# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S41
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 41 —

brought back for the whole world and has come upon all men in Christ as the representative of all mankind."

This thesis is added to the preceding one in order to show how the resurrection of Christ is the ground and cornerstone of justification. In His dying Christ shed His blood as a ransom for the sins of the world; through the resurrection of the Son, God the Father gives testimony that He has accepted the atoning sacrifice of His Son as fully valid. Very often the Scripture puts the death and resurrection of Christ together, and the holy apostles, in order to describe the essence of their office, call themselves outright witnesses of the resurrection of Christ, in order thereby at the same time to emphasize its great importance. Thus the Apostle Paul writes, for example, in Rom. 4:25: "Christ was delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification." Now if Christ was raised for the sake of our justification (as it reads in the original text), then the resurrection must surely be the ground on which it rests, without which it would be impossible. Such a justification, however, is a universal one, obtained for all men, for Rom. 5:18 says: "As by the offense of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life." Laden with the sin that had come upon all through one man, Christ went into death; from this sin of all He is absolved through the raising, and what God the Father has thereby done to Christ was not done for the benefit of the Son but for the whole of mankind. Therefore, according to Rom. 8:33, 34, it is not enough that Christ has died, but "rather" the resurrection is the final and highest ground of justification, for through it the Father has sealed that He has accepted the sacrifice of His Son for the guilt of sin of mankind. Therefore the apostle also writes in 1 Cor. 15:17: "If Christ be not risen, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." Thus the whole work of redemption would have been declared invalid by God if He had not raised Christ. Many, even among the preachers, do not rightly know what to make of the resurrection of Christ. They read at one time that Christ raised Himself, then again that the Father raised Him, and they cannot properly reconcile the two; so they suppose at one time that Christ rose in order thereby to prove His divinity, at another that He was raised so that the possibility and certainty of our resurrection might be proved. As true as both of these are, yet neither is the main point. Merely to prove His divinity, Christ would not have had to die and then rise again, and the possibility of our resurrection had already been proved by the raising of others before Christ; the main point remains that God declared through Christ's raising: Christ has now for the sins of the whole world