# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S313
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Related Matters, etc. 313

and powerless for this, while nothing can hinder God: so we still have hope against sin.

Just as the word of the Lord spoken to Moses shows very gloriously how God remains just when He, laying low all human glory that would claim to hold before Him, likewise rejects and casts away all human righteousness: so an earlier word spoken to Pharaoh shows how far a man may go through the contempt and abuse of divine grace, verse 17. By adducing this instance it is further to be established how it lies outside all creaturely power to become a partaker of salvation. Moses and Pharaoh are set opposite each other as two memorable examples of this truth, that it depends solely on God's mercy, insofar as the one was accepted and the other forsaken, compare Luke 17:34ff. Not that the absolute independence of God, established by Himself beyond all limits, which is His majesty, must therefore also necessarily include an absolute will; because He is precisely the freest being, He is able either to waive or to exercise His right, either to leave mankind, lying under the judgment of His wrath, therein, or to redeem it through a conditioned decree (addita conditione, ut credant, "with the condition added, that they believe," as the dogmaticians say). This is manifested in Moses and in Pharaoh. After the latter had already incurred the guilt of many excesses of his stubbornness, and had also failed to grow wise from the example of a predecessor of like mind (compare Exodus 2:23ff., Acts 7:29ff., from which it is evident that that one's reign lasted only a short time, but was a chain of experiences of the power and glory of God, which showed itself upon him and his people, meant to teach them to fear the Lord and honor His name through obedience — which is indeed the very purpose for which the warning of Exodus 9:16 was first spoken to him) — so it was to happen at last that, because all the divine forbearance with which the sinner was spared and borne with served only to harden him, that same forbearance would find its limit. "I have raised thee up" — that is, according to the Hebrew original text: I have let thee stand, compare 1 Kings 15:4, as a mighty and famous king, so that My power and My name might be glorified in thee. That the withholding of mercy was carried out upon Pharaoh happened indeed through the will of God, as the apostle teaches in the following verse: He shows grace to the believing, and hardens the unbelieving, compare chapter 11:20ff., through the outward provocation of His word, against which the resistance of man, embraced by the divine all-working power, develops.

Seemingly plausible conclusions brought forward with defiant discontent, verse 19, are brought to nothing solely through the believer's own experience of faith. For the one who persistently pushes it away and moves ever further from the true understanding of righteousness, the living and powerful word, the judge of the thoughts and intentions of the heart, must become more and more, with each step, an occasion of stumbling, and a savor of death unto death, though it was given to him for life.