Jesus. The Lord Jesus, therefore, found the man and asked him this question: 'Dost ¹ thou believe on the Son of God?' The man said, 'And who is he, Lord, that I way believe on him?' In reply to this question the Lord Jesus said: 'Thou hast both seen him, and he it is that speaketh with thee.' Then the man replied, 'Lord, I believe.' It should be noticed that, in some ancient manuscripts in this passage, the words are 'in the Son of man,' though in many very ancient manuscripts they are, as above, 'in the Son of God.' We cannot, therefore, be so certain as we are in other verses that Christ here spoke of Himself as the Son of God. But the title 'Son of man' also implies a dignity for [far] greater than that of any created being, for it contains a reference to the book of the Prophet ² Daniel, as we have already seen.

(7) There are other passages in which Christ distinctly sets forth the same claim to be the Son of God, but it is unnecessary to mention more than one or two of them besides those already quoted. Two, however, are of such importance that we must not pass over them in silence. In one it is written ³ that on the sabbath day the Lord Jesus Christ healed a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When the Jews declared that to do a good work like this on the Sabbath was a sin, and persecuted

Jesus because He had done it, He defended Himself by saying: 'My ¹ Father worketh even until now, and I work'. He referred to the passage in the Book of Genesis where it is written that, after creating the world, God 'rested ² on the seventh day from all his work, which he had made.' Christ's words meant that, although all the time which had elapsed since man's creation on earth was God's Sabbath day and God had been resting on it in the sense that He had not created on earth any creature more recent than man, yet in another sense God was still working on His Sabbath, inasmuch as He was caring for and providing for men. Therefore, the Lord Jesus Christ argued, 'as in this sense my Father is still working on His Sabbath, I too am justified in doing such work as showing mercy and healing on the Sabbath. day'. But such an argument included an unmistakable claim to be God's Son. The Jews fully understood this, and 'for ³ this cause therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only brake the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God.' In the rest of the chapter we are told how Jesus, in spite of this, continued to teach and insist upon this great cardinal doctrine of Christianity. He spoke perhaps still more clearly a little later when He said, 'I ⁴ and the Father are one.' It was principally because of this claim that the most pious of the Jews insisted upon Pilate's