And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
And I know that His commandment is life everlasting. The way which leads to eternal life. "If thou wouldest enter into life, keep the commandments." It is also formally eternal life because the commandment of God is that eternal Law which lives in the eternal reason of things, in the living mind of God. But Christ is not speaking of this. And therefore He asserts that the command is eternal life, causally, because it causes, merits, and brings about eternal life. Christ says this, says S. Chrysostom, to induce the Jews to believe Him in those things which He spake by the command of the Father, to induce them by the hope of the highest reward, and consequently by the fear of the heaviest punishment if they do not believe in Him. He tacitly threatens them with this by way of antithesis. And to keep them from doubting this He boldly asserts it. I maintain, says Christ, and assert of My own sure knowledge, that the command of God is the cause of eternal life. I have heard it from God Himse...
And I think that this would really suffice: yet I will also say something else by way of exposing the insolence of their loquacity. For come now, if it seems good to thee, and let us, having summarized for the present occasion in few words the doctrine of the Incarnation, shew concerning the Only-Begotten Himself that it was well and rightly said: I speak not from Myself; but the Father which sent Me, He hath given Me a commandment what I should say and what I should speak. For being Himself the Living and Personal Word of God the Father, He is necessarily the medium of interpreting what is in the Father; and in bringing to light that which is, as it were, the set will and purpose of His own Father, He says He has in effect received a commandment: and any one might see even in the case of ourselves that the fact is truly so and could not be otherwise. For the language of utterance, which consists in the putting together of words and phrases, and which makes itself heard externally by m...
Do you see the humility of the words? For he that has received a commandment is not his own master. Yet He says, As the Father raises up the dead and quickens them, even so the Son quickens whom He will. John 5:21 Hath He then power to quicken whom He will, and to say what He will has He not power? What He intends then by the words is this; The action has not natural possibility, that He should speak one set of words, and I should utter another. And I know that His commandment is life everlasting. He said this to those that called Him a deceiver, and asserted that He had come to do hurt. But when He says, I judge not, He shows that He is not the cause of the perdition of these men. By this He all but plainly testifies, when about to remove from, and to be no more with, them, that I converse with you, speaking nothing as of Myself, but all as from the Father. And for this cause He confined His discourse to them to humble expressions, that He might say, Even until the end did I utter ...
