There are two considerations which require the preaching of these truths…. The second reason is this; faith’s object is things not seen. That there may be room for faith, therefore, all that is believed must be hidden. Yet it is not hidden more deeply than under a contrary appearance of sight, sense, and experience. Thus, when God quickens, He does so by killing; when He justifies, He does so by pronouncing guilty; when He carries up to heaven, He does so by bringing down to hell…Thus God conceals His eternal mercy and loving kindness beneath eternal wrath, His righteousness beneath unrighteousness. Now the highest degree of faith is to believe that He is merciful, though He saves so few and damns so many; to believe that He is just, though of His own will He makes us perforce proper subjects for damnation. (Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will)
The driving thought of this section of Luther is an awakening shout to modern people who slumber in the throes of their physical senses. Their faith is somehow tied to those and they rest confidently in what their senses tell them. The gospel that is preached and taught today is one that fits very well with a person not having to go beyond his or her own sensory experience. The devil has worked his deceptions in the modern professing Church and so we are deceived. But, if Luther was and is right, then a person must be humbled and broken from the five physical senses in order to arrive at the truth of spiritual faith which is real and saving faith.
Hebrews 11:1 sets out some of the basics of faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Clearly, without any real question, faith operates in the realm of things not seen. Hebrews 11:7 goes on to tell us that “By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.” Noah believed what God said would happen rather than the things he could see and lived and functioned by what God said rather than according to the world around him.
Speaking of Moses, on the other hand, Hebrews 11:27 tells us that “By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing Him who is unseen.” So on the one hand faith operates by what it does not see and yet on the other hand it operates by what it does see. True and saving faith functions and operates in the spiritual realm by what it sees in the spiritual realm by the eyes of the soul while it does not operate by what the physical eyes see.
We see this illustrated in II Corinthians 5:6-8. “Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord–7 for we walk by faith, not by sight– 8 we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.” The body is that which those who are not of true faith never want to leave. But Paul (who was full of faith) preferred to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord which he considered to be far better. True faith enables one to live by the character and presence of God rather than by what the human flesh senses, feels, and desires.
So Luther is extremely biblical in teaching us that we must preach the enslaved will in order to teach the things of true faith. A person must come to faith in the things that the eyes cannot see in order to have true faith. What must be truly believed in the spiritual realm is in fact hidden from the physical senses and the way human beings think and operate. This is what is so insidious about many of the things that are going on in the modern professing Church. It is all about the senses and it is all about the things that we can see. It is all about this life and even this physical life. But the teachings of Christ are all about the spiritual realm. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about spiritual things and that have to do with His spiritual kingdom.
The soul that rests on Christ alone cannot rest on the physical things about Christ and what is understood of Christ, but has to see into the spiritual kingdom to see spiritual things. The soul that is going to be saved must be brought to the point of its spiritual death in order to see that it is God who does the impossible according to the physical senses and that is to bring spiritual life to the soul. Faith is far more than a simple intellectual belief, but it is a soul that has been made a new creature in Christ and has spiritual senses. Faith is now the actions of a spiritual life in the soul that lives by spiritual principles and by what the Spirit works in the soul. A soul that has not learned how enslaved it really is in the spiritual realm apart from Christ will not look to Christ alone to be saved from itself.
God Loves... Himself 
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