way to do it. And then why is there a right way? And yeah, I can see how you get sliding down the slope. 

25:48
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Then it starts sliding down the slope in animus practice. And it may be that the good intentions of the missionary, the good intentions of the pastor are there and present, but they’re not being perceived in the same way as the good intentions are because of our human condition. And it turns into animus practice. 

26:05
Rich Rudowske
So how does a good translation of scripture impact animism? 

26:12
Dr. Mike Rodewald
Well, an accurate, beautiful, clear translation of scripture that just challenges animus practice, it cuts kind of to the chase. The opposite of scripture, which is not accurate or not clear, or it’s in a language that’s not fully understood, is ripe for animus practice because it all comes about performing it. There’s kind of a mysticism to unclear or foreign scripture texts. And so you have animist approach with, we’re reading it, we don’t understand it, but we have to read it. Or it can be. Even in some of the african independent churches developed rituals where they cut text out of bibles even they can’t understand, but they know which text talks about healing. 

26:50
Dr. Mike Rodewald
And then they’ll eat the particular text of the Bible, not understanding what it is, but thinking the power is in the scrap of paper that has come and that they have eaten that and brought that power into themselves through the eating. That’s exactly what happens when people don’t understand the power of God’s word. When they see God’s word as being something mystical or something that has power or ambient power that’s not in the understanding. But when scripture is read understood, then the story of God’s salvation just cuts through loud and clear. Just as Naaman discovered the God of grace, then in scripture, that’s God’s message to us. The story of God’s salvation comes through loud and clear. And we understand who God is. God is our God of grace. He gives us Jesus Christ. 

27:37
Dr. Mike Rodewald
His action is that we have our salvation through Jesus and we live our life. Then in response to the gift of grace that God has given to us. There’s nothing we must do to earn that gift. And we respond in thankfulness that comes through in scripture all the time. Clear, accurate, natural. When people are reading scripture, it challenges animism every way along the line. Just as we talked about that text with Naaman, it challenges animism. 

28:02
Rich Rudowske
All right, well, thank you very much for your time with us today to talk about animism, really eye opening to see how prolific this could be in society, how just keeping that straight, that God’s action is first at our response as follows. Just that one hand seems like a minor shift, and on the other hand, it is the shift. It’s the shift, yeah. And privilege to be involved in Bible translation work to try to help clarify that message for others and remind ourselves as well. So thanks for being with us today. I appreciate it. 

28:33
Dr. Mike Rodewald
That’s an honor to be with you. And thanks for letting me talk a little bit about animism and its effects on our faith. 

28:44
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So when Dr. Mike and I talked after the recording was off, we talked a little bit more about how really the human experience is. Just to say things don’t seem to be going my way and it must be my fault, which is not a bad thing in itself, to have some self awareness and recognize that what we do has consequences, but it must be my fault. And there is some force or spiritual thing out there that I could get on my side and make this better if I just knew how to do it and talk about karma and luck and I’m just not living right or whatever, and that’s just part of the human experience. And again, God’s word speaks to that and says there’s a God that’s on our side and loves us deeply. 

29:32
Rich Rudowske
And in spite of what we’re experiencing in the world, we have a rock solid faith that we can lean into. 

29:37
Emily Wilson
Right? Yeah. So that is interesting because I think about like in Ephesians six and talking about spiritual warfare and yeah, those spiritual forces are constantly like, it’s a barrage and trying to turn us away. But at the same time, same author, Paul says in Romans eight that there’s nothing that can separate us from God. So that idea of even though all of these things are trying to attack us and trying to get us to lose faith, God is continually faithful and doesn’t mean that everything’s going to go just right in our lives because it’s the already but not yet. We still live in that broken world, but being able to say God paid the price, I don’t have to worry about paying a price. 

30:31
Emily Wilson
I don’t have to worry about this special object or this special routine, or is it all going to come back to me because I did this, but rather God doing it all for us. 

30:43
Rich Rudowske
That’s right. And Satan is really the great exploiter. He’ll find that chink in the armor to exploit. Whether if loneliness is a weak point for you, he’ll exploit it. If money problems is a weak point for you, he’ll exploit it. You name it, he’ll exploit it. And what that ends up doing is reminding us that no amount of our own self righteousness can stand against all of that. Satan will find the weak point and exploit it. And that just drives us back to Christ, not our own righteousness, which is the point of the reformation, ultimately, to recognize that we walk by faith alone through what Christ has done for us, and only out of response to that we lead lives of good works. If we can say that in thanksgiving to God, our own righteousness isn’t the point, ultimately, that’s just a response. 

31:33
Rich Rudowske
Ultimately, our walk of faith is in Christ, and he’s the one that protects and guards us against the exploitation of the devil. 

31:41
Emily Wilson
Right? So as you are celebrating Reformation Day, thinking about how we are able to grow in our relationship with God and to better understand who he is, who he has called us to be, and that we have that in our bibles and being able to read it in a language we understand and want to encourage you all as you’re celebrating reformation, as we’re about to kick off for the 500th anniversary of Luther’s translation of the New Testament into vernacular German, lifting a prayer of praise to God for his faithfulness, for his righteousness that covers the multitude of our sins, that he’s made himself known, and he is continuing to make himself known through Bible translation around the world. 

32:29
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. That New Testament from Luther was what really has solidified the reformation and what gives us the opportunity to stand where we stand today and grow in faith through that engagement with the word that we do on our own and even better with groups of people in our churches. And yeah, what an opportunity to recognize the reformation not as the beginning of a movement, particularly, but the renewal of access to God’s word, something that we all have readily here and have the opportunity to give to others, too, through our involvement and work of Bible translation. Thank you for listening to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. You can find past episodes of the podcast@lbt.org Slash podcast you can subscribe on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any place that you get podcast content. 

33:18
Rich Rudowske
You can follow Lutheran Bible translators’social, media channels on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Or go to lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s word in their hands. This episode of essentially translatable was produced and edited by the multi talented Andrew Olsen. Our executive producer is Emily Wilson. Podcast artwork was designed by Caleb Rotewald and our music was written and performed by Rob Weit. I’m Rich Trudesky. So long for now.