# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1858_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the General Synod. 279

Lutheran does not go out so mutely; he lets himself be driven out. Let the
false, apostate Lutherans-in-name-only, to whom apparent outward success
and the money-bag matter more than the truth of God, prefer a damnable
peace to the strife that God wills — a true Lutheran comes forward,
fresh and free, with the confession of the truth he has recognized, even
should the General Synod thereby fly into a thousand pieces over it. Let
fall what cannot stand before the light of the countenance of God. Here
the word of Christ holds: I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword —
not the false peace that is made by denying the truth, for that the devil
brings into the world, but the sword, the earnest, never-resting struggle
against the lie and against those who profess it. Indeed, a great part of
the Lord's own ministry consisted in struggle with the unbelieving
Sadducees and the false-believing Pharisees, with the hypocrites who did
indeed claim for themselves the name of Israel, but were, at the same
time, the mortal enemies of the true Israel and its King. A faithful
servant follows his Lord, even if in doing so he must deny himself and
take up his cross. He knows that he is only the servant, that he may not
deal and manage according to his own judgment with what belongs to the
Lord. The truth that God's Word teaches is God's own property — how
could he, out of deference to men, embezzle and squander this heavenly
treasure? The truth that God's Word teaches is the ornament and the crown
in which the revealed God lets himself be beheld, by the eye of faith, as
the one Savior and Redeemer of all sinners — how may a servant of God
remain calm when someone reaches with sacrilegious hand for his Lord's
crown and wishes to trample it in the dust? With his heart's blood he
must shield it. And he does so with thanks and joy. For he knows that this
heavenly treasure and ornament of God, the eternal truth, is his own sole
highest treasure, whose possession makes him free from all the terrors of
Satan, and rich and blessed; he knows that it is likewise the sole highest
treasure of his brethren, of the whole race of Adam, and of mankind yet
unborn. If the truth is lost, then all is lost. Therefore up, you faithful
Lutherans in the General Synod! Up to the Lord's war! Take up the sword
of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, and testify against the
God-forgetting platform of your synod, the banner of lies, which men have
set up in the place of the pure confession. Proclaim to the hypocrite
Lutherans, earnestly and boldly, the wrath and judgment of God upon those
who dare to lay a sacrilegious hand upon God's Word, to add to it and take
from it, who dare, for the sake of apparent advantage and for the sake of
the money-bag, to give up the truth of the Holy One in Israel and to let
truth and lie count for the same, who betray the church whose children
they call themselves and whose bread they eat, and deliver it into the
hands of its enemies. Let your testimony sound in their ears like the
thunder of God, that their hearts may tremble in terror before the
majesty of him whose