7.1

You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ: though He was rich, for our sake He became poor, so that through His poverty we might become rich. His servitude set us free, His weakness made us strong, and His foolishness made us wise. And if indeed, through His own death, He again brings about our resurrection, then we can raise a loud voice and say, “Although we have known Him according to the flesh, there is a new creation in Christ.”

Truly, beloved in the Lord, concerning the details of the word of freedom by which we have all been set free, I have many other things to say to you, but now is not the time to say them. Meanwhile I greet you all, my beloved children in the Lord, holy Israelite children according to your intellectual substance.

Indeed, it was fitting for you, as those drawing near to your own Creator, to seek the salvation of your souls through the law of the covenant, even though that covenant law had grown cold because of the abundance of wickedness, the pressure of evil, and the pleasures of the passions, and the faculties of your souls had died. Therefore you could no longer perceive your intellectual and glorious substance because of the death into which you had fallen. For this reason it is written in divine Scripture, “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.” Therefore He is the life of every rational nature created in Him according to the likeness of His image. He is also the true Mind of the Father.

The image of the Begetter that has been assumed is indeed unchangeable. Yet apart from it evil befell you, and in it we all died, for evil is foreign to the nature of the intellectual substance in God. Therefore, I say, it is outside nature for everyone. We acquired a dark house full of warfare. And I testify to you that the knowledge of all strength has failed us. For this reason our Father God, seeing our weakness—that we had become unable to bear the truth—came in His own goodness to visit His creatures through the ministry of the saints.