# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S25
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ninth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1899. 25

and that God spoke through the apostles to all mankind. This word of
Holy Scripture, looked at outwardly, indeed looks just like a human
word, since it too was spoken through human beings and to human
beings. But it is truly God's own word, for all Scripture is
God-breathed (1 Timothy 3:16); holy men of God spoke as they were
carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1). Let us have nothing to
do with the modern false doctrine that Scripture is not God's word
itself, but only a human report about God's word and revelation.
Through this false doctrine the devil means to rob the daughter of
heaven, the Christian church, of her heavenly endowment, of the word
of her God, and to put her instead upon a merely human word. A
comfortless position. No, no! God has given the church nothing less
than his own word.

2.

This word of God also has divine power. Even merely human speech
already has tremendous power. "The pen is mightier than the sword"
is a true saying. The human word is, of all human means of
influence, the most powerful. The human word addresses itself
precisely to the human spirit, convinces and wins it, and with it the
whole person. No worldly ruler, with all his external means of power,
can in the long run keep in chains those whom the human word has set
spiritually free. I need hardly document that with examples from
ancient and modern times. If the human word already has such power,
what power must the divine word given to the church have! The human
word can accomplish much, but it cannot change human nature; it
cannot create new life. But the divine word has almighty, creative
power. "The words that I speak" — says Christ (and these are words
the church has; the whole of Scripture is Christ's speech through the
Holy Spirit) — "are spirit and are life" — that is, they make of the
fleshly and spiritually dead human being a new, spiritual, spiritually
living human being. St. Paul testifies (2 Corinthians 4:6): "God, who
commanded the light to shine out of darkness" (that is, at the
creation of the world), "has shone in our hearts to give the light."
By this the apostle means that the same almighty power that brought
forth the natural light is also at work in the word of preaching. The
divine word entrusted to the church is often compared in Scripture to
a natural grain of seed. When the natural seed falls into the ground,
it begins to sprout and grow by a mysterious divine power — the power
that God placed in the grain of seed at creation and still sustains
in it. So it is also with the word entrusted to the church, which has
gone out from the mouth of God. When it comes