order that man might learn that God has foreknowledge of all things.
Chap. xxxiii.—Whosoever confesses that one God is the author of both testaments, and diligently reads the Scriptures in company with the presbyters of the church, is a true spiritual disciple; and he will rightly understand and interpret all that the prophets have declared respecting Christ and the liberty of the new testament.
1. A spiritual disciple of this sort truly receiving the Spirit of God, who was from the beginning, in all the dispensations of God, present with mankind, and announced things future, revealed things present, and narrated things past—[such a man] does indeed judge all men, but is himself judged by no man.[1] For he judges the Gentiles, "who serve the creature more than the Creator,"[2] and with a reprobate mind spend all their labour on vanity. And he also judges the Jews, who do not accept of the word of liberty, nor are willing to go forth free, although they have a Deliverer present [with them]; but they pretend, at a time unsuitable [for such conduct], to serve, [with observances] beyond [those required by] the law, God who stands in need of nothing, and do not recognise the advent of Christ, which He accomplished for the salvation of men, nor are willing to understand that all the prophets announced His two advents: the one, indeed, in which He became a man subject to stripes, and knowing what it is to bear infirmity,[3] and sat upon the foal of an ass,[4] and was a stone rejected by the builders,[5] and was led as a sheep to the slaughter,[6] and by the stretching forth of His hands destroyed Amalek;[7] while He gathered from the ends of the earth into His Father's fold the children who were scattered abroad,[8] and remembered His own dead ones who had formerly fallen asleep,[9] and came down to them that He might deliver them: but the second in which
