No One Else Is Called God

So, since the tradition that comes from the apostles is present in the church and stays with us, let us go back to the proof from Scripture given by those apostles who also wrote the Gospel. In it they set down the teaching about God, showing that our Lord Jesus Christ is the truth and that there is no lie in him. David says as much, prophesying his birth from a virgin and his rising from the dead: “Truth has sprung up out of the earth.” The apostles in the same way, as students of the truth, are above every falsehood. A lie has nothing in common with the truth, any more than darkness has with light; where the one is present, the other is shut out. [a]

So our Lord, being the truth, told no lies. He would never have acknowledged as God — as the God of all, as the highest King, and as his own Father — anyone he knew to have come out of a defect. He would not have called an imperfect being perfect, or a being of soul spiritual, or one who stood outside the Pleroma one who was inside it. Nor did his disciples ever mention any other God, or give the title Lord to anyone but the one who truly is God and Lord of all — whatever these empty word‑spinners say, who claim that the apostles hypocritically shaped their teaching to what their hearers could take, and answered people according to the opinions those people already held: telling blind things to the blind, to match their blindness; dull things to the dull; and to those in error, things that matched their error. To people who supposed that the Demiurge alone was God, they preached the Demiurge; but to those able to take in the Father who cannot be named, they announced the unspeakable mystery in parables and riddles. Which would mean that the Lord and the apostles did the work of a teacher not to serve the truth, but actually in hypocrisy, giving each person only as much as he was able to receive!

That is not how people who heal behave, or people who give life. It is how people behave who bring on diseases and make ignorance worse. The law will be found far truer than these men, for it declares a curse on anyone who sends a blind man off the road. The apostles were sent to look for the people who had wandered off, to be eyes for those who could not see and medicine for the weak. They certainly did not speak to them according to whatever opinion they held at the time, but according to the truth that had been revealed. Nobody would be acting properly who told blind men standing on the edge of a cliff to keep going the way they were going, as though it were the right road and they were perfectly safe. And what doctor who wanted to cure a sick man would prescribe by the patient’s whims instead of by the medicine the case requires?

But that the Lord came as the doctor of the sick he declares himself, saying, “Those who are well have no need of a doctor, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” So how are the sick to be made strong? How are sinners to come to repentance? By carrying on in exactly the same courses? Or, on the contrary, by a great change, a complete turning around of the old way of living that has brought this heavy sickness and these many sins on them? Ignorance is the mother of all of it, and ignorance is driven out by knowledge. That is why the Lord kept giving his disciples knowledge — the very thing by which he used to heal those who were suffering and hold sinners back from sin. So he did not speak to people to suit the notions they had before, and he did not answer his questioners to match their opinions. He spoke according to the teaching that leads to salvation, without hypocrisy and without favoritism.

The words of the Lord make this clear as well. To the circumcised he really did reveal the Son of God — the one the prophets had foretold as Christ; that is, he set himself before them, the one who had given people back their freedom and handed them the inheritance of incorruption. And the apostles taught the Gentiles to leave behind the worthless wood and stone they imagined to be gods, and to worship the true God, who created and made the whole human family and, by means of his creation, feeds them, makes them grow, gives them strength and keeps them in being. They were to look for his Son Jesus Christ, who bought us back out of the revolt with his own blood, so that we too might be a people made holy; who will also come down from heaven in his Father’s power and pass judgment on everyone, and who will freely give the good things of God to those who have kept his commands. Appearing in these last times as the chief cornerstone, he has gathered into one and joined together those who were far off and those who were near — that is, the circumcised and the uncircumcised — enlarging Japheth and settling him in the tents of Shem.

So neither the Lord, nor the Holy Spirit, nor the apostles would ever have named anyone God, plainly and without qualification, who was not God — unless he truly was God. And they would never have called anyone Lord in his own right except God the Father, who rules over all, and his Son, who has received from his Father authority over all creation. Take this passage: “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” Here Scripture shows us the Father speaking to the Son — the Father who gave him the nations as his inheritance and put all his enemies under him. So, since the Father is truly Lord and the Son is truly Lord, the Holy Spirit rightly gave them both the title Lord. [h]

And again, about the destruction of the people of Sodom, Scripture says, “Then the Lord rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah fire and sulfur from the Lord out of heaven.” It is pointing out here that the Son — the one who had also been talking with Abraham — had received the power to judge the people of Sodom for their wickedness. And the text that follows declares the same thing: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a straight scepter. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you.” For the Spirit gives the name God to both of them — to the one who is anointed as Son, and to the one who anoints, that is, the Father.

And again: “God stood in the assembly of the gods; he judges among the gods.” He is speaking of the Father and the Son and those who have received adoption as sons — and these are the church. For she is God’s own gathering, which God, that is, the Son himself, gathered by himself. He speaks of them again: “The God of gods, the Lord, has spoken and has called the earth.” Who is meant by God? The one of whom it is said, “God will come openly, our God, and will not keep silence” — that is, the Son, who came and was made plain to people, and who said, “I appeared openly to those who were not looking for me.” And which gods does he mean? The ones he says this to: “I have said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” Plainly those who have received the grace of the “adoption by which we cry, Abba, Father.”

So, as I have already said, no one else is named as God or called Lord except the one who is God and Lord of all — the one who also said to Moses, “I am the One who is. And this is what you will say to the children of Israel: He who is has sent me to you” — and his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who makes those who believe in his name sons of God. And again, when the Son speaks to Moses, he says, “I have come down to rescue this people.” For it is he who came down and went up again for the salvation of the human race. So God has been declared through the Son, who is in the Father and has the Father in himself — he who is — the Father bearing witness to the Son and the Son announcing the Father. Isaiah says as much: “I too am a witness,” he says, “declares the Lord God, and the Son whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe and understand that I am.”

When Scripture does give the name of gods to things that are no gods, it does not — as I have already remarked — call them gods without qualification. It adds something, some mark of meaning, that shows they are no gods at all. So with David: “The gods of the nations are idols of demons,” and, “You shall not follow other gods.” By saying “the gods of the nations” — and the nations do not know the true God — and by calling them “other gods,” he shuts out any claim of theirs to be gods at all. As for what they are in themselves, he tells us that too: “they are,” he says, “the idols of demons.” And Isaiah: “Let them all be put to shame who blaspheme God and carve useless things; I too am a witness, says God.” He takes them out of the class of gods, and uses the word by itself only so that we may know who he is talking about. Jeremiah says the same: “The gods who did not make heaven and earth — let them perish from the earth that is under heaven.” By adding their destruction he shows that they are no gods at all.

Elijah too, when all Israel was gathered at Mount Carmel and he wanted to turn them from idol worship, says to them, “How long will you go limping on both legs? If the Lord is God, follow him.” And again, at the burnt offering, he says this to the idol priests: “You will call on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the Lord my God; and the Lord who answers by fire — he is God.” By saying this the prophet proves that these gods, which those men held to be gods, are no gods at all. He pointed them to the God he himself believed in, who truly was God; and calling on him he cried out, “Lord God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob, hear me today, and let all this people know that you are the God of Israel.”

And so I too call on you, Lord God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob and Israel, who are the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; the God who out of the abundance of your mercy has looked on us with favor, so that we might know you; who made heaven and earth; who rule over all; who are the only and the true God, above whom there is no other God. Grant, through our Lord Jesus Christ, the governing power of the Holy Spirit. Give to everyone who reads this book to know you, that you alone are God; to be made strong in you; and to keep clear of every teaching that is heretical, godless and irreverent.

The apostle Paul, too, when he says, “Although you were slaves to things that are no gods, now you know God — or rather, are known by God,” has drawn a line between the ones that were not gods and the one who is God. And again, speaking of Antichrist, he says, “who opposes and lifts himself above everything that is called God or is worshiped.” He is pointing here to the things called gods by people who do not know God — that is, idols. For the Father of all is called God and is God; and Antichrist will be lifted up, not above him, but above the things that are indeed called gods and are not. Paul himself says that this is so: “We know that an idol is nothing, and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so‑called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we through him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him.” He has made a distinction, then, separating the things that are indeed called gods and are none from the one God the Father, from whom are all things; and he has confessed, as plainly as a man can and in his own person, one Lord Jesus Christ.

But in the clause “whether in heaven or on earth” he is not speaking of the world‑makers, the way these teachers explain it. His meaning is like that of Moses, where it is said, “You shall not make for yourself any image for God, of anything in heaven above, or anything on the earth beneath, or anything in the waters under the earth.” And Moses explains what the things in heaven are: “so that when you look up toward heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars and all the ornament of heaven, you may not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them.” And Moses himself, being a man of God, was indeed given as a god to Pharaoh; but he is not properly called Lord, and the prophets do not call him God. The Spirit speaks of him as “Moses, the faithful attendant and servant of God” — which is what he was.

They claim that Paul said plainly, in his second letter to the Corinthians, “in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of those who do not believe,” and they hold from it that there is indeed one god of this world, but another who is beyond every rule and beginning and power. It is not our fault if people who advertise that they know mysteries beyond God do not know how to read Paul. Read the sentence like this — following Paul’s habit of transposing his words, which I show elsewhere with many examples. Read “in whom God,” then mark it off, leave a slight interval, and at the same time take the rest in a single clause: “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this world.” Do that and you will find the true sense, which is contained in the words “God has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this world.” The little interval is what shows it. For Paul does not say “the god of this world,” as though he recognized any other beyond him; he confessed God as God indeed. And he says “the unbelievers of this world” because they will not inherit the coming age of incorruption. How it is that God has blinded the minds of those who do not believe I will show from Paul himself in the course of this work; I do not want to pull our minds off the matter in hand just now by wandering. [w]

Many other passages also let us see that the apostle often uses a transposed order in his sentences, because of how fast his speech runs and because of the drive of the Spirit that is in him. One case is in Galatians, where he puts it like this: “Why then the law of works? It was added until the seed should come to whom the promise was made, ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator.” For the order of the words runs like this: “Why then the law of works? Ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator, it was added until the seed should come to whom the promise was made” — a man asking the question, and the Spirit making the answer.

And again, in the second letter to the Thessalonians, speaking of Antichrist, he says, “And then that lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus Christ will kill with the breath of his mouth and will destroy by the appearing of his coming; whose coming is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders.” Now in these sentences the order of the words is this: “And then that lawless one will be revealed, whose coming is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and will destroy by the appearing of his coming.” He does not mean that the coming of the Lord is according to the working of Satan, but the coming of the lawless one, whom we also call Antichrist.

So if a man does not attend to how the passage is read, and does not bring out the breathing pauses where they fall, the result is not only awkwardness: as he reads he will actually speak blasphemy, as though the coming of the Lord could take place according to the working of Satan. In passages like these, then, the transposition has to be brought out by the reading, and the apostle’s meaning kept as it runs on. And so in that passage we do not read “the god of this world,” but “God,” whom we truly call God; and we hear it said of the unbelieving and the blinded of this world that they will not inherit the world of life which is to come.