Chapter 17

§ 1.

And this is the Creator, Who in love is our Father, in power our Lord, in wisdom our Maker and Framer: whose commandment also disobeying, we have become enemies to Him. And therefore in the last times the Lord restored us to friendship by His Incarnation,¹ being made Mediator of God and men: on the one hand, appeasing the Father in our behalf, against whom we had sinned, and assuaging² our disobedience by His own obedience; on the other hand, granting unto us to be on terms of citizenship and dutifulness with our Maker. For which cause in prayer also He taught us to say,³ And forgive us our debts; implying of course that This is our Father, Whose debtors we were, as having transgressed His commandment. And who is This? Some unknown Father, and such as never giveth precept to any? Or rather the God Who is proclaimed by the Scriptures, to Whom also we were debtors, transgressing His Commandment? For indeed Commandment was given unto man by the Word; For Adam,⁴ saith He, heard the voice of the Lord God. Well therefore saith His Word unto Man,⁵ Thy sins are forgiven; that same, against Whom we had sinned at first, bestowing remission of sins at last.⁶ Else, if it was one being’s command which we transgressed, and it was another who said, Thy sins be forgiven thee: this one is neither good, nor truthful, nor just. For how is he good, who giveth, not of His own? or how just, who seizes what is another’s? and how are sins truly forgiven, except He Himself whom we sinned against granted the forgiveness,⁷ for the bowels of mercy of our God, in which He hath visited us by His Son?

§ 2.

Wherefore also,⁸ on the healing of the Paralytic, The people, saith He, seeing it, glorified God, Who had given such power unto men. What God, I ask, did the people then present glorify? Was it at all one discovered by the heretics, an unknown Father? and how did they glorify Him, Who before in the beginning was not known by them? Plain it is then, that the Israelites were glorifying Him, who was proclaimed God by the Law and the Prophets, who is also the Father of our Lord: and therefore He was teaching men sensibly by those signs which He wrought to give glory to God. Whereas if He had Himself come from one Father, and men on sight of His miracles were glorifying another Father; He was rendering them ungrateful to that Father who had sent them healing. But to shew that from Him Who is God, the Only-Begotten Son had come for the salvation of man, and He by the miracles which He wrought was summoning the Unbelievers to give glory to the Father; and that what He was even now saying to the Pharisees,⁹ That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power to forgive sins: He said to them as not receiving the advent of His Son, and therefore not believing the pardon which was being wrought by Him:—He also, having so spoken, commanded the man sick of the palsy to take up the bed on which he lay, and to go to his own house: by this His act confounding the Unbelievers, and signifying that He is Himself the Voice of God, by which man received precepts which he transgressed and became a sinner. For the palsy was the result of sins.

§ 3.

Therefore in forgiving sins,¹⁰ while He cured the man, He also manifestly declared Himself, Who He is. For if no man can forgive sins but God only, and if our Lord did forgive them, and heal man; plain it is, that He was the very Word of God, made Son of Man, receiving from the Father the power of remitting sins, in that He is Man, and in that He is God: so that even as being Man, He sympathized with us, so being God He may have mercy on us, and forgive us our debts, which we owe to God our Creator. And therefore David said before,¹¹ Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord hath not imputed sin; foreshewing that remission which is by His Coming,¹² whereby He hath blotted out the handwriting of our debt, and hath fastened it to the Cross: that as by the Tree we were made debtors to God, so by the Tree we may receive remission of our debt.

§ 4.

This, as it was shewn typically¹³ by many others, so also especially by the Prophet Elisha.¹⁴ For when the Prophets with him were cutting wood to make a Tabernacle, and the iron shaken off from an axe had fallen into Jordan, and was not found of them, and Elisha coming to the same place, had been told what had happened; he cast wood into the water; and upon his doing this, the iron of the axe floated,¹⁵ and from the surface of the water they took it, who before had lost it: and so the Prophet by deed signified, that by the Dispensation of the wood we were to receive again the solid Word of God, which by the Wood we had negligently lost, and were not in a way to find.¹⁶ But to shew that the Word of God is like unto an axe, John the Baptist saith concerning Him,¹⁷ But now the axe is laid unto the root of the trees. And Jeremiah saith in like manner, The Word of the Lord is as an axe cleaving a rock.¹⁸ Him then, hidden from us, the dispensation of the Wood, as we said before, revealed. For since by Wood we lost Him, by Wood again He was made manifest unto all, shewing forth the length and height and depth and breadth in Himself; and as one of those who have gone before said, “by the divine extension of His Hands gathering the two peoples together unto one God. For the Hands indeed are two, because there are also two peoples dispersed unto the ends of the earth: but the Head in the midst is one, because God is One,¹⁹ Who is above all, and through all, and in us all.”