# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S312
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

I, still further, out of free favor renewing My covenant (chapter 34, verses 10, 27), have mercy on him who, in faith in the Lord's name (to be revealed through the Messiah) and in humility, does not demand it of Me as a right. (Hence the repetition — to be referred, in a further prospect, even to the Gentiles, to whom salvation indeed came from the Jews.) Since Moses desired what he asked for out of grace from the Lord, verse 12ff., it is also solemnly promised to him, together with those for whom he interceded, insofar as everything depended for them too on grace and mercy alone, as God Himself proclaimed this, chapter 34:7. With Him there is no injustice; the sole reason why He has mercy is simply His groundless mercy, "for before Him no one is innocent" (Exodus 34:7, literally: he who does not turn guilt into innocence); and in His power, freedom, and might stands everything: if He does not show mercy, He therefore never acts unjustly; if He does the opposite, then it is plain that all reliance on one's own merit is vain, useless, and dangerous. One loses thereby nothing more and nothing less than eternal salvation. That this is the correct understanding is made clear by the following, the sixteenth verse, in Paul: it reads, "So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy." The whole human race is shut up under sin and death; before Him, before whom no living person is righteous, natural birth and worthiness avail no one; one's own doing is therefore also lost, inherited sin renders it null, and so too all willing and running of the self-righteous, which remains merely an outward work so long as grace is not recognized as grace and accordingly appropriated. But the gracious working of God, through the Spirit of faith in Christ and His word, gives the right willing and the right running, which is not in vain, since man, in humbling himself, knows that he can do nothing of himself, but rather that it rests solely with the merciful God, who purely brings about all that is well-pleasing to Him through the powers of faith, Philippians 2:13, 3:14, 1 Corinthians 9:26. The apostle ascribes this to himself when, in both of the latter passages, he speaks of running and pressing on toward the mark set before him, insofar as divine grace again sanctifies and renews for this purpose the powers of the soul, originally uncorrupted but perverted through sin.

The apostle's language against the work-righteous is a curt one, only so much as is needed to dismiss them; but to believers, for whom grace is truly grace, to which they have been able to contribute nothing, the Spirit of knowledge opens the heart, so that a few words, which must be a stumbling block and an offense to unbelief, are precious, comforting truths for them. For if it stood with us to become free from sin, death, and hell, then surely not a single person would be saved — the devil would overpower them all; but instead it is taken entirely out of our hands and placed solely in God's hand, because this is of the utmost necessity, since we are too weak