and who was and who is to come.
374 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
So then, when God does anything of this sort, we should not conclude that his substance, by which he is God, is changeable in time and place, or moveable through times and places; but we should realize that in the operation of divine providence these things do not happen in the operation by which he creates natures, but in the one by which he also administers externally the natures he has created internally. This is because by his immutable and surpassing power, not in any local or spatial sense, he is both interior to every single thing, because in him are all things (Rom 1 1 :36), and exterior to every single thing because he is above all things. Again, by his immutable eternity, and not in any temporal, time-connected sense, he is both older than all things because he is before all things, and newer than all things because again he is himself after all things.52
Returning to the question ofhow God spoke to Adam
27, 49. Accordingly, when we hear scripture saying: And the Lord God commandedAdam, saying: From every tree that is in Paradise you shall eatfor food; butfrom the tree ofgetting to know good and evil you all shall not take a bitefrom it; but on the day you all eatfrom it, you all shall die the death (Gn 2:16-17), ifwe inquire about the way in which God spoke these words, it is a way indeed that cannot directly be grasped by us. We most certainly have to main tain, however, that God spoke either through his own substance or through some creature subject to him. But then he does not speak through his own substance except for creating all natures," though as regards spiritual and intellectual ones he speaks not only for creating but also for enlightening them, since they are now able to grasp his speech as it is in his Word, which was in the beginning with God, and God is what the Word was through whom all things were made (Jn
1:1.3). But to those who are not able to grasp this, when God speaks he only does so through a creature, either through a spiritual one alone whether in dreams or in ecstasy in the likeness of bodily things, or also through a bodily one, when some specific appearance is presented to the senses of the body, or some sounds and words are heard.
50. So if Adam, then, were such that he was able to grasp the speech with which God addresses the minds of the angels through his own substance, then there can be no doubt that God, without being moved himself through time, moved Adam's mind through time in a wonderful and inexpressible way and impressed upon it the beneficial and wholesome command of the Truth, and also showed it in the same inexpressible Truth what punishment would be owed to its transgressor. This would happen in the same way as all good commands are
52. See, for example, Rv 1:8; God the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the one who is and who was and who is to come. 53. SeeGn 1:3. etc.: Ps 148:5.