Signs of the Coming Kingdom

As for whether these names really belong to him, we have already seen that both of them fit the one who was the first to announce his Christ to the human race, and the first to give him the further name of Jesus. So the sheer nerve of Marcion’s Christ becomes plain when he says that many will come in his name — when the name is not his at all, since he is not the Creator’s Christ and Jesus, the one these names properly belong to. It is plainer still when he forbids his followers to receive men whose equal in fraud he is himself, since he too comes in a name that belongs to someone else — unless his business really was to warn away from a name falsely taken up the disciples of one whose name, being properly his own, carried the truth of it as well. But when they do come, by and by, and say, “I am Christ,” they will be welcomed by you — you who have already welcomed one exactly like them. Christ, though, comes in his own name. So what will you do when the very owner of these names arrives, the Creator’s Christ and Jesus? Will you turn him away? But how outrageous that would be, how unjust and how insulting to the good God, that you should refuse the one who comes in his own name after taking in another man who came in it. [a]

Now let us look at the signs he assigns to the times. “Wars,” I notice, “and kingdom against kingdom, and nation against nation, and plague, and famines, and earthquakes, and terrifying sights, and great signs from heaven” — every one of them suited to a severe and terrible God. And when he goes on to say that “all these things must happen,” what is he making himself out to be? The Creator’s destroyer, or the Creator’s champion? He insists that these appointments of his have to be carried out in full. But surely, as the good God, he would have blocked events so grim and so terrible rather than pushed them forward — if they had not been his own decrees.

“But before all this,” he says, persecutions and sufferings were going to come on them, and they would in fact “turn out as a testimony” for them, and for their salvation. Listen to what Zechariah predicts: “The Lord Almighty will shield them; and they will devour them, and will subdue them with sling-stones; and they will drink their blood like wine, and they will fill the bowls the way the bowls of the altar are filled. And the Lord will save them on that day, his own people, like sheep; because they roll like sacred stones …” And so that you do not suppose these predictions are about the kind of suffering that comes to them from all their wars with foreigners, look at what the suffering is like. In a prophecy of wars fought with regular weapons, nobody would think to list stones as arms; stones are what you know from crowds and unarmed riots. Nobody measures the copious streams of blood that run in war by the bowlful, or limits them to what is spilled at a single altar. Nobody calls men sheep who fall in battle with weapons in their hands, meeting force with force — only those who are killed giving themselves up, standing at their post and enduring it, rather than fighting back. In short, as he says, they “roll like sacred stones”; they do not fight like soldiers. Stones is what they are, foundation stones, the stones we ourselves are built on — “built,” as Paul says, “on the foundation of the apostles” — men rolled this way and that like consecrated stones, exposed to everyone’s attack.

And that is why in this passage he tells them not to “work out beforehand what they will answer” when they are brought before the courts — just as he once put into Balaam’s mouth a message Balaam had never thought of, in fact the opposite of what he had thought, and promised Moses “a mouth” when Moses pleaded that he was slow of speech, and showed through Isaiah that this wisdom cannot be resisted: “One will say, I belong to the Lord, and will call himself by the name of Jacob; and another will sign himself by the name of Israel.” And what plea is wiser or harder to resist than the plain, open confession made in a martyr’s case, by a man who “prevails with God,” which is what “Israel” means? It is no wonder that the one who forbade rehearsing a defense had himself received from the Father the power to speak a word in season: “The Lord has given me the tongue of the learned, so that I would know how to speak a word in season to the weary.” Except, of course, that Marcion brings us a Christ who is not subject to the Father. That persecutions from a man’s closest friends are predicted, and slander out of hatred for his name, I need not go over again. But “by endurance,” he says, “you yourselves will be saved.” Of this very endurance the Psalm says, “The endurance of the just will not perish forever” — because another Psalm says, “Precious in the Lord’s sight is the death of the just,” which comes, no doubt, out of their endurance, so that Zechariah declares, “A crown will belong to those who endure.” And so that you will not go on insisting that the apostles were persecuted by the Jews for announcing another god, remember that the prophets got the same treatment from the Jews, and that they were heralds of no god but the Creator. Then, having shown when the destruction would come — “when Jerusalem begins to be surrounded by armies” — he described the signs of the end of everything: “portents in the sun and the moon and the stars, and on the earth distress of nations at their wits’ end, like the sea roaring, because of what they expect of the evils that are coming on the earth.”

That “the powers of heaven themselves have to be shaken” you can find in Joel: “And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth — blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” In Habakkuk too you have this: “The earth will be split open by rivers; the nations will see you and be in labor pains. You will scatter the waters with your stride; the deep gave out its voice; the height of its terror was raised; the sun and the moon stood still in their course; your flashes of lightning will go out as light, and your shield will be like the glitter of the lightning; in your anger you will grind the earth, and in your fury you will thresh the nations.” So there is agreement, I take it, between what the Lord says and what the prophets say about the shaking of the earth, and of the elements, and of the nations in them.

But what does the Lord say next? “And then they will see the Son of man coming from the heavens with very great power. And when these things happen, look up and lift your heads, because your redemption has come near.” That is, at the time of the kingdom, which is what the parable itself is about: “So you too, when you see these things happening, know that the kingdom of God is close at hand.” This will be the great day of the Lord, and of the glorious coming of the Son of man from heaven, the one Daniel wrote about: “Look, one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven …” And, “there was given to him the kingly power” — the power he “went off to a distant country to receive for himself” in the parable, leaving money with his servants to trade with and increase. That is, the rule over all the nations, which in the Psalm the Father had promised to give him: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.” “And all that glory will serve him; his dominion will be an everlasting dominion, which will not be taken from him, and his kingdom one that will not be destroyed” — because in it “people do not die, and they do not marry, but are like the angels.” It is about this same coming of the Son of man, and the good it brings, that we read in Habakkuk: “You went out for the salvation of your people, to save your anointed ones” — in other words, those who will look up and lift their heads, redeemed in the time of his kingdom.

So these accounts of the promises agree with one another, and so do the accounts of the great catastrophes, in the predictions of the prophets and in the Lord’s own statements alike. That being so, you cannot possibly drive a wedge between them. You cannot assign the catastrophes to the Creator as the terrible God, on the grounds that they are the sort of thing the good god ought not to permit, let alone look forward to, and then assign the promises to the good god, on the grounds that the Creator, knowing nothing of that god, could not have predicted them. And if the Creator did predict these promises as his own — and they differ in no way from the promises of Christ — then he is a match for the good god himself in the freeness of his giving, and plainly your Christ has promised nothing more than my Son of man. Take the whole passage of this Gospel text, from the disciples’ question down to the parable of the fig tree, and you will find that the sense hangs together and suits the Son of man at every point, so that it consistently gives him both the sorrows and the joys, both the catastrophes and the promises. You cannot separate him from either side of it. And since there is only one Son of man, whose coming stands between the two outcomes, catastrophe and promise, it must follow that both belong to that one Son of man: the judgments on the nations, and the prayers of the holy ones. He comes in the middle, so that he is common to both outcomes; he will end one of them by inflicting judgment on the nations when he comes, and at the same moment begin the other by fulfilling the prayers of his holy ones. So if you grant that the coming of the Son of man is the coming of my Christ, then, once you credit him with inflicting the judgments that come before he appears, you are forced to assign him the blessings that come out of the same event. And if you will have it that it is the coming of your Christ, then, once you credit him with the blessings his coming brings, you are obliged to charge him as well with inflicting the evils that come before he appears. The evils that go before and the blessings that follow immediately are both bound up with the coming of the Son of man and cannot be pulled apart from it. So make up your mind which of the two Christs you want to put in the place of the Son of man, the one you will hand both arrangements over to. Either you make the Creator a most generous God, or you make your own god terrible by nature.

In short, think about the picture the parable gives: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. When they put out their fruit, people know that summer is near. So you too, when you see these things happening, know that the kingdom of God is very near.” Now if the fruiting of ordinary trees is an advance sign that summer is coming, then in the same way the great convulsions of the world point to the arrival of the kingdom they come before. But every sign belongs to the one who owns the thing it is a sign of, and everything has its sign appointed for it by the one who owns it. So if these troubles are the signs of the kingdom, the way the ripening of the trees is a sign of summer, it follows that the kingdom belongs to the Creator, since the troubles that are the kingdom’s signs are credited to him.

And since this beneficent Deity had said in advance that these things must happen — terrible and frightful as they are, and predicted as they were by the law and the prophets — he did not destroy the law and the prophets when he declared that what they foretold was certainly going to be fulfilled. He goes further: “heaven and earth will not pass away until everything is fulfilled.” And what, may I ask, are these things? Are they the things the Creator made? Then the elements will submit quietly while their Maker’s arrangement is carried out. But if they come from that excellent god of yours, I rather doubt that heaven and earth will calmly allow the completion of things settled by their Creator’s enemy. And if the Creator does put up with it quietly, then he is no “jealous God.” But let heaven and earth pass away, since their Lord has decided so — only let his word stand forever. That is exactly what Isaiah predicted would happen. Let the disciples be warned too, “so that their hearts are not weighed down with overeating and drunkenness and the worries of this world, and that day come on them unawares, like a trap” — which is what would happen if they forgot God in the middle of the world’s plenty and business. You will find a warning just like it in Moses, so that the one who rescues them from “the trap” of that day is no one else than the one who gave people the same warning so long before.

There were places in Jerusalem for teaching, and other places outside Jerusalem to withdraw to. “In the daytime he was teaching in the temple” — just as he had foretold through Hosea: “In my house they found me, and there I spoke with them.” “But at night he went out to the Mount of Olives.” That is what Zechariah had pointed out: “And his feet will stand on that day on the Mount of Olives.” And there were suitable hours for an audience as well. “Early in the morning” they had to come to him — the one who, after saying through Isaiah, “The Lord gives me the tongue of the learned,” added, “He has appointed me the morning, and has also given me an ear to hear.” Now if this is destroying the prophets, what will fulfilling them look like?