# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1928_S12
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

12 Proceedings of the thirty-first convention

Thus he lays the foundation for his mighty, comforting expositions of Jesus'
work. The other apostles have preached likewise. When, for example, John
comforts Christians with the shedding of Jesus' blood, he adds: "The blood of
Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." Evidently he means to say:
Consider that the blood of Jesus is not merely noble human blood; no, it is the
blood of the Son of God, and as such it cleanses from all sins.

From all this it already follows that we are not dealing with a laborious
speculation when we speak of Jesus, our High Priest, as true God and true man.
The modern theological world, the Ritschlians and all the other rationalists,
laughs at our stressing Jesus' true deity. It calls this a metaphysical
discussion that has no practical value. Yes, for him who does not believe in
Jesus' true deity, the reference to the divinity of the person of our High
Priest indeed has no meaning. He must see in it a gross deception. The leading
theologians of our day are unfortunately almost all Unitarians and thus deniers
of the deity of Christ. But thank God, we do not belong to the crowd that wants
to rob Jesus of his divine honor; and because we recognize the true God in him,
we want, in considering his high-priestly work, to bring out precisely this
side of his person; for it gives us the comfort that he was well qualified to
accomplish the immeasurably great work of removing sin. To us this is a high,
glorious, heart-refreshing article, the article of Jesus' deity. It is the
cornerstone of our whole hope, which we do not want to let anyone take from us.
— Here a beautiful saying of Luther may be cited, which the Formula of Concord
quotes in Article 8, p. 683: "We Christians must know that if God is not in the
scale as well and gives it weight, we sink to the bottom with our bowl. I mean
it this way: if it were not to be said, God has died for us, but only a man, we
are lost. But if God's death and God dead lie in the scale-bowl, it sinks, and
we rise up like a light, empty bowl; but he can also very well rise up again or
leap out of his bowl; yet he could not sit in the bowl unless he became a man
like us, so that it could be said: God dead, God's agony, God's blood, God's
death. For God in his nature cannot die, but now that God and man are united in
one person, it is rightly called God's death when the man dies who is one thing
or one person with God."

III.

We now turn to the work of Jesus as our High Priest. What does Scripture tell
us about it? What did he accomplish as our High Priest? The chief task of the
high priests in the Old Testament was to reconcile God when he was angry with
the people because of their sins. To bring about such reconciliation they
offered atoning sacrifices. We have a moving account of a special sacrifice of
this kind in Num. 16:41 ff. God had prescribed exactly how the ordinary atoning
sacrifices were to be offered, Lev. 4:1; 5:1 ff. All sacrificing for sinners
culminated in the service on the great Day of Atonement, on the tenth day of
the seventh month, when the high priest went with the blood of sacrificial
animals into the Most Holy Place and sprinkled it there seven times before the
mercy seat and cleansed the people with it. God said, Lev. 16:30: "On this day
shall your atonement be made, that ye may be cleansed; from all