# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

16 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

God's grace is received. If faith came into consideration here as a virtue, then only perfect faith could stand before God and save, while weak faith would be counted for nothing. That does not agree with the statements of Holy Scripture, and so faith must come into consideration here only insofar as it grasps the grace of God in Christ. —

These, however, are the unbelievers, for: "He that believes not is condemned already." John 3:18. "If you do not believe," says the Lord, "that I am he, you will die in your sins." — "He that does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." — "He that does not believe shall be damned."

It is the unbelievers, then, who remain under the wrath of God and under the damnation that already rests on them on account of original sin, and precisely their unbelief is the sole cause of this. John 3:18 says: "He that believes in him is not condemned; but he that believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God." (Literally: because he has not believed.) And as the Epistle to the Hebrews (4, 7) says that the children of Israel did not enter into the rest of the promised land because of unbelief, so those who are lost also do not enter into the rest of eternal life because of their unbelief. For those excluded from the earthly Canaan are presented in that epistle as types of those excluded from the heavenly Canaan.

As faith alone saves, since it grasps the one Savior, Jesus Christ, so unbelief alone condemns, since it rejects Christ, the only deliverer from damnation. Redemption is offered to all. God comes with his grace also to the unbelievers, presses upon them, urges them to receive salvation, but they brace themselves against it and will not. Just as the sin against the Holy Spirit condemns because it constantly shuts out salvation, so also unbelief.

Although unbelief, too, is forbidden in the first commandment and is a fountain of all other sins, the greatest sin, it comes into consideration here not so much as a transgression of the law but as rejection of the Gospel.

This unbelief is therefore the cause that man remains in damnation. By every sin he deserves damnation, but through unbelief it comes about that he remains in damnation. The sentence of the law has been set aside through Christ, since he became a curse for us. If it were therefore possible for faith to exist alongside the other sins, then all the other sins could not condemn. It is as when someone has a mortal illness and spurns a sure remedy offered him