And I again said: Do you think, O men, that we could ever have understood these things in the Scriptures, if we had not received, by the will of Him who willed them, the grace to understand? So that the saying spoken through Moses might also be fulfilled:
'They provoked me with what is no god, they embittered me with their abominations; they sacrificed to demons whom they did not know; new ones lately come, whom their fathers did not know. The God who begot you you forsook, and you forgot the God who nourished you. And the Lord saw, and was jealous, and was provoked through anger of His sons and daughters, and said: I will turn away my face from them, and will show what shall be to them in the last days; for they are a perverse generation, sons in whom there is no faith. They moved me to jealousy with what is not God, they provoked me with their idols; and I will move them to jealousy with what is no nation, with a nation void of understanding I will anger them; for a fire has been kindled from my wrath, and it shall burn to Hades; it shall devour the earth and its produce, it shall set on fire the foundations of the mountains. I will gather evils upon them.'
And after that righteous One was slain, we, another people, sprang up afresh, and shot up as new and flourishing ears of grain, as the prophets said: 'And many nations shall flee for refuge to the Lord in that day for a people, and they shall dwell in the midst of the whole earth.' But we are not only a people, but also a holy people, as we have already shown. 'And they shall call them a holy people, redeemed by the Lord.'
Therefore we are no contemptible people, nor a barbarian tribe, nor such nations as the Carians or Phrygians, but God has chosen us also and become manifest to those who did not ask after Him. 'Behold, I am God,' He says, 'to the nation which did not call on my name.' For this is that nation which God of old promised to Abraham, and announced that He would make him father of many nations—not saying of Arabs, nor Egyptians, nor Idumeans; since Ishmael too became father of a great nation, and Esau also, and there is now a great multitude of the Ammonites. And Noah too was father of Abraham himself and, in short, of the whole human race; and various others were ancestors of various peoples.
What more, then, does Christ here bestow on Abraham? That by a like calling with a voice He called him, telling him to go forth from the land in which he dwelt. And He called us all by that same voice, and we have already gone forth from the manner of life in which we lived, living wickedly according to the common ways of the other inhabitants of the earth; and together with Abraham we shall inherit the holy land, receiving the inheritance for the unending eternity, being children of Abraham through a like faith.
For in the manner that he believed the voice of God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness, in the same manner we too, having believed the voice of God—which was spoken again through the apostles of Christ and proclaimed to us through the prophets—have renounced even unto death all things in the world. He promises to him, therefore, a nation of like faith, God-fearing and righteous, that gladdens the Father; but not you, in whom there is no faith.