# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S24
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

24 Proceedings of the 24th General, or

distinguished. Otherwise there are some animals that surpass man in
other gifts — some in sight, some in hearing, some in smell — but
none of them can speak. Therefore this is itself a sign that speech
is of an exceedingly high kind and nature."*) That is why we thank
God also for the human word, when in the explanation of the First
Article we confess: "I believe that God has made me and all
creatures, has given me body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my limbs,
my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them."

But with a completely different word God has equipped his church
here on earth. To his church he has given not merely a human word,
but — his own, his divine word. And such a divine word is what
mankind needs after the Fall. It is the bridge by which God has
restored fellowship between fallen humanity and himself. When Adam
had fallen into sin and death, no human word could help him — not
even the word of all the sages of Greece, or of our most advanced
age, had it already existed then. Only one thing helped: God's own
word. God approached Adam, spoke to him himself, rebuked his sin, and
then made him alive again with the word of the promise of the seed
of the woman. Luther says: "When Adam had fallen, he was already dead
before God; his conscience was scattered and shattered. ... But God
made him alive again with his living word. God said to the serpent,
Genesis 3:15, 'I will put enmity between you and the woman, and her
seed shall crush your head' — when Adam heard that, ... he took heart
and became joyful." Thus: not on a human word, but on his own word,
did God set Adam and Eve after the Fall, and thereby founded the
first congregation of believers. The church that followed was
likewise founded on God's own word, for God had his word proclaimed
through the patriarchs and forefathers. And the word that he later
gave Israel in writing was not the word of Moses, David, Isaiah, etc.,
but his own, his divine word. This was, indeed, according to the
explicit testimony of Scripture, Israel's advantage over all other
nations. The human word the heathen nations had in common with
Israel, but God's word Israel alone had. St. Paul answers the
question, "What advantage, then, has the Jew?": "Much in every way.
To begin with, that they were entrusted with the very words of God"
(Romans 3:2). So the word that the church of the Old Testament had
was God's own word. God's own word the church of the New Testament
now has as well. In the Holy Scripture that is in our hands we have
the word that God spoke to Israel through the prophets, and besides
that the word that God spoke through the evangelists

*) E. A. 57, 248 f.