# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S234
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

234 Instruction Against Doubt of the Divine Word and Its Truth.

Marentius, Julian, and the like — this Julian, a notorious renegade enemy and most fierce persecutor of the holy Gospel, was wounded by an arrow, of which he could not know whence it had come flying. See, then, what happened: when he perceived from this God's righteous judgment and the punishment of His wrath, his conscience compelled him to proclaim and confess as good and true that very holy Word of God, the gracious Gospel, which he had until then denied, hated, and persecuted — in that he threw the blood which flowed from his wound up into the air and said to the Lord Christ (whom he had called the Galilean): You have won — thereby confessing that he had been wrong in denying and persecuting His Word, and Christ had been right, and that God had therefore struck and laid him low with this death, as punishment for such sins of his, in the very height of his fiercest malice. We also have before our eyes a notable, undeniable example in the godless Jews, of whom it is beyond all dispute and doubt that they hate and deny our holy Gospel of Christ; but do they not, on that account, bear the heavy rod of God's just wrath as punishment, in that He has withdrawn His gracious hand from them, struck them with dreadful blindness (since they themselves chose blindness by their own will), and cast them down to the scorn and mockery of the whole world? Should one wish for more examples of notable persons, enough of them could be cited in Franciscus de Spira, Latomus, Hoffmeister, Sixtus, Thammer, and others, were it not that this would run too far afield here.

But what do such examples and the like intend? They show that Holy Scripture is a truthful Word of God, and that His divine Majesty, according to the tenor and content of the same, watches over it with such great power, earnestness, and zeal, that all who persistently contradict it out of deliberate malice shall not remain unpunished, but must be put to shame.

Tenthly, a strong proof that Holy Scripture is certainly God's truthful Word is given us also by the revelations of the high mysteries which are contained and described within it. As an example, let one consider the great mystery of the holy, most-praised Trinity within the one divine Being, and let conscience judge whether it is a heavenly and divine revelation or a human invention. I dare say the conscience will at once, being convinced within itself, be compelled to confess that it is a great mystery from God, and will tremble before any other thoughts that would run counter to it. Likewise the great mystery of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God — who would not hold this to be an unfathomable work of God, and praise it to the utmost? So too the ineffable work of redemption; likewise, the justification of a poor sinner before God, how the same can, directly out of his sins, become a righteous man, and out of a condemned firebrand of hell become a blessed child of God unto the inheritance of His kingdom. Finally, the mystery of the