The Prophets Call Him God

Since there is an abundant supply of witnesses to the holy birth, namely everything that has been written for this very purpose, to bear witness to it, let us also look a little at an announcement about God in the Old Testament. Then you will know that the birth of God from a virgin was not announced only when it actually took place, but had been foretold from the very beginning of the world. It was foretold so that, since the thing to be brought about was beyond words, unbelief about it when it came might be removed by its having been announced beforehand, while it was still to come. And so the prophet Isaiah says: “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a Son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.” What room is there here for doubt, you unbeliever? The prophet said that a virgin would conceive: a virgin has conceived. He said that a Son would be born: a Son has been born. He said that he would be called God: he is called God. For he is called by that name because he is of that nature. So when the Spirit of God said that he would be called God, he showed that anyone who makes himself a stranger to all fellowship with this divine title is without the Spirit of God. [a]

“Behold, then,” he says, “a virgin will conceive and bear a Son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.” But here is a point your evasive unbelief may perhaps seize on. You may say that what the prophet declared he would be called referred not to the glory of his divinity, but to the name by which people would address him. But what are we to make of the fact that Christ is never called by this name in the Gospels, while the Spirit of God cannot be said to have spoken falsely through the prophet? How is it, then? Surely we are to understand that the prophecy foretold the name of his divine nature, and not of his humanity. For since in his manhood united to the Godhead he received another name in the Gospel, it is plainly clear that that name belonged to his humanity and this one to his divinity.

But let us go further and call other true witnesses to establish the truth; for when we are speaking about the Godhead, the divinity cannot be better established than by his own witnesses. So the same prophet says elsewhere: “For to us a Son is born, to us a child is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder; and his name will be called the Angel of Great Counsel, the Mighty God, the Father of the World to Come, the Prince of Peace.” Just as above the prophet had said plainly that he would be called Emmanuel, so here he says that he would be called “the Angel of Great Counsel, and the Mighty God, and the Father of the World to Come, and the Prince of Peace,” although we certainly never read that he was called by these names in the Gospel. Of course this is so that we may understand that these are not terms belonging to his human nature but to his divine nature, and that the name used in the Gospel belonged to the manhood he took upon himself, while this one belonged to his innate power. And because God was to be born in human form, these names were so distributed in God’s sacred plan that a human name was given to the manhood and a divine one to the divinity. So he says: “He will be called the Angel of Great Counsel, the Mighty God, the Father of the World to Come, the Prince of Peace.”

No, heretic, whoever you may be: here the prophet, full as he was of the Holy Spirit, did not follow your example and compare the one who was born to a cast metal image, a senseless figure someone has fashioned. For “a Son,” he says, “is born to us, a child is given to us; and the government will be upon his shoulder; and his name will be called the Angel of Great Counsel, the Mighty God.” And so that you may not imagine the one he announced as God to be someone other than the one who was born in the flesh, he adds words referring to his birth, saying: “A child is born to us, a Son is given to us.” Do you see how many titles the prophet used to make clear the reality of his birth in the body? He called him both Son and child on purpose, so that what kind of child had been born might be shown more clearly by a name referring to his infancy. And the Holy Spirit, foreseeing without doubt this perversity of blasphemous heretics, showed the whole world by the very terms and words used that it was God who was born, so that even if a heretic were determined to utter blasphemy, he might find no loophole for it. So he says: “A Son is born to us, a child is given to us; and the government will be upon his shoulder; and his name will be called the Angel of Great Counsel, the Mighty God, the Father of the World to Come, the Prince of Peace.” He teaches that this child who was born is the Prince of Peace, and the Father of the World to Come, and the Mighty God. What room is there, then, for evasion? This child who is born cannot be cut off from God who is born in him; for the one he spoke of as born he called the Father of the World to Come, and the one he called a child he foretold as the Mighty God. What now, heretic? Where will you turn? Every way is fenced and shut in; there is no possible way out. There is nothing left but for you at last to be forced to confess the mistake you refused to understand.

But not content with these passages, though they are certainly enough, let us ask what the Holy Spirit said through another prophet. “Will a man pierce his God?” he says. “For you are piercing me.” To make the subject of the prophecy still clearer, the prophet foretells what he proclaimed about the Lord’s suffering as though from the mouth of the one he was speaking about. “Will a man pierce his God? For you are piercing me.” Does not our Lord God, I ask, seem to have said this when he was led to the cross? “Why indeed do you not acknowledge me as your Redeemer? Why do you not know God, clothed in flesh for your sake? Are you preparing death for your Savior? Are you leading the Author of life out to death? I am your God, whom you are lifting up; your God, whom you are crucifying.” What mistake is this, I ask, or what madness? “Will a man pierce his God? For you are piercing me.”

Do you see how exactly the words describe what was actually done? Could you ask for anything more explicit or clearer? Do you see how the sacred testimonies follow our Lord Jesus Christ, made flesh, from the very cradle to the cross he bore? For here you can see that the one you read of elsewhere as God when he was born in the flesh was God when he was pierced on the cross. So there, where his birth was in question, the prophet speaks of him as God; and here, where his crucifixion is in question, he is most plainly named God. This was so that his taking on of manhood might not in any point lessen the dignity of his divinity, and that the humbling of his body and the shame of his suffering might not touch the glory of his majesty. For his stooping down to so lowly a birth, and his generous goodness in enduring his suffering, ought to increase our love and devotion toward him; since it is certainly a great and monstrous sin if, the more he lavishes love on us, the less we honor him.