Before Abraham Came into Being, I Am

And though this is the saying of an apostle, it is the very teaching of the Lord. For the same Person who says this to Christians through his apostle had himself said something very like it to the Jews in the gospel, when he said: “But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. For I have not come of myself, but he sent me.” He clearly shows that he is both God and man: man, in that he says that he is a man; God, in that he declares that he was sent. For he must have been with the one from whom he came, and he came from the one by whom he said he was sent. That is why, when the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” he answered in words that exactly fit his eternity and glory: “Truly, truly, I tell you, before Abraham came into being, I am.” [a]

I ask, then: whose saying do you think this is? Certainly it is Christ’s, beyond any doubt. And how could he who had been born only recently say that he existed before Abraham? Simply because of the Word of God, with which he was entirely united, so that all might understand how close the union of Christ and God is; since whatever God said in Christ, the unity of the divinity claimed in its fullness as its own. But, conscious of his own eternity, he rightly answered the Jews, when he was in the body, with the very words he had once spoken to Moses in the Spirit. For here he says, “Before Abraham came into being, I am.” But to Moses he says, “I am who I am.” He certainly announced the eternity of his divine nature with marvelous grandeur of language, for nothing can be said so worthily of God as that he always is. For “to be” admits no beginning in the past and no end in the future. So this is said very clearly of the nature of the eternal God, since it exactly describes his eternity.

And the Lord Jesus Christ himself showed this, when he was speaking of Abraham, by the difference in the terms he used, saying, “Before Abraham came into being, I am.” Of Abraham he said, “before he came into being”; of himself, “I am.” For coming into being belongs to things in time; being belongs to eternity. So he assigns “coming into being” to the passing life of man, but “being” to his own nature. And all this was found in Christ, who, by virtue of the mystery of the manhood and the divinity joined together in him who always “was,” could say that he already “was.”