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AND though this is the saying of an Apostle, yet it is the very
doctrine of the Lord For the same Person says this to Christians by His
Apostle, who had Himself said something very like it to Jews in the gospel,
when He said: "But now ye seek to kill me, a man, who have spoken the truth
to you, which I heard of God: for I am not come of Myself, but He sent
me." He clearly shows that He is both God and man: man, m that He says
that He is a man: God, in that He affirms that He was sent. For He must
have been with Him from whom He came: and He came from Him, from whom He
said that He was sent. Whence it comes that when the Jews said to Him,
"Thou art not yet fifty years old and hast Thou seen Abraham?" He replied
in words that exactly suit His eternity and glory, saying, "Verily, verily,
I say unto you, Before Abraham came into being, I am." I ask then,
whose saying do you think this is? Certainly it is Christ's without any
doubt. And how could He who had been but recently born, say that He was
before Abraham? Simply owing to the Word of God, with which He was entirely
united, so that all might understand the closeness of the union of Christ
and God: since whatever God said in Christ, that in its fulness the unity
of the Divinity claimed for Himself. But conscious of His own eternity, He
rightly then when in the body, replied to the Jews, with the very words
which He had formerly spoken to Moses in the Spirit. For here He says,
"Before Abraham came into being, I am." But to Moses He says, "I am that I
am." He certainly announced the eternity of His Divine nature with
marvellous grandeur of language, for nothing can be spoken so worthily of
God, as that He should be said ever to be. For "to be" admits of no
beginning in the past or end in the future. And so this is very clearly
spoken of the nature of the eternal God, as it exactly describes His
eternity. And this the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, when He was speaking of
Abraham, showed by the difference of terms used, saying, "Before Abraham
came into being I am." Of Abraham he said, "Before he came into being:" Of
Himself, "I am," for it belongs to things temporal to come into being: to
be belongs to eternity. And so "to come into being" He assigns to human
transitoriness: but "to be" to His own nature. And all this was found in
Christ who, by virtue of the mystery of the manhood and Divinity joined
together in Him who ever "was," could say that He already "was."
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