Reigning from the Tree

Now let us set the rest of the arrangement made for him beside Scripture. Whatever that poor little body of his may have been, it had a bodily bearing and it could be looked at, and so it will be my Christ — call him inglorious, call him ignoble, call him dishonored. That is exactly what he was announced as going to be, in bodily bearing and in appearance alike. Isaiah comes to our help again: “We announced before him: like a little child, like a root in thirsty ground. He has no form or beauty; we saw him, and he had neither form nor beauty; his form was despised, disfigured beyond all men.” In the same way the Father had spoken to the Son just before that: “Since many will be astonished at you, so also your beauty will be without glory from men.” For although in David’s words he is “fairer than the sons of men,” that belongs to the figurative state of spiritual grace, when he is girded with the sword of the Spirit, which is truly his form and his beauty and his glory. But according to the same prophet, in bodily condition he is “a worm and not a man, a reproach of men, an outcast of the people.” He announces no inward quality of that kind as belonging to him, though. In him lived the fullness of the Spirit, and so I acknowledge him as “the rod from the stem of Jesse.” His blossoming flower will be my Christ, on whom, according to Isaiah, there has rested “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and godliness, and of the fear of the Lord.” [a]

Such a spread of spiritual credentials would fit no man but Christ. He is like a flower, for the Spirit’s grace; he is reckoned to the stem of Jesse, but he takes his descent from it through Mary. So I put the question to you deliberately: do you grant him the intention behind all this humiliation and suffering and quietness? Grant it, and he is the Christ of Isaiah — a man of sorrows who knew what grief was, who was led like a sheep to the slaughter and who, like a lamb before its shearer, did not open his mouth; who would not struggle or shout, and whose voice was not heard in the street; who did not break the bruised reed — that is, the shattered faith of the Jews — and did not put out the smoldering wick — that is, the newly kindled zeal of the Gentiles. He can be no one but the man who was foretold.

His conduct ought to be examined by the rule of Scripture, and it falls, unless I am mistaken, into two kinds of work: preaching and miracle. But I will arrange my handling of both so as to put it off to the place where I have decided to discuss Marcion’s own gospel — Christ’s remarkable teachings and his miracles — though with our present purpose still in view. So let us finish here, in general terms, the subject we took up, pointing out in passing how Christ was announced beforehand by Isaiah as a preacher: “For who is there among you who fears the Lord and obeys the voice of his Son?” And as a healer likewise: “He has taken away our weaknesses and carried our sorrows.”

On the subject of his death I suppose you try to introduce a difference of opinion, simply because you deny that suffering on a cross was ever predicted of the Creator’s Christ, and because you argue besides that it is not to be believed that the Creator would expose his own Son to the very kind of death on which he had pronounced a curse himself. “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” What that curse means is worth taking up alongside the plain prediction of the cross, which is what we are chiefly inquiring into here; but I put it off, because we have already given the reasoning of the thing elsewhere, with the proof set out first. Let me begin instead with a full account of the types. [k]

No doubt it was proper for this mystery to be set out beforehand by types, and chiefly by that method. The more incredible it was, the more it would have tripped people up if it had been put in bare prophecy; and the greater it was, the more it needed to be shadowed over, so that the difficulty of understanding it would drive people to pray for the grace of God. Take Isaac first. When his father handed him over as an offering, he carried the wood for his own death himself. By that act he was already setting out the death of Christ, whom his Father had appointed as a sacrifice and who carried the cross he suffered on.

Joseph likewise was a type of Christ — not on the ground that he suffered persecution from his brothers for God’s sake, as Christ did from his brothers in the flesh, the Jews (I do not want to hold up my course), but in the words of the blessing his father gave him: “His glory is a bull’s; his horns are a unicorn’s horns; with them he will push the nations to the very ends of the earth.” Of course he was not being described as a real unicorn with its one horn, or as a minotaur with two. Christ was being pointed to in him — a bull in respect of both his characters: to some as harsh as a judge, to others gentle as a Savior, whose horns were the ends of his cross. For the ends of the crossbeam, which is part of a cross, are called horns, and the stake that runs up the middle of the whole frame is the single horn. By this power of his cross, then, and horned in this way, he is even now pushing all nations through faith, carrying them off from earth to heaven; and he will push them then through judgment, throwing them down from heaven to earth.

He will be a bull in another passage of the same Scripture too, when he is interpreted spiritually as Jacob speaking against Simeon and Levi — which means against the scribes and the Pharisees, since it was from those two that the scribes and Pharisees traced their descent. Like Simeon and Levi, they finished off their wickedness with a heresy, and with it they persecuted Christ. “Let my soul not enter their counsel; let my heart not be joined to their assembly. For in their anger they killed men, and in their self-will they cut the sinews of a bull.” The men are the prophets; the bull is Christ. For it was against him that they turned their fury loose, once they had killed his prophets, by fastening him to the cross with nails. Otherwise the words are empty: after killing men, he protests against them for torturing a bull!

Again, take the case of Moses. Why, at that particular moment when Joshua was fighting Amalek, did he pray sitting down with his hands stretched out? In a struggle like that it would surely have been more fitting to bend the knee, beat the breast, throw himself face down on the ground, and pray lying there. Why, except that a battle fought in the name of the Lord who would one day fight the devil needed the shape of that very cross by which Jesus was to win? And why, once more, did the same Moses, who had forbidden the likeness of anything whatever, set up the bronze serpent on a pole and offer it, hanging there, as a sight to be looked at for healing? Did he not mean here too to show the power of our Lord’s cross, by which that old serpent the devil was beaten — and by which every person bitten by spiritual serpents, who yet turned toward it with an eye of faith, was promised a cure from the bite of sin, and health for good?

Come now: when you read in David’s words that “the Lord has reigned from the tree,” I want to know what you understand by it. Perhaps you think some wooden king of the Jews is meant — and not Christ, who overcame death by his suffering on the cross and reigned from there! Now death did reign from Adam to Christ; but why may Christ not be said to have reigned from the tree, since by dying on the tree of his cross he shut up the kingdom of death? Isaiah says the same kind of thing: “For to us a child is born.” What is unusual about that, unless he means the Son of God? “To us is given one whose government is on his shoulder.” Now what king carries the badge of his rule on his shoulder, instead of on his head as a crown, or in his hand as a scepter, or as a mark on some royal clothing? But the one new King of the new ages, Jesus Christ, carried on his shoulder both the power and the distinction of his new glory: his cross. And so, according to the prophecy we began with, he might from then on reign from the tree as Lord. [q]

This is the tree Jeremiah gives you notice of as well, when he prophesies about the Jews, who would say, “Come, let us put wood on his bread” — that is, on his body. For God revealed the sense of it in your own gospel when he called his body bread, so that from now on you can understand that he gave his body the figure of bread: the body that the prophet long ago turned figuratively into bread, the Lord himself meaning to supply the interpretation of the mystery in due time.

If you want still more prediction of the Lord’s cross, Psalm 22 can supply it well enough. It contains the whole passion of Christ, who was even then singing out his own glory. “They pierced my hands and my feet” — which is the special cruelty of the cross. And again, when he begs his Father’s help, he says, “Save me from the lion’s mouth,” that is, the jaws of death, “and my lowliness from the horns of the unicorns,” that is, from the ends of the cross, as we showed above. Now David himself did not suffer this cross, and neither did any other king of the Jews; so you cannot suppose that this is a prophecy of anyone’s suffering but his, who alone was crucified so notoriously by the nation.

Suppose the heretics in their hardness reject and despise all these interpretations. I will grant them that the Creator has given us no signs of the cross of his Christ. Even then they will not prove from the concession that the man crucified was a different Christ, unless they could somehow show that this death was predicted of him by their own god, so that a difference of predictions would establish a difference of sufferings, and by that a difference of persons too. But since there is no prophecy of even Marcion’s Christ, much less of his cross, it is enough for my Christ that there is a prophecy of death at all. Since the kind of death is not stated, death on a cross could still have been meant — and it would then have to be assigned to another Christ, if the prophecy had referred to another. Besides, if he refuses to allow that my Christ’s death was predicted, he only has the more to blush for: he announces that his own Christ really died, though he denies he was ever born, while he denies that my Christ can die, though he allows that he could be born.

Still, I will show him the death and the burial and the resurrection of my Christ, all marked out in a single sentence of Isaiah: “His burial was taken away from among them.” There could have been no burial without a death, and no taking away of a burial except by a resurrection. Then at last he added: “Therefore he will have many for his inheritance, and he will divide the spoil of the many, because he poured out his soul to death.” Here we are told the reason for this favor shown him: it was to repay him for suffering death. And it was shown just as clearly that he was to receive this repayment for his death, and to receive it after his death, by means of the resurrection.

It is enough for my purpose to have traced the course of Christ’s arrangement this far in these particulars. It has proved him to be just the sort of person prophecy announced he would be, so that he ought not to be regarded in any character but the one prediction assigned him. And the agreement between the facts of his course and the Creator’s Scriptures ought to restore belief in those Scriptures — belief that a good part of them lost when prejudice fed a difference of opinion and either threw doubt on them or led to their being denied. And now we go further and build up the rest of the structure out of the Creator’s Scriptures: the matching events that were predicted and bound to happen after Christ. For the arrangement would not be found complete if the one had not come after whom it had to run its course. [w]

Look at all the nations coming up out of the whirlpool of human error to the divine Creator and the divine Christ, and then deny, if you dare, that he was what prophecy was about. The Father’s promise in the Psalms will occur to you at once: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession.” You will not be able to enter a claim that some son of David is meant here rather than Christ, or that the ends of the earth were promised to David, whose kingdom was shut inside the Jewish nation alone, rather than to Christ, who now takes in the whole world in the faith of his gospel.

So again he says through Isaiah: “I have given you as a covenant for the people, as a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind” — those in error, that is — “to bring the prisoners out of the prison” — to free them from sin — “and out of the prison house” — the prison house of death — “those who sit in darkness” — the darkness of ignorance. If these things are being accomplished through Christ, they were not designed in prophecy for anyone but the one through whom they are accomplished.

In another passage he says as well: “See, I have set him as a testimony to the nations, a prince and commander to the nations; nations that do not know you will call on you, and peoples will run together to you.” You will not interpret these words of David, because just before them he said, “I will make an everlasting covenant with you, the sure mercies of David.” In fact these words will oblige you all the more to understand that Christ is reckoned to spring from David by fleshly descent, by reason of his lineage through the Virgin Mary.

There is an oath to David in the psalm that touches this promise of him: “Of the fruit of your womb I will set one on your throne.” Whose womb is meant? David’s own? Certainly not — David was not going to give birth to a son. His wife’s, then? No: instead of saying “of the fruit of your womb,” he would have said “of the fruit of your wife’s womb.” But by naming David’s own womb, it follows that he was pointing to someone of David’s line, of whose womb the flesh of Christ was to be the fruit — the flesh that blossomed out of Mary. He named the fruit of the womb by itself, because it was fruit of the womb in a peculiar sense, of the womb only in fact, and not of a husband as well; and he assigns the womb to David as head of the line and father of the family. Since it could not fit a virgin’s condition to attach a husband to her, he attributed the womb to the forefather instead.

That new arrangement, then, which is now found in Christ, will turn out to be what the Creator promised back then under the name of “the sure mercies of David.” They were Christ’s, since Christ sprang from David — or rather, his very flesh was itself David’s “sure mercies,” hallowed in religion and made “sure” by its resurrection. Accordingly the prophet Nathan, in the first book of Kings, makes a promise to David about his offspring, “who will come,” he says, “out of your womb.” Now if you explain that simply of Solomon, you will send me into fits of laughter — for David will evidently have given birth to Solomon! But is not Christ designated here as the seed of David: the seed of that womb which came from David, namely Mary’s?

And since it was Christ rather than anyone else who was to build the temple of God — a holy human being, that is, in whom God’s Spirit could live as in a better temple — it was Christ, rather than David’s son Solomon, who was to be looked for as the Son of God. Again, a throne forever with a kingdom forever suits Christ better than Solomon, who was only a temporal king. God’s mercy never departed from Christ, whereas God’s anger came down even on Solomon, after his extravagance and his idolatry: for Satan stirred up an Edomite as an enemy against him. Since none of these things fits Solomon, then, but only Christ, our method of interpretation will certainly hold; and the very outcome of events shows that they were plainly predicted of Christ. And so in him we have “the sure mercies of David.” Him God has appointed as a testimony to the nations, not David; him as a prince and commander to the nations, not David, who ruled over Israel alone. It is Christ whom all the nations now call on, who did not know him; Christ to whom all races now betake themselves, who were ignorant of him before. A thing cannot be called still to come when you can see it happening every day.