Against Heresies: Book V

NOW THIS BEING IS THE CREATOR: who is, with respect to His love, the Father; but with respect to His power, He is Lord; and with respect to His wisdom, our Maker and Fashioner. By transgressing His commandment, we became His enemies.

Therefore, in the last times, the Lord has restored us to friendship through His incarnation, becoming “the Mediator between God and men,” indeed propitiating for us the Father against whom we had sinned, and canceling our disobedience by His own obedience, also giving us the gift of communion with, and submission to, our Maker.

For this reason, He has taught us to say in prayer, “And forgive us our debts,” since indeed He is our Father, whose debtors we were, having transgressed His commandments.

But who is this Being? Is He some unknown one, a Father who gives no commandment to anyone? Or is He the God who is proclaimed in the Scriptures, to whom we were debtors, having transgressed His commandment? The commandment was given to man by the Word. For Adam, it is said, “heard the voice of the God.” Rightly then does His Word say to man, “Your sins are forgiven you;” He, the same one against whom we had sinned in the beginning, grants forgiveness of sins in the end.

But if indeed we had disobeyed the command of another, and it was a different being who said, “Your sins are forgiven you,” such a one is neither good, nor true, nor just. For how can he be good, who does not give from what belongs to himself? Or how can he be just, who takes away the goods of another? And in what way can sins truly be forgiven, unless He against whom we have sinned has Himself granted forgiveness “through the bowels of mercy of our God,” in which “He has visited us” through His Son?

AND THEREFORE: when He healed the man with paralysis, the evangelist says, "The people, upon seeing it, glorified God who gave such power to men." Which God, then, did the bystanders glorify? Was it truly that unknown Father invented by the heretics? And how could they glorify one who was completely unknown to them? It is clear, therefore, that the Israelites glorified Him who has been proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets, who is also the Father of our Lord.

Therefore, He taught people, through the evidence of their senses from the signs He performed, to give glory to God. If He had come from another Father, and people glorified a different Father when they witnessed His miracles, He would have made them ungrateful to the Father who had sent the gift of healing.

However, as the only-begotten Son had come for humanity's salvation from Him who is God, He stirred up the unbelievers by the miracles He regularly performed to give glory to the Father.

To the Pharisees, who did not accept the coming of His Son and consequently did not believe in the forgiveness of sins granted by Him, He said, "That you may know that the Son of Man has power to forgive sins." After saying this, He commanded the paralyzed man to take up the bed he was lying on and go to his house. By this act, He confounded the unbelievers and showed that He Himself is the voice of God, by which humanity received commandments, which they broke and became sinners, for the paralysis was a consequence of sin.

THEREFORE: by forgiving sins, He indeed healed humanity, while also revealing who He was. For if no one can forgive sins except God alone, and the Lord forgave them and healed people, it is clear that He Himself was the Word of God made the Son of man, receiving from the Father the power to forgive sins; because He was human, and because He was God, so that as a man He suffered for us, and as God He might have compassion on us and forgive our debts, which made us debtors to God our Creator. And so David said beforehand, "Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord has not counted sin;" indicating the forgiveness of sins that comes with His coming, by which "He has destroyed the record" of our debt and "nailed it to the cross;" so that just as through a tree we became debtors to God, through a tree we may also obtain the forgiveness of our debt.

THIS IDEA HAS BEEN CLEARLY ILLUSTRATED BY MANY OTHERS: especially through Elisha the prophet. When his fellow prophets were cutting wood to build a tabernacle, the iron head of an axe became loose and fell into the Jordan River, where they couldn't find it. When Elisha arrived at the scene and learned what happened, he threw a piece of wood into the water. After doing this, the iron part of the axe floated up, and they retrieved what they had lost.

Through this action, the prophet indicated that the sure word of God, which we had carelessly lost due to a tree, and could not find again, would be given back to us through the dispensation of a tree, namely, the cross of Christ. John the Baptist likens the word of God to an axe when he says, "But now the axe is laid to the root of the trees." Jeremiah also mentions similarly, "The word of God cleaves the rock like an axe." This word, which was hidden from us, was revealed by the means of a tree, as I have mentioned before.

Just as we lost it through a tree, through a tree it was made known to everyone, revealing its height, length, breadth, and depth. As one of our predecessors noted, "Through the spreading of the hands of a divine person, gathering the two peoples to one God." These were two hands because there were two peoples scattered to the ends of the earth, but there was one head in the middle, as there is but one God, who is above all, through all, and in us all.