# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S135
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 135

(Romans) 10:5ff.) For this reason this highest work of God was permitted to fall neither earlier nor later within the years of the world; not right at the beginning, because, owing to its importance, exceptional preparations had to be made for it, and so that later unbelief could not render it suspect as a fable — for such unbelief is a wild fire kindled against God, to which it is not good to give tinder and fuel; not at the end, so that the yearning hope and waiting might not be tried too long, and, through being surrendered to the mockery of unbelievers over the delay, might not turn into a dreadful and despairing abandonment. That is why the history of Israel, too, never and nowhere knows of the Law apart from its connection with promise — indeed on the ground of a prior blessing, for whose sake the revelations of the Lawgiver to the people in the wilderness are at the same time disclosures of the glory of their covenant God; and this covenant is bearer of the gracious relationship in a manner that, according to the declarations made to the patriarchs, already holds good for all the rest of the earth.

The fall into sin, indeed, must have occurred very early in creation — (should it have taken place even before the institution of the Sabbath, on the Friday as the sixth evening and morning, when man came into being? cf. Luther on Genesis 8:17ff., part I, p. 37 — just as God, immediately after the absolution that took place and the announcement of the cross, chapter 8:15ff., likewise points to the slaughter of animals and covers the nakedness of the fallen with a garment of the skins of the sacrifice) — because otherwise the necessarily attained confirmation in the good would have constituted its impossibility, a confirmation which among the angels was already a stage of perfection. But just as the first man would have propagated this confirmation to his descendants, had the Fall not occurred, so has he now bequeathed to them the opposite — and indeed in such a way that the historical origin of this opposite condition is removed from the very consciousness of the individual begotten after Adam's image. This could not be otherwise; for the individual did not yet exist, at the time when the primal decision for evil took place, in its full actuality as a personal being. The deed as such cannot fall within individual knowledge, since this knowledge, after all, knows only of the self-determinations of a developed personality. From this, however, it does not follow that the spirit of man is likewise incapable of recognizing the being that has been wrought and has arisen from such a deed. It is already testified to him through the language of conscience, which, in that it says to him: Thou shalt, while he, according to his habitual perversity, wishing to be unbound, can never in truth answer: I will — thereby accuses him, on account of the discord of his life with its holy Law, in this way: not as though this accusation were the product of consciously committed sins, but on account of one transgression preceding all these in time, which stands to them only as cause and generator. The primal deed reflects itself in our knowledge — always mediated through the knowledge of a law — in the shape of an evil-being present from the beginning, of a persisting sinful condition, and indeed...