When the Apostle “gives thanks to God through Jesus Christ,” or says that “through him we have received grace and apostleship for the obedience of faith among all the nations,” or that “through him we have obtained access into this grace in which we stand and rejoice,” he is describing the benefits bestowed on us by the Son. At one time the grace of the good gifts passes from the Father to us through the Son; at another the Son brings us through himself to the Father.
Thus, when Paul says, “through whom we received grace and apostleship,” he shows the supply of the gifts coming to us through the Son. When he says, “through whom we have obtained access,” he shows that through Christ we are accepted and made members of “the household of God.” Does confessing the grace that he works for us diminish his glory? Surely the opposite is true: recounting his benefits is itself a reason to glorify him.
For this reason Scripture does not describe the Lord by a single name, nor only by titles that directly indicate his divinity and majesty. Sometimes it uses names that disclose his nature: the “name above every name,” the name Son; true Son; Only-begotten God; Power of God; Wisdom; Word. At other times, because grace is given to us in many forms and because in the riches of his goodness and manifold wisdom he provides according to the needs of each, Scripture calls him by countless other names: Shepherd, King, Physician, Bridegroom, Way, Door, Fountain, Bread, Axe, Rock.
These titles do not define his nature. They show, rather, the variety of his effective care, which in his compassion for creation he gives according to the particular need of each recipient. Those who flee to his governing care and, through patient endurance, correct their wandering ways he calls “sheep”; and to those who hear his voice and refuse strange teaching he declares himself “Shepherd”: “My sheep hear my voice.” To those who have advanced and need righteous kingship, he is King. Because he leads us by the straight path of his commandments toward good works, and because he securely encloses those who through faith take refuge in the blessing of the higher wisdom, he is Door: “If anyone enters through me, he will go in and out and find pasture.” Because he is a strong, immovable, and impregnable defense for the faithful, he is Rock.
Among such titles, when he is called Door or Way, “through him” is especially natural and clear. But as God and Son he is glorified with and together with the Father, since “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” We therefore use both expressions: one proclaims his proper dignity; the other proclaims his grace toward us.
Every help for our souls comes “through him,” and an appropriate name is given according to each form of his care. When he presents to himself a blameless soul, without spot or wrinkle, like a pure virgin, he is called Bridegroom. When he receives a soul badly wounded by the devil’s blows and heals it from the grave sickness of sin, he is called Physician.
Does such care for us lower our thoughts of him? Or does it not rather fill us with wonder at once at the Savior’s mighty power and at his love for humanity? He was able both to share in our weaknesses and to descend to our lowliness. Neither heaven nor earth nor the great seas; neither the creatures of water and land; neither plants, stars, air, seasons, nor the vast variety and order of the universe displays his power so wonderfully as this: that God, incomprehensible by nature, was able without suffering change in his divinity to meet death through the flesh, so that by his suffering he might grant us freedom from suffering.
The Apostle indeed says, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” But such language does not imply a lowly or subordinate service. It signifies help given “in the power of his might.” He himself bound the strong man and plundered his goods—that is, us, whom the enemy had misused for every evil work—and made us “vessels useful to the Master,” prepared for every good work through the proper ordering of what lies within our own power.
Through him we have obtained access to the Father, having been transferred from “the power of darkness” so as to share “the inheritance of the saints in light.” We must not think of the economy accomplished through the Son as a compulsory, servile ministry arising from the low estate of a slave. It is the voluntary and effective care of the Son for his own creation, exercised in goodness and compassion according to the will of God the Father.
We remain faithful to godliness when, in everything accomplished by him, we confess both the perfection of his power and its inseparability from the Father’s will. Thus, when the Lord is called “the Way,” we rise to a higher meaning rather than remaining with the ordinary sense of the word. “Way” signifies the ordered advance toward perfection, step by step, through works of righteousness and the illumination of knowledge, always longing for what lies ahead and reaching toward what remains, until we attain the blessed end—the knowledge of God—which the Lord grants through himself to those who trust in him.
Our Lord is therefore, in his very being, the good Way, on which there is no wandering or straying, leading to the one who is good in his very being, the Father. “No one,” he says, “comes to the Father except through me.” Such is our ascent to God through the Son.
We should next explain the manner in which the Father bestows his blessings on us “through him.” No created nature—neither the visible world nor the intelligible creation—can remain in being without the care and providence of God. The Creator Word, the Only-begotten God, apportions his help according to the needs of each creature. Because those who receive his goodness are many and diverse, his mercies are many and diverse as well, each adapted to the particular need.
Those confined in the darkness of ignorance he enlightens, and therefore he is true Light. He assigns recompense according to deeds, and therefore he is righteous Judge: “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son.” Those who have fallen from the height of life into sin he raises up, and therefore he is Resurrection. By the touch of his power and the will of his goodness he accomplishes all things. He shepherds, enlightens, nourishes, heals, guides, raises up, calls into being what did not exist, and preserves what has been created.
Thus the good things from God come to us “through the Son,” whose action in every case is swifter than speech can express. Lightning is not so swift, nor the movement of light through the air, nor the turning of the eye, nor even the motion of thought. The divine energy surpasses all these in speed far more than the slowest creature is surpassed by birds, winds, the movements of the heavenly bodies, or even by thought itself.
For how much time could be required by the one who “upholds all things by the word of his power,” who does not act through bodily organs and needs no hands to shape and fashion, but has the nature of all existing things following him in obedient and unforced consent? As Judith says, “You thought, and what you determined stood ready.”
Yet lest the greatness of his works should ever lead us to imagine that the Lord is without source, hear what the one who is Life himself says: “I live through the Father.” The Power of God says, “The Son can do nothing from himself.” The self-sufficient Wisdom says, “I received a commandment what I should say and what I should speak.” Through all these words he leads us to knowledge of the Father and directs our wonder at all created things to the Father, so that “through him” we may know the Father.
The Father is not known by a different operation belonging exclusively to himself, as though Father and Son worked by separate energies, for “whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.” Rather, the Father receives the wonder awakened by all that comes to pass through the glory that comes to him from the Only-begotten. He rejoices both in the one who acts and in the greatness of the works, and he is exalted by those who acknowledge him as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, “through whom are all things and for whom are all things.”
Therefore the Lord says, “All that is mine is yours,” as though the sovereignty over created things were given to him from the Father; and, “What is yours is mine,” because the creative cause comes to him from the Father. We must not imagine that he needs assistance in his work, nor that each task is assigned to him separately as though he were a servant receiving detailed orders. Such a conception is servile and unworthy of divine dignity.
Rather, the Word is full of the Father’s excellences. He shines forth from the Father and accomplishes all things in the likeness of the one who begot him. If he is without variation in essence, he is likewise without variation in power; and where power is equal, operation is equal as well. Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Therefore “all things came to be through him,” and “all things were created through him and for him,” not because he performs a slave’s service, but because as Creator he fulfills the Father’s will.
When he says, “I have not spoken from myself,” “As the Father said to me, so I speak,” “The word you hear is not mine, but the Father’s who sent me,” and elsewhere, “As the Father commanded me, so I do,” he does not speak this way because he lacks will or initiative, nor because he must wait for some previously arranged signal. His purpose is to show that his own will is joined to the Father in an indissoluble union.
We must not understand “commandment” as a verbal order issued imperiously to the Son as to a subordinate, telling him what he must do. In a way fitting the Godhead, we should understand the communication of will as something like the reflection of an object in a mirror, passing from Father to Son without any interval of time. “The Father loves the Son and shows him all things,” so that “all things that the Father has” belong to the Son—not accruing to him gradually, piece by piece, but being with him all together and at once.
Among human beings, a craftsman thoroughly trained by long practice may eventually possess his skill so securely that he can work on his own from the knowledge stored within him. Are we then to suppose that the Wisdom of God, the Maker of all creation, eternally perfect, wise without a teacher, the Power of God “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” requires lessons one by one to learn the manner and measure of his works?
If that is your thought, then in the emptiness of your reasoning you may as well open a school: place the Father in the teacher’s seat and the Son standing before him as an ignorant pupil, gradually learning wisdom and advancing toward perfection through lessons given bit by bit. Follow that thought consistently, and you will have the Son learning eternally yet never reaching perfection, since the Father’s wisdom is infinite and the end of the infinite cannot be reached. Whoever refuses to confess that the Son possesses all things from the beginning will never be able to confess that he reaches perfection at all.
I am ashamed that the argument has dragged us down to such degrading conceptions. Let us return to the loftier level of our discussion.
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”—not because the divine nature admits a bodily image or shape, but because the goodness of the will, inseparable from the essence, is seen as equal and alike—or rather the same—in Father and Son.
What, then, is meant by saying that he “became subject,” or that the Father “delivered him up for us all”? It means that from the Father the Son has his work of goodness on behalf of humanity. But you must also hear the words, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law,” and, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Pay close attention to the Lord’s own speech. Whenever he is teaching us about the Father, he also regularly uses words of personal authority: “I will; be cleansed”; “Peace, be still”; “But I say to you”; “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you”; and many expressions like these. Through such sayings we recognize our Master and Creator; through the former sayings we are taught the Father of our Master and Creator.
From every direction, therefore, the true doctrine is established: the fact that the Father creates through the Son neither makes the Father’s act of creation incomplete nor shows the Son’s active power to be weak. It reveals the unity of their will. Thus the expression “through whom” acknowledges an originating Cause, but does not deny the Son as the effective Cause.