Children by Birth and by Deed

The Lord has said that there are certain angels — the devil’s angels — for whom everlasting fire has been prepared. And speaking of the weeds he says, “The weeds are the children of the evil one.” So it has to be said that he assigns everyone who belongs to the apostasy to the one who took the lead in that offense. But he did not make either angels or men that way by nature. We nowhere find that the devil created anything at all, since he is himself a creature of God, like the rest of the angels. God made all things, as David also says about everything of that kind: “For he spoke the word, and they were made; he gave the command, and they were created.” [a]

So then, since all things were made by God, and since the devil has made himself the cause of apostasy for himself and for others, Scripture is right to keep calling those who stay in a state of apostasy “sons of the devil” and “angels of the evil one.” For the word “son,” as a man before me observed, carries two meanings. One is a son in the order of nature, because he was born a son. The other is a son because he was made one, and so counts as a son — though there is a difference between being born a son and being made one. The first is actually born from the person in question. The second is made his by him, either by having been created by him or by being taught his teaching. When a person has been taught from someone else’s mouth, he is called the son of the man who instructs him, and the instructor is called his father. By nature, then — that is, by creation, so to speak — we are all sons of God, because we have all been created by God. But when it comes to obedience and teaching, we are not all sons of God. Only those are who believe in him and do his will. And those who do not believe and do not obey his will are the sons and the angels of the devil, because they do the devil’s works. He declared that this is so through Isaiah: “I have fathered children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.” And again, where he says that these children are strangers to him: “Strange children have lied to me.” By nature, then, they are his children, because they were created so; but as far as their works go, they are not his children.

Among men, sons who disobey their fathers are disinherited. They are still their sons in the course of nature, but by law they are cut off, and they do not become the heirs of the parents who fathered them. It is the same with God. Those who do not obey him are disinherited by him and have stopped being his sons, and so they cannot receive his inheritance. As David says, “Sinners are estranged from the womb; their rage is after the likeness of a serpent.” That is why the Lord called men he knew to be the offspring of men “a brood of vipers” — because, in the way of those creatures, they go about slyly and injure others. He said, “Watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.” Of Herod he said, “Go and tell that fox,” aiming at the man’s wicked cunning and deceit. And that is why the prophet David says, “Man, when he was set in honor, was made like the cattle.” And Jeremiah says, “They have become like horses mad for the mares; each one neighed after his neighbor’s wife.” And Isaiah, preaching in Judea and reasoning with Israel, called them “rulers of Sodom” and “people of Gomorrah” — meaning that they were like the men of Sodom in wickedness, and that the same sort of sins were rife among them, and so calling them by the same name because their conduct was the same. And since God had not created them that way by nature, and since it was also in their power to act rightly, the same prophet said to them, giving them good advice: “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; take the wickedness out of your souls before my eyes; stop your wicked deeds.” No doubt, then, since they had broken the law and sinned in the same way, they got the same rebuke the men of Sodom got. But if they turned back and came to repentance and stopped doing evil, they would have it in their power to become sons of God and to receive from him the inheritance of immortality. This, then, is why he has called “angels of the devil” and “children of the evil one” those men who pay attention to the devil and do his works. Yet at the same time every one of them was created by one and the same God. When they believe and are subject to God, and go on and keep his teaching, they are sons of God. But when they have gone into apostasy and fallen into wrongdoing, they are put down to the account of their chief, the devil — the one who first became the cause of apostasy for himself, and afterwards for others.

The words of the Lord are many, and all of them proclaim one and the same Father, the Creator of this world. So it fell to me, for these people’s own sake, to refute with many arguments men who are tangled up in many errors — in the hope that when they have been shown wrong by many proofs they may be turned to the truth and saved. But in what follows I must add to this composition the teaching of Paul as well, after the Lord’s words: to examine that man’s mind, to expound the apostle, to explain whatever passages the heretics have read some other way — for they have misunderstood what Paul said from top to bottom — to show up the foolishness of their mad opinions, and to prove out of that same Paul, from whose writings they press their questions on us, that they are utterers of falsehood while the apostle was a preacher of the truth. He taught everything in agreement with the preaching of the truth: that it was one God the Father who spoke with Abraham, who gave the law, who sent the prophets ahead of time, who in the last times sent his Son, and who granted salvation to his own handiwork — that is, to the substance of flesh. So I will arrange in another book the rest of the words the Lord taught about the Father, not in parables but in expressions taken in their plain sense, and along with them the exposition of the letters of the blessed apostle. With God’s help I will then hand you the finished work of the exposure and refutation of knowledge falsely so called, and by these five books train myself, and you, to stand against every one of the heretics.