Third Sunday In Lent PSALM SIXTY-NINE

22. Let their table become a snare before them. Here a noteworthy teaching must be indicated. All the punishments, imprecations, and curses spoken of in the Scriptures, whether for the Jews or for others, are in a tropological sense of the most advantageous and desirable usefulness, as the apostle intimates in Rom. 11:25: “Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren, that blindness in part has happened in Israel.” Behold, he says that this mystery is decidedly salutary, that is, for us, not for them. Thus such curses are not so much foretold out of wrath as they are caused by supreme love for us. Therefore let that curse, morally understood, be on me: Let the table, whether Scripture, or the Sacrament of the Altar, or bodily refreshment, become a snare, so that it may catch me according to the flesh and liberate me according to the spirit, so that the sinner may be seized in his works and for the purpose of repayment, that the flesh of sin, which had ruled over the spirit, might justly be made subject and humbled, and the spirit might do to the flesh what it had done to the spirit. For “O daughter of Babylon, you wretched one; blessed is he who shall repay you for what you have done to us” (Ps. 137:8). Thus we may say with Samson to these five senses, the satraps of Philistia (that is, the flesh): “As they did to me, so I did to them” (Judg. 15:11).
And a stumbling block, namely, that it may always cause offense and never make progress, but its power become worse and weaker. –Martin Luther