The Prophets Called Him God

He it is, then, of whom the prophet says: “For God is in you, and there is no God besides you. For you are our God, and we did not know you, O God of Israel, the Savior.” He “afterward appeared on earth and lived among men.” Of him, and in his person, the prophet David also speaks: “From my mother’s womb you are my God.” He shows clearly that he who was Lord and man was never separate from God, and that the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in him even in the Virgin’s womb. As the same prophet says elsewhere: “Truth has sprung from the earth, and righteousness has looked down from heaven.” So we may know that when the Son of God looked down from heaven (that is, came and descended), righteousness was born of the flesh of the Virgin; no phantom of a body, but the Truth. For he is the Truth, by his own true witness: “I am the truth and the life.” [a]

And so, since we proved in the earlier books that this Truth, that is, the Lord Jesus Christ, was God when he was born of the Virgin, let us now do what we resolved in the previous book to do, and show that he who was to be born of the Virgin was always declared beforehand to be God. And so the prophet Isaiah says, “Cease from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for it is he in whom he is reckoned to be”; or, as it is more exactly and clearly in the Hebrew, “for he is reckoned high.” By saying “cease,” a word that pleads against violence, he admirably points to the turmoil of persecution. “Cease,” he says, “from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for he is reckoned high.” Does he not, in one and the same sentence, speak both of his taking on manhood and of the truth of his Godhead? “Cease,” he says, “from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for he is reckoned high.” Does he not, I ask you, seem plainly to be addressing the Lord’s persecutors, and saying, “Cease from the man” whom you are persecuting, for this man is God; and though he appears in the lowliness of human flesh, he still remains in the high state of divine glory? By saying “Cease from the man whose breath is in his nostrils,” he admirably showed his manhood by the clearest signs of a human body. And he did this fearlessly and confidently, as one who would assert the truth of his humanity as urgently as that of his Godhead. For this is the true and catholic faith: to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ had the substance of a true body, just as he had a true and perfect divinity.

Unless perhaps you think something can be made of the fact that he uses the word “High” instead of “God.” But it is the habit of Holy Scripture to put “High” for “God,” as where the prophet says, “The Most High uttered his voice, and the earth was moved,” and “You alone are Most High over all the earth.” Isaiah too says this: “The High and lofty One who inhabits eternity.” Here we are clearly to understand that, as he puts Most High there without adding the name of God, so here too he speaks of God by the name of Most High. So then, since the divine word spoken by the prophet clearly announced beforehand that the Lord Jesus Christ would be both God and man, let us now see whether the New Testament agrees and harmonizes with the testimony of the Old.