637. In those earliest times all in that Christian world acknowledged that the Lord Jesus Christ was God, and to Him was given all power in heaven and on earth, and power over all flesh, as His actual words declare (Matthew 28:18; John 17:2). They believed in Him in accordance with His command from God the Father (John 3:15-16, 36; 6:40; 11:25-26). This same fact is also evident from the summoning of all the bishops by the emperor Constantine the Great, in order that Arius and his followers, who denied the divinity of the Lord the Saviour born of the Virgin Mary, should be convicted and condemned on the authority of scripture. This they succeeded in doing, but in avoiding the wolf they ran into the lion; or, as the proverb has it, the man who seeks to avoid Charybdis runs into Scylla. They devised the fiction of a Son of God from eternity, who came down and took upon Himself a human form, believing that they were thus claiming back and restoring His divinity to the Lord. But they did not know that God the Creator of the universe Himself came down in order to become the Redeemer, and thus a second Creator, as is clearly stated in the Old Testament (Isaiah 25:9; 40:3, 5, 10-11; 43:14; 44:6, 24; 47:4; 48:17; 49:7, 26; 60:16; 63:16; Jeremiah 50:34; Hosea 13:4; Psalms 19:14; add to these John 9:15 ¹ ).

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