SECTION II. 43$ 1. The patriarcis might not know that this angel in whom. God dwelt, and who was thus . united to od, was Christ the Son of God, or the Messiah, the great Mediator between God and men appointed for the reconciliation and salvation of the world. 2. They might not know whether this union between God and the angel was constant or only occasional. Though they might suppose him to be an angel of superior rank, by his being made such a glorious medium of God's conversing and transact- ing with .men at special seasons, yet they might not know that he was assumed into so constant and everlasting an union, and withal, so very near and so very intimate that this complexper- son should be called God over all blessed for evermore, and that there should be a constant and mutual communication of pro- perties between .the one and the other in speaking or writing of them. 3. The Jews in the days of the prophets did not know half so many texts of the Old Testament to belong to Christ as the apostles have taught us. 4. I might add also, that the Jewish writers in later ages by degrees came to obtain a confused notion of God's transacting his affairs with men, and . manifesting himself to them, by his Logos or Word, which sometimes they interpreted as his own essential Wisdom, or the idea, scheme, decree of all things that was in God ; and sometimes they made it to signify a very glo- rious angel, the first-born of every creature, in whom God dwelt, and by whom he transacted his affairs with the children of men. And though they had not the same clear and distinct ideas ofthese matters as the New Testament reveals to us con- cerning the union of God and man in one complex person, yet in their writings there appear many hints and intimations of this kind, as I have proved in a dissertation on the Logos. And indeed I know not any thing besides this supposition that can give so fair and reasonable an account how it comes to pass that both the Gentiles and Jews, in the first age of chris- tianity, did not raise perpetual objections against the doctrine of Christ's deity, that is, his being sometimes represented under the characters and names of the true God ; and why they did not always quarrel with the apostles for citing such texts of 'scripture as plainly refer to the true and essential God in the Old Testament; and apply them to Christ in the New Testament ; as in Rom. x. Eph. iv. Heb. i. &c. But this sup- position gives a very fair solution of it, viz. that as God ap- peared and resided in an angel heretofore, so Christ or the Mes- siah was understood to be a glorious person or spirit incarnate, who was especially inhabited by God, or in whom godhead
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