Who has performed and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? I the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he.
Read Chapter 41
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Beginning. Disposing all things, as the conquests of Cyrus, announced so long before by name, evince.
Last. Alpha and Omega, Apocalypse i. 8., and xxii. 13.
“I, the Lord, the first, and with the last; I am he.” There is no “God” “before” God, nor can we call “God” that which is “after” God. (For that which is after God is the creation, and that which is before God is nothing, and nothing is not God, or, one should rather say, that which is “before” God is God in his eternal blessedness, defined in contradistinction to nothing.) … For if it is the Father who speaks in this way, he bears witness to the Son that he is not “after” himself. For if the Son is God and whatever is “after” the Father is not God, it is clear that the saying bears witness to the truth that the Son is in the Father and not after the Father. If, [however,] one were to grant that this statement is of the Son, the phrase “no other has been before me” will be a clear allusion that he whom we contemplate “in the Beginning” is apprehended together with the eternity of the Beginning. - "Against Eunomius 5.1"
[Where] do you get those fortresses of yours, “ingenerate” and “unoriginate,” from—or where the term “immortal”? Show us the express words, or we cross them out as unscriptural, and you will be dead as a result of your own principles, since the words, the wall of defense you trusted in, will have been destroyed. Is it not plain that these terms derived from passages that imply, without actually mentioning them? Which passages? What about “I am the first, and I am hereafter,” and “Before me there is no other God and after me there shall be none,” “for everything that exists” [God is saying] “is mine, without beginning or ending”? You have taken the truths that there is nothing before God and that he has no prior case, and you have given him the titles “unoriginate” and “ingenerate.” The fact that there is no halt to his ongoing existence means he is “immortal” and “indestructible.” - "On the Holy Spirit, Theological Oration 5(31).23"
