The Hand That Formed Us

The one who created man at the beginning promised him a second birth after his dissolving away into earth. Isaiah declares it this way: “The dead will rise again, and those who are in the tombs will get up, and those who are in the earth will rejoice. For the dew that comes from you is health to them.” And again: “I will comfort you, and you will be comforted in Jerusalem. And you will see, and your heart will rejoice, and your bones will flourish like grass; and the hand of the Lord will be known to those who worship him.” [a]

And Ezekiel speaks like this: “And the hand of the Lord came upon me, and the Lord led me out in the Spirit and set me down in the middle of the plain, and the place was full of bones. And he made me pass by them all around, and there were many of them on the surface of the plain, very dry. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I said, ‘Lord, you who made them know.’ And he said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: You dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. This is what the Lord says to these bones. See, I am going to bring the spirit of life upon you, and I will lay sinews on you, and bring flesh up over you again, and stretch skin over you, and put my Spirit into you, and you will live; and you will know that I am the Lord.’ And I prophesied as the Lord had commanded me. And while I was prophesying, there was an earthquake, and the bones were drawn together, each one to its own joint. And I looked, and there were the sinews and the flesh coming up over them, and the skin rose over them all around — but there was no breath in them. And he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, son of man, and say to the breath: This is what the Lord says. Come from the four winds and breathe on these dead, so that they may live.’ So I prophesied as the Lord had commanded me, and the breath entered into them; and they lived, and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great gathering.” And again he says: “This is what the Lord says. See, I will set your graves open and bring you out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel; and you will know that I am the Lord, when I open your tombs so as to bring my people up again out of the tombs. And I will put my Spirit into you, and you will live; and I will settle you in your own land, and you will know that I am the Lord. I have spoken, and I will do it, says the Lord.”

We see at once that in this passage it is the Creator who gives life to our dead bodies, who promises them resurrection and a raising up out of their graves and tombs, and who grants them immortality as well — for he says, “As the tree of life, so will their days be.” So he is shown to be the only God who does these things, and to be himself the good Father, generously giving life to those who have no life from themselves.

This is why the Lord showed himself and the Father plainly to his disciples: so that they would not go looking for some other God besides the one who formed man and gave him the breath of life, and so that men would not work themselves up to such a pitch of madness as to invent another Father above the Creator. It is also how he healed all the others whose bodies were weak because of sin — with a word. To one of them he said, “Look, you have been made well. Sin no more, or something worse may happen to you.” By this he was pointing out that our infirmities have come upon us because of the sin of disobedience.

But to the man who had been blind from birth he gave sight not by a word but by an outward act. He did not do it aimlessly, or because things happened to fall out that way, but so that he might display the hand of God — the hand that had shaped man at the beginning. So when his disciples asked him why the man had been born blind, whether it was his own fault or his parents’, he answered, “Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be made plain in him.” And the work of God is the fashioning of man. For Scripture says that he made him by an actual piece of work: “And the Lord took clay from the earth and formed man.”

That is why the Lord spat on the ground and made clay and smeared it on the man’s eyes. He was pointing to the original fashioning of man and how it was carried out, and making the hand of God plain to anyone who can grasp by what hand man was formed out of the dust. What the craftsman, the Word, had left unformed in the womb, he then supplied out in the open, so that the works of God might be shown in him. And this was so that we would not go hunting for some other hand that fashioned man, or some other Father — knowing that this hand of God, which formed us at the beginning and which forms us in the womb, has in the last times sought us out when we were lost, winning back what was his own, taking the lost sheep up on his shoulders and carrying it back with joy to the fold of life.

That the Word of God forms us in the womb, he says to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you came out of the belly I made you holy and appointed you a prophet among the nations.” Paul says the same thing: “But when it pleased God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, that I might proclaim him among the nations.”

So, since it is by the Word that we are formed in the womb, it was this same Word who formed the power of sight in the man born blind. He was showing openly who it is that fashions us in secret, now that the Word himself had been made visible to men; and he was declaring the original forming of Adam, how he was made and by what hand he was fashioned, pointing to the whole by means of a part. For the Lord who formed the powers of sight is the one who made the whole man, carrying out the will of the Father.

And since man, in the forming that came after Adam, had fallen into transgression and needed the washing of rebirth, the Lord said to the man whose eyes he had smeared with clay, “Go to Siloam and wash.” In this way he gave him back both his complete forming and the rebirth that comes through the washing. And that is why, when he had washed, he came back seeing: so that he might know the one who had fashioned him, and so that man might learn to know the one who has given him life.

So all the followers of Valentinus lose their case when they say that man was not fashioned out of this earth of ours but out of some fluid, spread-out substance. For it is plain that man was fashioned at the beginning out of the same earth from which the Lord formed eyes for that man. It would make no sense for the eyes to be formed from one source and the rest of the body from another, any more than it would make sense for one being to fashion the body and another the eyes.

It was the very same one who formed Adam at the beginning — the one the Father spoke to when he said, “Let us make man after our image and likeness” — who, revealing himself to men in these last times, formed the power of sight for the man who had been blind and who came from Adam. This is also why Scripture, pointing to what was going to happen, says that when Adam had hidden himself because of his disobedience, the Lord came to him toward evening, called him out, and said, “Where are you?” That means that in the last times the very same Word of God came to call man, reminding him of the things he had done — the life he was living when he hid himself from the Lord. Just as God spoke to Adam toward evening then, searching him out, so in the last times, by the same voice, he has searched out Adam’s descendants and visited them.

And since Adam was shaped out of this earth of ours, Scripture tells us that God said to him, “By the sweat of your face you will eat your bread, until you turn back into the dust you were taken from.” Now if after death our bodies return into some other substance, then that is the substance they have come from. But if they return into this very earth, then plainly it was from this that man’s frame was made — as the Lord also showed clearly when he formed eyes for that man out of this very stuff. [n]

And so the hand of God was plainly displayed, the hand that fashioned Adam and that has formed us as well. There is one and the same Father, whose voice is present with his own handiwork from the beginning to the end; and the Gospel declares plainly what substance we were formed out of. We should not, then, go looking for another Father besides him, nor for another substance we were formed from besides the one already named and displayed by the Lord, nor for another hand of God besides the hand that from the beginning to the end forms us and makes us ready for life, that stays with its own handiwork and brings it to completion after the image and likeness of God.

And this Word was made plain when the Word of God became man, making himself like man and man like himself, so that by his likeness to the Son man might become precious to the Father. In times long past it was said that man was made after the image of God, but it was not actually shown, since the Word after whose image man was made was still invisible. That is also why man lost the likeness so easily. But when the Word of God became flesh, he made both of them good again. He showed the image truly, since he himself became what his image was; and he set the likeness firmly back in place, making man like the invisible Father by means of the visible Word.

And the Lord has shown himself not only by the things just named, but by his suffering as well. To undo that disobedience of man which happened at the beginning by way of a tree, “he became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” — setting right, by obedience on a tree, the disobedience that had come about by means of a tree. He would not have come to undo, by that same figure, the disobedience committed against our Maker, if he were announcing some other Father.

But since it was by these things that we disobeyed God and refused to believe his word, it was by these same things that he brought in obedience and agreement with his Word. And in them he plainly shows God himself — the very God we offended in the first Adam, when Adam did not carry out his command. In the second Adam we are reconciled, made obedient to the point of death. For we were in debt to no one but to him whose command we had broken at the beginning.

This one, then, is the Creator. In respect of his love he is Father; in respect of his power he is Lord; in respect of his wisdom he is our Maker and Fashioner. By breaking his command we became his enemies. And so in the last times the Lord has restored us to friendship by his coming in flesh, becoming “the mediator between God and men.” He made the Father favorable toward us again — the Father against whom we had sinned — and cancelled our disobedience by his own obedience, and gave us as a gift both fellowship with our Maker and submission to him. [r]

This is also why he taught us to say in prayer, “And forgive us our debts” — since he is in fact our Father, and it was to him we were in debt, having broken his commands. But who is this? Is he some unknown one, a Father who gives no command to anybody? Or is he the God proclaimed in the Scriptures, the one we were in debt to because we broke his command? Now the command was given to man by the Word, for Adam, we are told, “heard the voice of the Lord God.” So it is right that his Word says to man, “Your sins are forgiven you.” The very one we sinned against at the beginning is the one who grants forgiveness of sins at the end.

But suppose we had disobeyed the command of one being while a different being said, “Your sins are forgiven you.” Such a one would be neither good nor truthful nor just. How can anyone be good who does not give out of what belongs to him? How can anyone be just who snatches away another man’s property? And how can sins really be forgiven unless the one we have sinned against has himself granted the pardon, “through the deep mercy of our God,” by which “he has visited us” through his Son?

And so, when he had healed the paralyzed man, the evangelist says, “The people who saw it glorified God, who had given such power to men.” Which God did the bystanders glorify, then? Was it that unknown Father the heretics invented? And how could they glorify someone entirely unknown to them? Plainly, then, the Israelites glorified the one proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets, who is also the Father of our Lord. And that is why he taught men, through the signs he performed, by the evidence of their own senses, to give glory to God.

If he had himself come from a different Father, and men glorified a different Father when they saw his miracles, then he made them ungrateful to the Father who had sent the gift of healing. But since the only Son had come from the one who is God, for man’s salvation, he did two things at once. By the miracles he regularly worked he stirred up the unbelieving to give glory to the Father; and to the Pharisees, who would not admit that his Son had come and so did not believe in the forgiveness he granted, he said, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins.” And when he had said this, he ordered the paralyzed man to pick up the mat he had been lying on and go home. By this act of his he silenced the unbelievers and showed that he is himself the voice of God — the voice by which man received the commands that he broke, and so became a sinner. For the paralysis had followed as a consequence of sins.

So in forgiving sins he really did heal the man, while he also showed who he himself was. For if no one can forgive sins but God alone, and yet the Lord forgave them and healed men, then plainly he was himself the Word of God made Son of Man, receiving from the Father the authority to forgive sins — being man, and being God — so that, as he suffered for us as man, he might have compassion on us as God and forgive us our debts, the debts we had run up toward God our Creator.

And this is why David said beforehand: “Happy are those whose lawless acts are forgiven and whose sins are covered over. Happy is the man to whom the Lord has not charged sin.” He was pointing to the forgiveness of sins that follows on his coming, by which “he wiped out the record” of our debt and “nailed it to the cross” — so that, as by means of a tree we were made debtors to God, by means of a tree we might have our debt cancelled.

Many others have set this out strikingly, and Elisha the prophet above all. His fellow prophets were cutting timber to put up a shelter, and the iron head flew off an axe and fell into the Jordan, and they could not find it. Elisha came to the place, learned what had happened, and threw a piece of wood into the water. When he had done that, the iron of the axe floated up, and they took what they had lost off the surface of the water.

By this act the prophet was pointing out that the firm word of God, which we had carelessly lost by means of a tree and had no way of finding again, we would receive back by the arrangement of a tree. For that the word of God is compared to an axe, John the Baptist declares when he says of it, “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees.” Jeremiah says the same: “The word of God splits the rock like an axe.”

So this word, which had been hidden from us, the arrangement of the tree made plain, as I have already remarked. As we lost it by means of a tree, by means of a tree it was made plain again to everyone, showing in itself the height, the length, the breadth, and the depth. As one of our predecessors put it: “By the divine stretching out of the hands, gathering the two peoples together to one God.” For there were two hands, because there were two peoples scattered to the ends of the earth; and there was one head in the middle, since there is one God, who is above all and through all and in us all.