Divided Law-life vs whole Christ-life; death’s fear; Zipporah begins

life, somehow divided, and looking toward both—toward the divine I mean and the human. For it is not free of earthly and worldly care, nor indeed altogether holy, although the evangelical way of life does not have at all the being divided toward the things of flesh, or toward the affairs in the world, but wholly as it were consecrating to God those who have come under Christ. For ‘Those of Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘have crucified the flesh with the passions and the desires.’ And indeed when one of the disciples coming said to Christ: ‘Teacher, permit me first to go away and bury my father’; he was being taught the wholly holy way of life, hearing at once: ‘Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.’ And the divine Paul also writes to some: ‘When God was well pleased to reveal his Son in me, that I might evangelize him among the nations, immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood.’ But Moses does confer. For the life according to law is divided, as I said, and still also lies under the fear of death. For Moses was fearing to go down into Egypt, declining to die. But this also has been abolished in Christ. And the holy Paul will confirm saying concerning both Christ and us: ‘Since the children have shared flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same; that through death he might abolish the one having the power of death—that is, the devil—and might free these, as many as by fear of death were through all the living liable to slavery.’ Therefore also of dying itself thereafter, the mind of the saints grows bold. For Paul said again: ‘For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.’ And again: ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? tribulation or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?’ And that the life according to law is held in the terrors of death, but the boast of the way of life in Christ has fled this, would become clear, holy Scripture crying that death has reigned from Adam even until Moses. But the one who abolished death, and shook down the power of corruption, and saved together those who believe and those once trained under law—who else would he be, except our Lord Jesus Christ alone? For ‘Not an elder, not an angel, but the Lord himself saved them,’ a prophetic oracle said. And you might see also very clearly the mystery upon this as again in a type in what befell blessed Moses. For as he was already going out from the Midianites’, and thereafter hastening into Egypt, God said: ‘As you go in and return into Egypt, see all the wonders which I have given in your hands; you will do them before Pharaoh.’ And after other things: ‘And it came to be,’ he says, ‘on the way, in the lodging, an angel of the Lord met him, and was seeking to kill him; and Zipporah taking a flint, circumcised the foreskin of her son, and fell toward the