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13. Those then who say, What, had God no other way by which He
might free men from the misery of this mortality, that He should will
the only-begotten Son, God co-eternal with Himself, to become
man, by putting on a human soul and flesh, and being made mortal to
endure death? these, I say, it is not enough so to refute, as to
assert that that mode by which God deigns to free us through the
Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, is good and
suitable to the dignity of God; but we must show also, not indeed
that no other mode was possible to God, to whose power all things are
equally subject, but that there neither was nor need have been any
other mode more appropriate for curing our misery. For what was so
necessary for the building up of our hope, and for the freeing the
minds of mortals cast down by the condition of mortality itself, from
despair of immortality, than that it should be demonstrated to us at
how great a price God, rated us, and how greatly He loved us? But
what is more manifest and evident in this so great proof hereof, than
that the Son of God, unchangeably good, remaining what He was in
Himself, and receiving from us and for us what He was not, apart
from any loss of His own nature, and deigning to enter into the
fellowship of ours, should first, without any evil desert of His
own, bear our evils; and so with unobligated munificence should bestow
His own gifts upon us, who now believe how much God loves us, and
who now hope that of which we used to despair, without any good deserts
of our own, nay, with our evil deserts too going before?
14. Since those also which are called our deserts, are His gifts.
For, that faith may work by love, "the love of God is shed abroad
in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." And He
was then given, when Jesus was glorified by the resurrection. For
then He promised that He Himself would send Him, and He sent
Him; because then, as it was written and foretold of Him, "He
ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto
men." These gifts constitute our deserts, by which we arrive at the
chief good of an immortal blessedness. "But God," says the
apostle, "commendeth His love towards as, in that, while we were
yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more, then, being now
justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him."
To this he goes on to add, "For if, when we were enemies, we were
reconciled to God by the death of His Son; much more, being
reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." Those whom he first
calls sinners he afterwards calls the enemies of God; and those whom
he first speaks of as justified by His blood, he afterwards speaks of
as reconciled by the death of the Son of God; and those whom he
speaks of first as saved from wrath through Him, he afterwards speaks
of as saved by His life. We were not, therefore, before that grace
merely anyhow sinners, but in such sins that we were enemies of God.
But the same apostle calls us above several times by two appellations,
viz. sinners and enemies of God, one as if the most mild, the other
plainly the most harsh, saying, "For if when we were yet weak, in
due time Christ died for the ungodly." Those whom he called weak,
the same he called ungodly. Weakness seems something slight; but
sometimes it is such as to be called impiety. Yet except it were
weakness, it would not need a physician, who is in the Hebrew
Jesus, in the Greek Soter, but in our speech Saviour. And this
word the Latin language had not previously, but could have seeing that
it could have it when it wanted it. And this foregoing sentence of the
apostle, where he says, "For when we were yet weak, in due time He
died for the ungodly," coheres with those two following sentences; in
the one of which he spoke of sinners, in the other of enemies of God,
as though he referred each severally to each, viz. sinners to the
weak, the enemies of God to the ungodly.
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