Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
This Demiurge, then, who by love is Father, by power is Lord, and by wisdom is our Maker and Shaper, is the one whose command we broke and so turned into his foes. For this cause, in these final times, the Lord brought us back into friendship through becoming incarnate, standing as go-between for God and men; making peace on our behalf with the Father whom we had wronged, and soothing our defiance through his own compliance, while granting us that turning and yielding toward our Maker. It is for this reason he instructed us to pray thus: and release us from our debts — seeing that he is our Father, to whom we owed a debt, having broken his commandment. But who is meant here? Some unknown figure, who never once gave a command to anyone as a father would? Or rather the God announced through the Scriptures, to whom our debt was owed, having broken his commandment? Now this command reached man through the Word, for Scripture tells us Adam heard the sound of the Lord God's voice. Does his Word, then, say to a man, your sins stand forgiven, while it was some different being who issued the command? No such being could be called good, true, or upright. For how is one good who hands out what does not belong to him? Or how is one upright who lays claim to another's possession? How, then, could sins be genuinely released, unless the very one we had wronged granted that release, out of the depths of our God's compassion, wherein he came to us through his Son?
For this same reason, when the paralyzed man was cured: the multitude, we are told, upon witnessing this, praised God, who had granted such authority to human beings. Which God, then, was the surrounding crowd praising? Some unnamed Father dreamed up by heretics, perhaps? And how could they praise a being wholly unfamiliar to them? Plainly, then, the people of Israel were praising the God announced through the law and the prophets, who is likewise the Father of our Lord; and it was for this reason he instructed men, by means of the signs he worked, to give praise to God with their minds. But had he in fact descended from some different Father, while those onlookers, upon seeing his mighty deeds, praised a separate Father, he would then have made these people ungrateful toward the very Father responsible for the cure — since it was from him who is God that the only-begotten Son had come forth for man's rescue, and through the mighty deeds he performed he was summoning the unbelieving to give praise to the Father; and to those who did not accept his Son's arrival, and consequently placed no trust in the pardon that came through him, he declared to the Pharisees: so that you may know the Son of Man holds authority to release sins; and having said this, he directed the paralyzed man to lift up the mat on which he had lain and return home — thereby confounding the doubters, and showing that he himself is the voice of God, the voice through which man was given the commandments he broke and by that breaking became a sinner; for it was from sin that the paralysis had originally sprung.
By releasing sins, therefore, he cured the man, yet also openly revealed who he was. For seeing that none but God alone can release sins, and it was the Lord who released these and cured the men, it stands clear that he himself was the Word of God turned Son of Man, taking from the Father the authority to release sins, being at once both man and God — so that as man he felt pity for us, and as God he might extend mercy and cancel the debts we owe to God our Maker. It was for this reason David spoke beforehand: fortunate are those whose wrongs are pardoned, and whose sins lie hidden. Fortunate is the man against whom the Lord has counted no sin — foretelling that pardon which arrives through his coming, whereby he wiped away the record written against us for our debt, nailing it fast upon the cross, so that just as through a tree we became indebted to God, so through a tree we might obtain release from that debt.
This truth was likewise displayed, meaningfully, through many other figures, and now also through the prophet Elisha. For when the prophets accompanying him were felling timber to build a dwelling, and the iron head, having slipped free of the axe, dropped into the Jordan where they were unable to recover it, Elisha came to that spot, and upon learning what had occurred, threw a piece of wood into the water; and once he had done so, the axe-head rose up to the surface, and those who had lost it earlier retrieved it from the top of the water — the prophet demonstrating through this deed that the reliable word of God, forfeited by us so carelessly through wood and impossible for us to recover, we would obtain again through the fitting of a tree. And that the word of God resembles an axe, John the Baptist attests, saying: even now the axe lies ready at the root of the trees. And Jeremiah says something similar: the word of the Lord is like an axe splitting a rock. This Word, then, once concealed from us, was disclosed, as noted earlier, through the fitting of the tree. For since it was by means of a tree that it was lost, so by means of a tree it has been disclosed again to everyone, revealing in itself its height, its length, and its breadth; and, as one of the elders remarked, by the extending of hands it draws the two peoples together into a single God. For there were two hands, because the two peoples had been dispersed to the far corners of the earth; yet one head in the center, because there is a single God over everything, working through everything, and dwelling within all of us.