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| Of the Substance of the People of God, Which Through His Assumption of Flesh is in Christ, Who Alone Had Power to Deliver His Own Soul from Hell.
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Chapter 11.—Of the Substance of
the People of God, Which Through His Assumption of Flesh is in
Christ, Who Alone Had Power to Deliver His Own Soul from
Hell.
But after having prophesied these
things, the prophet betakes him to praying to God; yet even the
very prayer is prophecy: “How long, Lord, dost Thou turn away
in the end?”1059
“Thy
face” is understood, as it is elsewhere said, “How long dost
Thou turn away Thy face from me?”1060
For therefore some copies have
here not “dost,” but “wilt Thou turn away;” although it
could be understood, “Thou turnest away Thy mercy, which Thou
didst promise to David.” But when he says, “in the end,”
what does it mean, except even to the end? By which end is to be
understood the last time, when even that nation is to believe in
Christ Jesus, before which end what He has just sorrowfully
bewailed must come to pass. On account of which it is also added
here, “Thy wrath shall burn like fire. Remember what is my
substance.”1061
This
cannot be better understood than of Jesus Himself, the substance of
His people, of whose nature His flesh is. “For not in vain,”
he says, “hast Thou made all the sons of men.”1062
For
unless the one Son of man had been the substance of Israel, through
which Son of man many sons of men should be set free, all the sons
of men would have been made wholly in vain. But now, indeed, all
mankind through the fall of the first man has fallen from the truth
into vanity; for which reason another psalm says, “Man is like to
vanity: his days pass away as a shadow;”1063
yet God has not made all the sons
of men in vain, because He frees many from vanity through the
Mediator Jesus, and those whom He did not foreknow as to be
delivered, He made not wholly in vain in the most beautiful and
most just ordination of the whole rational creation, for the use of
those who were to be
delivered, and for the
comparison of the two cities by mutual contrast. Thereafter it
follows, “Who is the man that shall live, and shall not see
death? shall he snatch his soul from the hand of hell?”1064
Who is
this but that substance of Israel out of the seed of David, Christ
Jesus, of whom the apostle says, that “rising from the dead He
now dieth not, and death shall no more have dominion over Him?”1065
For He
shall so live and not see death, that yet He shall have been dead;
but shall have delivered His soul from the hand of hell, whither He
had descended in order to loose some from the chains of hell; but
He hath delivered it by that power of which He says in the Gospel,
“I have the power of laying down my life, and I have the power of
taking it again.”1066
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