The Night Martin Luther Stopped Trembling

As a young Augustinian monk in Erfurt, Martin Luther lived in daily terror of God. He fasted until his body ached, confessed sins for hours at a stretch, and once told his confessor Johann von Staupitz that he could not love a God who wielded nothing but thunderbolts. Luther knew the God of Sinai — the smoking mountain, the trembling earth, the voice so dreadful that even Moses said, "I am terrified and trembling." That was the only God Luther had ever encountered.

But sometime around 1515, hunched over his desk in the tower room of the Black Cloister in Wittenberg, Luther read Romans 1:17 with fresh eyes: "The righteous shall live by faith." He later wrote that in that moment, he felt himself "altogether born again" and that he had "entered paradise itself through open gates."

Luther had not changed mountains by his own effort. He had been brought to a different mountain entirely — Mount Zion, the city of the living God, where sinners are welcomed not by smoke and fire but by "Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant."

This is precisely the contrast the writer of Hebrews draws. You have not come to the mountain that could not be touched. You have come to something breathtaking — a joyful assembly, a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and a God who invites you closer rather than driving you away.