The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK EIGHT 67
CHAPTER 26
God, without being moved Himself, moves the creatures which He has made.
48. Therefore, almighty God, who sustains all things and is always the same in His immutable eternity, truth, and will, without moving through time or space, moves His spiritual creation through time, and also moves His material creation through time and space. Consequently, by this motion He rules the beings which by His interior action He has made, ruling them extrinsically both by wills subject to Himself which He moves through time, and by bodies subject to Himself and to those wills, moving these bodies through time and space—in that time and space whose reason-principle is life in God beyond time and space.!!> Hence, when God does this, we ought not to think that His substance by which He is God is changeable in time and space or movable through time and space, but we should recognize these actions in the work of His divine providence. They are not in that work by which He creates beings, but in that by which He extrinsically rules what He has intrinsically created. Without any distance or measure of space, by His immutable and transcendent power He is interior to all things because they are all in Him, and exterior to all things because He is above them all.1!© Moreover, without any distance or unit of time, by His immutable eternity He is more ancient than all things because He is before them all, and newer than all things because He is also after them all.!!"
CHAPTER
How God spoke to Adam (Gen. 2.16-17).
49. Scripture says: And the Lord God commanded Adam, saying: "You may eat of every tree that 1s in Paradise, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. In the day that you eat of it you shall die."!!8 Now when we hear these words, if we ask