His Coming Was Never Hidden

But I suppose you excuse the insult offered to the Lord by giving him a lesser honor, with the words “as the image of the hidden God.” By calling him an image you compare him to man’s condition, and by speaking of him as the image of the hidden God you take away from the honor plainly due to him. For David says, “God will come plainly; our God, and he will not keep silent.” And he surely came and did not keep silent. Before he uttered anything in his own person after his birth, he made his coming known by earthly and heavenly witnesses alike: the star points him out, the magi worship him, and angels announce him. What more do you want? His voice was still silent on earth, and his glory was already crying aloud in heaven. Do you say, then, that God was and is hidden in him? But that was not the message of the prophets, of the patriarchs, yes, and of the whole Law. They did not say that he whose coming they all foretold would be hidden. [a]

You go astray in your wretched blindness, looking for grounds for blasphemy and not finding them. You say that he was hidden even after his coming. I maintain that he was not hidden even before his coming. Did the mystery of God, who was to be born of a Virgin, escape the knowledge of that famous patriarch on whom the vision of God present with him bestowed a title, so that from the name of Supplanter he rose to the name of Israel? When, from his struggle with the man who wrestled with him, he understood the mystery of the incarnation still to come, he said, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” What, I ask you, had he seen, that he should believe he had seen God? Did God show himself to him amid thunder and lightning? Or did the heavens open and the dazzling face of the Deity show itself to him? Most certainly not. On the contrary, he saw a man and acknowledged a God. How truly worthy he was of the name he received, since it was with the eyes of the soul rather than of the body that he earned the honor of a title given by God! He saw a human form wrestling with him, and declared that he saw God. He certainly knew that the human form was in fact God, for in the form in which God appeared then, in that very same form he was in all truth to come afterward. And yet why should we be surprised that so great a patriarch believed without hesitation what God himself showed him so plainly in his own person, when he said, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved”? How did God show him so much of the presence of the Deity that he could say the face of God had been shown to him? For it seems that only a man had appeared to him, one whom he had actually beaten in the struggle. But God was certainly bringing this about by signs that went before, so that no one would disbelieve that God was born of man, when long before, the patriarch had already seen God in human form.