Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| The Unobligated Death of Christ Has Freed Those Who Were Liable to Death.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 14.—The Unobligated Death of Christ Has Freed
Those Who Were Liable to Death.
18. What, then, is the
righteousness by which the devil was conquered? What, except the
righteousness of Jesus Christ? And how was he conquered? Because,
when he found in Him nothing worthy of death, yet he slew Him. And
certainly it is just, that we whom he held as debtors, should be
dismissed free by believing in Him whom he slew without any debt.
In this way it is that we are said to be justified in the blood of
Christ.821
For so that
innocent blood was shed for the remission of our sins. Whence He
calls Himself in the Psalms, “Free among the dead.”822
For he only
that is dead is free from the debt of death. Hence also in another
psalm He says, “Then I restored that which I seized not;”823
meaning sin
by the thing seized, because sin is laid hold of against what is
lawful. Whence also He says, by the mouth of His own Flesh, as is
read in the Gospel: “For the prince of this world cometh, and
hath nothing in me,” that is, no sin; but “that the world may
know,” He says, “that I do the commandment of the Father;
arise, let us go hence.”824
And hence He proceeds to His
passion, that He might pay for us debtors that which He Himself did
not owe. Would then the devil be conquered by this most just right,
if Christ had willed to deal with him by power, not by
righteousness? But He held back what was possible to Him, in order
that He might first do what was fitting. And hence it was necessary
that He should be both man and God. For unless He had been man, He
could not have been slain; unless He had been God, men would not
have believed that He would not do what He could, but that He could
not do what He would; nor should we have thought that righteousness
was preferred by Him to power, but that He lacked power. But now He
suffered for us things belonging to man, because He was man; but if
He had been unwilling, it would have been in His power to not so to
suffer, because He was also God. And righteousness was therefore
made more acceptable in humility, because so great power as was in
His Divinity, if He had been unwilling, would have been able not to
suffer humility; and thus by Him who died, being thus powerful,
both righteousness was commended, and power promised, to us, weak
mortals. For He did one of these two things by dying, the other by
rising again. For what is more righteous, than to come even to the
death of the cross for righteousness? And what more powerful, than
to rise from the dead, and to ascend into heaven with that very
flesh in which He was slain? And therefore He conquered the devil
first by righteousness, and afterwards by power: namely, by
righteousness, because He had no sin, and was slain by him most
unjustly; but by power, because having been dead He lived again,
never afterwards to die.825
But He would have conquered the
devil by power, even though He could not have been slain by him:
although it belongs to a greater power to conquer death itself also
by rising again, than to avoid it by living. But the reason is
really a different one, why we are justified in the blood of
Christ, when we are rescued from the power of the devil through the
remission of sins: it pertains to this, that the devil is conquered
by Christ by righteousness, not by power. For Christ was crucified,
not through immortal power, but through the weakness which He took
upon Him in mortal flesh; of which weakness nevertheless the
apostle says, “that the weakness of God is stronger than
men.”826
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
