# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S32
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

32 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

Scripture lets be a mystery, but also not wish to overlook what information it does offer us in this respect. Above all we must guard against trying to demonstrate from history how God means it toward human beings. For if history does not show us that the Gospel was really preached at all times to all peoples, this seems not to be in harmony with the word: "God wills that all men be helped." Here is a mystery which we cannot solve. Whoever wants to solve it must be wise beyond God's Word. Such attempts therefore show no maturity in Christian knowledge but immaturity.

We are dealing here with those who have opportunity to hear or read God's Word. In these one can sometimes show how their outward conduct toward the means of grace is rightly imputed to them as guilt. Such a person can buy a Bible and read in it, he can still go to church, inquire about God's Word, be instructed and be baptized; and does not do it, will not, mocks and even blasphemes about it without having any knowledge of it. Here the person's guilt is evident. Even if there were no means of rescue for sinful man, he would be lost through his own guilt. Since there is now, however, such a means by which God wills to heal him, he is lost, if he despises it, first of all on account of the despising of the means of grace. And this guilt we recognize. The guilt of such a despiser of the means of grace becomes especially clear to us when we consider what is bound up with it, namely contempt of the voice of God in his heart, suppression of the innate consciousness of God, deadening of the conscience that accuses and condemns him, a closing of the eyes to God's testimonies in nature, in history, in his own life, which ought to be an impulse and spur to him to seek God and to look about for further revelation of God. For this too we find no excuse. It is a willful suppression of the truth, a willful closing of the eyes, a voluntary further surrender to the power of sin that rules him and to the power of Satan in which he finds himself.

Such freedom of the natural man in the outward use and non-use of the means of grace, and his culpability when he does not use the means, is also confessed by the Formula of Concord II, p. 601: "This Word man, even when not yet converted to God and regenerated, can hear and read outwardly; for in these outward things, as was just said, man, even after the fall, has to a certain extent a free will, so that he may go to church and listen or not listen to the preaching." Page 602 (58): "But when such a man despises the instrument of the Holy Spirit and will not hear, he is not wronged if the Holy Spirit does not enlighten him, but in the