# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S310
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

310 On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Related Matters, etc.

[the apostle, in chapter 9:10-11, treats] the rejection of the Jews from those outward excellencies which they had enjoyed through the course of so many centuries, and the assumption of the Gentiles into those prerogatives which the Jews claimed for themselves alone. If the discourse concerned election, this absurdity would follow from the Calvinists' opinion: that all of Jacob's descendants were saved, and, conversely, that all of Esau's descendants were damned. The sense of the saying is therefore this: I bestowed or granted not so much blessing to Esau's descendants as to Jacob's descendants, and accordingly I set the former after the latter, loved them less. Thus the word "hatred" is used in Luke 14:26: "he who does not hate father and mother"; which Matthew renders thus: "he who loves father or mother more" etc., Matthew 10:87; and thus a lesser love, in comparison with a greater, is called hatred."

IV. Refutation of the objections put into the mouths of the Israelite gainsayers, verses 14–24. The conclusion that followed for the Jews from what preceded was this: not all who descend bodily from Israel thereby also become children of grace (just as not all Edomites remained strangers to the covenants). This was, to be sure, a hard saying for those who did not wish to hear it. For they thought that they could in no way be forsaken by God and the Gentiles received in their place. The apostle himself introduces their presumed counter-objection, which would accuse him of encroaching, through his preceding exposition of the divine righteousness, on that righteousness itself, in that he excludes all merit of works and all self-glorying and worthiness of bodily descent. But Paul excellently vindicates, against those who built merely on their own name and supposed advantages, the power and the right of God, and, the more defiant and ill-disposed his gainsayers were, the greater the severity with which he deals with them. Such severity was necessary, so that the just claims of his Lord's unrestricted majesty might be driven home and upheld, and the glory of His generosity not be surrendered at an unfitting time. This befitted an apostle of Jesus Christ, who had Himself taught His disciples something similar, Matthew 20:13–15,*) compare Luke 19:22ff., 10:26ff.,

*) Note. The simple content of this parable, which agrees entirely with the present passage of the epistle to the Romans, is God's gracious call to enter the vineyard of His kingdom of heaven on earth. The expression "to hire" or "to engage for wages" is used so as to be intelligible to those for whom grace is not grace — who, without seeing through into the perfect law of liberty, wish to have their reward credited to them not out of grace but out of obligation. In this life the distinction among the laborers is not apparent, compare verse 14; but in that life to come they are set apart, compare John 8:35, Galatians 4:30. The householder's answer to the murmurers is entirely suited to the state of mind out of which their complaint arose; just as Christ, to the rich young man, before whose spiritual eye the veil of the law hung, held before him, in His demand, the full meaning of the first commandment, "to have no other god in the heart," which cannot be fulfilled in a legalistic way, apart from the power of the Gospel, except that one has, at least outwardly, nothing — thereby letting the particular calling take its own course. "Though I give all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing." Those who deal in works, because they do not give the Lord the honor by clinging to pure grace, are indeed