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Dialogue with Trypho
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Chapter 119: Christians are the Sacred People Promised to Abraham. They Have Been Summoned like Abraham.
THEN I SAID AGAIN: "Would you think, sirs, that we could ever have understood these matters in the Scriptures if we had not received grace to discern by the will of Him whose pleasure it was? This was so that the saying of Moses might come to pass, 'They provoked me with strange [gods], they provoked me to anger with their abominations. They sacrificed to demons they did not know; new gods that recently came up, whom their fathers did not know.
You have forsaken God who begot you and forgotten God who brought you up. And the Lord saw, and was jealous, and was provoked to anger because of the rage of His sons and daughters: and He said, I will turn My face away from them, and I will show what shall come on them at the last; for it is a very perverse generation, children in whom there is no faith. They have moved Me to jealousy with what is not God, they have provoked Me to anger with their idols; and I will move them to jealousy with what is not a nation, I will provoke them to anger with a foolish people.
For a fire is kindled from My anger, and it shall burn to Hades. It shall consume the earth and her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains; I will heap misfortune on them.' And after that Righteous One was put to death, we flourished as another people and grew like new and prosperous corn; as the prophets said, 'And many nations shall turn to the Lord in that day for a people: and they shall dwell in the midst of all the earth.' But we are not only a people, but also a holy people, as we have already shown. 'And they shall call them the holy people, redeemed by the Lord.' Therefore we are not a people to be despised, nor a barbarous race, nor like the Carian and Phrygian nations; but God has even chosen us, and He has become manifest to those who did not seek Him. 'Behold, I am God,' He says, 'to the nation which did not call on My name.' For this is the nation that God long ago promised to Abraham when He declared that He would make him a father of many nations; not meaning, however, the Arabians, or Egyptians, or Edomites, since Ishmael became the father of a mighty nation, and so did Esau; and there is now a great multitude of Ammonites.
Noah, moreover, was the father of Abraham, and in fact of all men; and others were the progenitors of others. What greater measure of grace, then, did Christ bestow on Abraham? This, specifically, that He called him with His voice in a similar calling, telling him to leave the land where he lived. And He has called all of us by that voice, and we have already left the way of living in which we used to spend our days, passing our time in evil after the customs of the other inhabitants of the earth; and along with Abraham we shall inherit the holy land when we receive the inheritance for an endless eternity, being children of Abraham through similar faith.
For as he believed the voice of God and it was credited to him for righteousness, in the same way we, having believed God’s voice spoken by the apostles of Christ and shared with us by the prophets, have renounced even to death all the things of the world. Accordingly, He promises to him a nation of similar faith, God-fearing, righteous, and delighting the Father; but it is not you, 'in whom there is no faith.'"