An Elder on Both Covenants

An elder, a disciple of the apostles, reasoned in just this way about the two covenants, proving that both truly came from one and the same God. There is no other God, he held, besides the one who made us and formed us; and there is nothing to the argument of the men who claim that this world of ours was made by angels, or by some power or other, or by a different God. For once a man has been moved away from the Maker of all things, and once he grants that this creation we belong to was formed by someone else, or through someone else, he cannot help falling into a great deal of inconsistency and into no end of contradictions of that kind — and he will have no explanations to offer for them that anyone could call likely or true. That is why the people who bring in other teachings hide from us the opinion they themselves hold about God. They know their own teaching is cracked and useless, and they are afraid that if they are beaten in the argument they will have trouble getting away. [a]

But suppose a man believes in one God only, who also made all things by the Word — as Moses likewise says, “God said, Let there be light; and there was light,” and as we read in the Gospel, “All things were made by him, and without him nothing was made,” and as the apostle Paul says in the same way, “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father, who is above all and through all and in us all.” That man will first of all “hold the head, from which the whole body is fitted and bound together, and through every joint, according to the measure of the work of each single part, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” And then every word will hold together for him as well, provided he reads the Scriptures carefully in the company of those who are elders in the church — the men among whom the apostles’ teaching is found, as I have pointed out.

All the apostles taught that there were indeed two covenants among the two peoples, but that it was one and the same God who appointed them both, for the good of the men for whose sake the covenants were given — the men who were to believe in God. I proved that in the third book, out of the apostles’ own teaching. And the first covenant was not given without reason, or to no purpose, or in some accidental way. It bent the people it was given to under the service of God, for their own benefit, since God needs no service from anyone. It displayed a pattern of heavenly things, because man was not yet able to see the things of God by sight of his own. It sketched in advance the images of the things that now actually exist in the church, so that our faith would stand firm. And it held a prophecy of things to come, so that man might learn that God knows all things beforehand.