The Cross Foretold

It is the last stage of his suffering, of course, that you raise a doubt about. You maintain that death on a cross was never predicted of Christ, and you press a further point: that it is not believable God would have exposed his own Son to that kind of death, since God himself said, “Cursed is everyone who has hung on a tree.” But the reason given in the law explains beforehand what that curse means. God says in Deuteronomy: “If a man has been involved in some sin that carries the sentence of death, and he dies, and you hang him on a tree, his body is not to stay on the tree; you are to bury him that same day, because everyone who has been hung on a tree is cursed by God. And you are not to defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you as your portion.” So God did not condemn Christ to this suffering as a man under a curse. He drew a distinction: whoever had incurred the death sentence for some sin of his own, and died hanging on a tree, was to be “cursed by God,” because his own sins were the reason he hung there. [a]

Christ, on the other hand, spoke no deceit from his mouth, and displayed nothing but righteousness and humility. He was not exposed to that kind of death for anything he had earned — as we recorded above that the prophecies said of him — but in order that what the prophets foretold would come upon him at your hands might be fulfilled. In the Psalms the Spirit of Christ himself was already singing it long before: “They were paying me back evil for good”; and, “What I had not stolen I was then paying back in full”; “They wiped out my hands and my feet”; and, “They put gall into my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink”; “For my clothing they cast lots.” The other outrages you were to commit on him were foretold in the same way. He suffered all of it, actually and thoroughly, and suffered it not for any wrong act of his own, but “so that the Scriptures from the mouth of the prophets might be fulfilled.”

And of course it was fitting that the mystery of the suffering itself should be set out in figures in the predictions. The more unbelievable it was, the more it would have been a stone to trip over if it had been predicted nakedly; and the greater it was, the more it needed to be shadowed out, so that the difficulty of understanding it would have to look to God’s grace for help.

To begin, then, with Isaac. When his father led him out as the victim and he carried his own wood, he was already pointing at that early date to Christ’s death — Christ given up by the Father as the victim, and carrying the wood of his own suffering.

Joseph, again, was made a figure of Christ in this one point alone — to name no more, and not to hold up my own course — that he was persecuted by his brothers and sold into Egypt on account of God’s favor to him, just as Christ was sold by Israel, and so, “according to the flesh,” by his own “brothers,” when Judas betrays him. For Joseph is blessed by his father in these terms: “His glory is a bull’s; his horns are the horns of a unicorn; with them he will toss the nations, all of them alike, to the very ends of the earth.” Obviously no one-horned rhinoceros was being pointed at there, and no two-horned minotaur. What was signified was Christ. He is the “bull,” because of each of his two characters — fierce to some, as Judge; gentle to others, as Savior — and his “horns” were to be the ends of the cross. Even on a ship’s yardarm, which is part of a cross, “horns” is the name given to the ends, while the upright pole of the mast is a “unicorn.” It is by this power of the cross, and horned in this way, that he now “tosses” all the nations through faith, sweeping them off the earth up to heaven; and one day he will “toss” them through judgment, throwing them down from heaven to earth.

He will be the “bull” somewhere else in the same book as well. When Jacob pronounced his blessing over Simeon and Levi, he was prophesying about the scribes and Pharisees, since it is from those two that the scribes and Pharisees trace their descent. Read spiritually, the blessing runs like this: “Simeon and Levi carried out an injustice out of their own sect” — meaning their persecution of Christ — “let my soul not come into their council, and let my heart not rest on their company; because in their anger they killed men” — that is, prophets — “and in their craving they hamstrung a bull” — that is, Christ, whom they killed after the slaughter of the prophets, and on whom they worked their savagery out to the end by driving nails through his sinews. Otherwise it is pointless of him to charge somebody else with the butchery, and not them, after the murder they had already committed.

But now let me come to Moses. Why was it, I wonder, that at the one moment when Joshua was fighting Amalek, Moses prayed sitting down with his hands spread out — when in a crisis like that he surely ought rather to have commended his prayer by bending his knees, beating his breast, and lying face down on the ground? It can only be that at the place where the name of the Lord Jesus was the subject of the speech — since he was one day going to enter the ring single-handed against the devil — the figure of the cross was needed too, the figure through which Jesus was to win the victory.

And why did the same Moses, after forbidding any “likeness of anything,” set up a bronze serpent placed on a piece of wood and hanging there as a spectacle of healing for Israel, at the very time when they were being wiped out by snakes after their idolatry? Only because in this case he was displaying the Lord’s cross, on which the “serpent,” the devil, was “put on show” — so that for everyone hurt by snakes of that kind, that is, by the devil’s angels, salvation was worked out when they turned their eyes hard away from the sinfulness of their sins to the mystery of Christ’s cross. For whoever looked at that cross then was set free from the bite of the snakes.

Come now: if you have read in the prophet’s words in the Psalms, “God has reigned from the tree,” I am waiting to hear what you take that to mean — in case you happen to think some carpenter-king is meant, and not Christ, who has reigned from the moment he overcame the death that followed his suffering on “the tree.”

In the same way Isaiah says, “For a child is born to us, and to us a son is given.” What is new about that, unless he is speaking of the “Son” of God? And one is born to us the beginning of whose government has been laid “on his shoulder.” What king in the world wears the badge of his power on his shoulder, and does not wear either a crown on his head, or a scepter in his hand, or some distinguishing mark on his clothing? Only the new “King of ages,” Christ Jesus, raised up his own new glory and power and majesty “on his shoulder” — the cross, that is — so that, according to the earlier prophecy, the Lord “might reign from the tree” from that time on.

It is this same wood that God hints at through Jeremiah, when he says that you would say: “Come, let us put wood into his bread, and let us wear him away out of the land of the living, and his name will be remembered no more.” Of course that “wood” was put on his body; for Christ has revealed as much by calling his body “bread” — the body that the prophet announced long ago under the name of “bread.”

And if you are still looking for predictions of the Lord’s cross, the twenty-first Psalm will finally be able to satisfy you, since it contains the whole passion of Christ; he sings his own glory in it even at that early date. “They dug through my hands and my feet,” he says — which is the peculiar atrocity of the cross. And when he begs the Father for help: “Save me,” he says, “out of the mouth of the lion” — death, of course — “and my lowliness from the horn of the unicorns” — from the ends of the cross, that is, as we showed above. Neither David himself nor any of the kings of the Jews ever suffered that cross; so do not think that some other individual man’s passion is being prophesied here, rather than the passion of the one who alone was so conspicuously crucified by the People.

Now if the hardness of your heart insists on rejecting and laughing at all these interpretations, we will prove that it can be enough that the death of the Christ had been prophesied — so that, since the manner of the death was not specified, it may be understood to have been carried out by means of the cross, and so that the suffering of the cross may be credited to no one but the man whose death was being predicted over and over. For I want to show his death, his suffering, and his burial all in one saying of Isaiah. “By the crimes of my people,” he says, “he was led to death; and I will give the wicked for his burial and the rich for his death, because he did no wrong, and no deceit was found in his mouth; and God willed to redeem his soul from death,” and so on. He says again, moreover: “His burial has been taken away from the midst.” For he would not have been buried unless he had been dead, and his burial would not have been removed from the midst except through his resurrection. Finally he adds: “Therefore he will have many for an inheritance, and he will divide the spoils of many” — and who else will do that but the one who “was born,” as we showed above? — “in return for the fact that his soul was handed over to death.” The reason for the favor granted him is stated: it is in return for the injury of a death that had to be repaid. And so it is shown as well that the one who was to win these rewards because of death was to win them after death — after resurrection, of course.

As for what happened at his passion, that midday went dark, the prophet Amos announces it: “And it will be in that day, says the Lord, that the sun will set at midday, and the day of light will grow dark over the land; and I will turn your feast days into grief and all your songs into mourning; and I will lay sackcloth on your waists and baldness on every head; and I will make the grief like the grief for a beloved son, and those who are with him like a day of mourning.”

And Moses prophesied that you would do this at the beginning of the first month of your new year, when he foretold that the whole community of the sons of Israel was to slaughter a lamb at evening, and that they were to eat this solemn sacrifice of that day — the passover of unleavened bread, that is — with bitter herbs; and he added that “it is the Lord’s passover,” meaning the passion of Christ. And the prediction was fulfilled in exactly this way: on “the first day of unleavened bread” you killed Christ; and, so that the prophecies might be fulfilled, the day hurried to make an “evening,” that is, to bring on the darkness that came at midday. And so God “turned your feast days into grief, and your songs into mourning.” For after the passion of Christ, captivity and dispersion came upon you as well, predicted beforehand through the Holy Spirit.

Yes, and it is for these deserts of yours that Ezekiel announces the ruin that is coming on you — and not only in this present age, a ruin that has already fallen, but on the “day of repayment,” which comes later. From that ruin no one will be set free but the man who has been sealed on the forehead with the passion of the Christ you rejected. For this is what is written: [v]

And the Lord said to me, “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of Israel are doing, every one of them in the dark, each in a hidden bedroom? For they have said, The Lord does not see us; the Lord has abandoned the land.” And he said to me, “Turn around again, and you will see greater outrages than these that they are doing.” And he brought me to the doorway of the gate of the house of the Lord that faces north; and there were women sitting there, weeping for Tammuz. And the Lord said to me, “Son of man, have you seen? Does the house of Judah think it a small thing to commit the outrages they have committed? And you are going to see practices of theirs worse still.” And he brought me into the inner shrine of the house of the Lord; and there, on the thresholds of the house of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were some twenty-five men who had turned their backs on the temple of the Lord, with their faces toward the east; and these were worshiping the sun. And he said to me, “Do you see, son of man? Are such deeds trifles to the house of Judah, that they should commit the outrages these men have committed? Because they have filled up the measure of their impieties, and look, they are pulling faces at me as well, I will act with my indignation; my eye will not spare, and I will not pity. They will cry out in my ears with a loud voice, and I will not hear them; no, I will not pity.” And he cried into my ears with a loud voice, saying, “The vengeance of this city is at hand.” And each man had weapons of destruction in his hand. And there were six men coming along the way of the upper gate that looks toward the north, and each man’s battle-axe of dispersion was in his hand; and one man was in the middle of them, dressed in a robe reaching to his feet, with a sapphire belt around his waist. And they came in and took their stand beside the bronze altar. And the glory of the God of Israel, which was over the house, in its open court, went up from the cherubim. And the Lord called the man who was dressed in the robe reaching to his feet, the one who had the belt around his waist, and said to him, “Go through the middle of Jerusalem and write the sign Tau on the foreheads of the men who groan and grieve over all the outrages that are done in their midst.” And while this was being done, he said in my hearing, “Go after him into the city and cut them down; and do not spare with your eyes, and do not pity old man or young man or virgin; and the little ones and the women, kill them all, so that they may be thoroughly wiped away. But do not go near anyone who has the sign Tau on him. And begin with my holy ones.”

Now the mystery of this “sign” was predicted in a number of ways: a “sign” in which the foundation of life was laid down beforehand for the human race, and a “sign” the Jews were not going to believe in. Moses kept announcing it long before in Exodus, saying: “You will be thrown out of the land you are entering, and among those nations you will not be able to rest; and there will be no steady place for the print of your foot. And God will give you a heart worn out, and a soul pining away, and eyes failing, so that they cannot see; and your life will hang on the tree before your eyes, and you will not trust your life.”

And so, since prophecy has been fulfilled through his coming — that is, through the birth we recorded above and the passion we have plainly explained — that is the reason Daniel said, “Vision and prophet were sealed.” Christ is the seal set on all the prophets, fulfilling everything that had been announced about him in days gone by; for since his coming and his own passion there is no longer “vision” or “prophet.” That is why he says so emphatically that Christ’s coming “seals up vision and prophecy.” And so, by showing the number of the years, and the time of the sixty-two and a half weeks fulfilled, we have proved that Christ came — that is, was born — at that specified time; and by showing the time of the seven and a half weeks, which are subdivided so as to be cut off from the earlier weeks, and within which we have shown Christ to have suffered; and by the conclusion that follows from the seventy weeks and the destruction of the city, we have proved that “sacrifice and anointing” cease from that time on.

This much is enough for the present on these points: to have traced so far the course of the path laid down for Christ, by which he is proved to be exactly what he used to be announced as — and proved so on the ground of that agreement among the Scriptures which has let us speak out against the Jews on the strength of the ruling already given on the greater part of the case. For let them not question or deny the writings we produce. The fact that things foretold as due to happen after Christ are now being recognized as fulfilled ought to make it impossible for them to deny that these writings stand on a level with the divine Scriptures. Otherwise, if the one had not come after whom the things regularly announced had to be brought about, would the things now completed ever be proved to have happened at all?

Look at all the nations, from that time on, coming up out of the whirlpool of human error to the Lord God the Creator and to his Christ. And if you dare to deny that this was prophesied, the Father’s promise in the Psalms confronts you at once, where it says: “You are my Son; today I have become your Father. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.” For you will not be able to claim that this “son” is David rather than Christ, or that “the ends of the earth” were promised to David, who reigned inside the single country of Judea, rather than to Christ, who has already taken the whole world captive by faith in his good news. As he says through Isaiah: “Look, I have given you as a covenant of my family, as a light for the nations, so that you may open the eyes of the blind” — those who go astray, of course — “to loose the bound out of their chains” — that is, to free them from sins — “and out of the prison house” — that is, out of death — “those who sit in darkness” — the darkness of ignorance, to be sure. And if these blessings come about through Christ, then they were not prophesied of anyone but him, the one through whom we consider them to have been accomplished. [af]