# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S314
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Whomever a ray of this light has struck cannot pass by in calm indifference or sluggish aversion; rather, in the one who remains evil, these feelings intensify into positive hatred and bitter rage. But the unrestricted God, from whom everything else has its being and essence, stands all the higher in His perfection the less the comparison with creatures — as with a potter who merely dug the clay, verse 21 — reaches Him. The natural man perceives nothing of His Spirit; therefore he cannot help but understand Paul's words as Paul himself describes him as doing, and, entirely in keeping with his self-delusion, since he does not accuse himself, only God, and even gives Him the answer himself. And yet it follows from the apostle's rejoinder that God has so tempered, out of free goodness, His right of majesty over His creatures — whom He found everywhere already afflicted, as a lump already corrupted through their own sinful guilt — that He has far greater cause to complain of man than man has to murmur against the Most High. This is the suppressed apodosis of verses 22 and 23, following the well-known figure of aposiopesis, compare John 6:62. Translated literally according to the Greek, the sentence reads as a question: "But if God, willing to show His wrath and make known His power, endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on vessels of mercy which He had before prepared for glory" — (supply:) has done this — "what will you answer to that?" It is the Lord's patience, which cannot be told, that is meant to lead us to repentance, Romans 2:4f. It is to demonstrate this — not to glorify the great whole in general within the divine order of the world, as some have wished to prove from 1 Corinthians 11:19, 2 Timothy 2:20, etc., and from this passage — that the shadows of that fearful power of moral ruin serve, which lies spread over one part of the human race, in contrast to the light in which the other part shines all the more gladly. Dark and full of mystery are the depths of evil in human nature when they collide with the divine workings of the Word. There, through various grave transgressions known only to God, a disposition is woven and formed in the inward part of the heart which, instead of gracious forbearance, calls forth punitive justice — often cutting short, by an untimely death, a many-year respite that had been granted for perceiving the soul's salvation. The vessels of wrath are in no way fitted by the Lord in the sense that He would be the author of sin — the text says nothing of the kind, just as it testifies quite explicitly, concerning the vessels of grace, that they were prepared by God, without regard to their subsequent works, through the combining of all circumstances, inward and outward, serving their good, verse 23, so that goodness, faithfulness, mercy, wisdom, almighty power, and love might find their objects in them; the necessity by virtue of which the former proceed in their hardening and present themselves as instruments, through this very contrast, for carrying out God's purposes