Divine Nature of Christ

It has proof. He was always the Father, and therefore the Son also existed, coexisting eternally with his own begetter.

You loved righteousness.

The divine David, addressing the Father in heaven and God as if with a voice common to all humanity, cried out this prayer: 'God, command by your power, strengthen,' and 'God accomplishes what he has worked in us.' (Psalm 67:30)

But the power of the Father is the Son, through whom he made the heavens firm and established the earth, and has brought about the adornment of this world.

Moreover, he made man according to his own image and likeness, a worker of righteousness who surpasses corruption and death.

Yet because death has reigned through sin and we have become subject to corruption, and 'all have gone astray, together become useless,' the Maker and Lord of all things necessarily foresaw this among his own creations.

For God and Father was pleased to sum up all things in Christ and to renew them to their original state.

Therefore David, penetrating the deep mystery of the incarnation, proclaims to the Son who is from God by nature: 'You loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore, God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.' (Psalm 44:7-8)

Some think these words do not belong to the Only-begotten but should rather be spoken to a mere man, the one begotten from the holy virgin.

Yet such thinking is foolish, as demonstrated by many arguments.

It was not an ordinary man who was born to us, merely sharing our nature but stripped of any true unity with God, so that one might claim, following their own reasoning, to have foreknown him—the God of all things—as one who loves righteousness and hates lawlessness based solely on a private opinion.

Yet we may fittingly apply the voice of the Psalmist to the Only-Begotten who has appeared in human form, and direct our attention to Isaiah’s prophecies concerning him.

For he declared: 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive in her womb and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel.' (Isaiah 7:14)

He shall eat butter and honey before he knows how to refuse evil and choose the good.

For before the child knows either good or evil, he refuses wickedness in order to choose the good; he has loved righteousness and hated iniquity by his very nature, being righteousness and God himself.

For as yet, from the time of his birth, the child does not know what is hardened, nor does he praise what is not so constituted; how then could he have disobeyed wickedness in order to choose the good?

But he was, as I have said, God in the flesh—those naturally good things which belong to him being carried forth outside himself.

I do not merely praise what I wish to say; let it stand if it seems right according to the reasoning of the envious and the special virtue of one who dwells in face-to-face union and has been honored.

But since they say these things, I will ask: From what works then will this one be such—and yet, being a man according to nature, just as those of the divine order—be deemed worthy to receive thrones, to sit in counsel with God and the Father, and to be proclaimed Lord, equal with the One who is according to nature?