Who Our Instructor Is

We have shown that Scripture calls all of us children; and not only that, but that we who have followed Christ are called babes, by a figure of speech; and that the Father of all is alone perfect, since the Son is in him and the Father is in the Son. So it is time, in due order, to say who our Instructor is. [a]

He is called Jesus. Sometimes he calls himself a shepherd: “I am the good Shepherd.” The picture is taken from shepherds, who lead their sheep, and by it the Instructor is meant — the one who leads the children, the Shepherd who tends the babes. For babes are simple, and they are drawn as sheep. “And they shall all be one flock,” it says, “and one shepherd.” So the Word, who leads the children to salvation, is fittingly called the Instructor.

With the greatest possible clearness, then, the Word has spoken about himself through Hosea: “I am your Instructor.” Now reverence for God is instruction: it is learning the service of God, training in the knowledge of the truth, and right guidance that leads up to heaven. And the word “instruction” is used in more than one way. There is the instruction of the one who is led and learns, and the instruction of the one who leads and teaches; third, the guidance itself; and fourth, what is taught — the commands laid down. And the instruction that is God’s own is truth aimed straight at the contemplation of God, and holy deeds set out in endurance that never lets up.

A general directs the line of battle with his soldiers’ safety in mind, and a helmsman steers the ship wanting to bring his passengers through. In the same way the Instructor, out of concern for us, guides the children into a way of living that saves; and, to put it generally, whatever we ask of God in accordance with reason to be done for us will happen to those who trust the Instructor. And just as the helmsman does not always give way to the winds, but sometimes turns the bow against them and stands up to the whole force of the gale, so the Instructor never gives way to the blasts that blow through this world. He does not hand the child over to them like a ship to be wrecked on a wild and unrestrained course of life. Carried along by the favoring breeze of the Spirit of truth, he keeps a firm hold on the child’s tiller — his ears, I mean — until he brings him safe to anchor in the harbor of heaven. What people call an ancestral custom is gone in a moment. God’s guidance is a possession that lasts forever.

They say that Phoenix was the instructor of Achilles, and Adrastus of the children of Croesus, and Leonides of Alexander, and Nausithous of Philip. But Phoenix was mad for women. Adrastus was a fugitive. Leonides did not cut down Alexander’s pride, and Nausithous did not reform the drunkard from Pella. Zopyrus the Thracian was no better able to check the sexual immorality of Alcibiades — and Zopyrus was a slave somebody had bought, while Sicinnus, the tutor of the children of Themistocles, was an idle household slave. They say he invented the Sicinnian dance as well. Nor have we overlooked the men called royal instructors among the Persians. There are four of them, and the kings of the Persians pick them out of all the Persians with the greatest care and set them over their sons. But the boys learn nothing except the use of the bow, and when they come of age they have intercourse with sisters and with mothers, with women, with wives and with countless courtesans, practiced in intercourse like wild boars.

But our Instructor is the holy God Jesus, the Word, who guides the whole human race. God himself, who loves humanity, is our Instructor. Somewhere in a song the Holy Spirit says of him: “He provided for the people fully in the wilderness. He led him about in the thirst of the summer heat, in a waterless land, and instructed him, and guarded him like the pupil of his eye — as an eagle covers her nest and yearns over her young, spreads out her wings, takes them up and carries them on her back. The Lord alone was leading them, and there was no strange god with them.” Plainly, I think, Scripture has set the Instructor before us in the account it gives of his guidance.

Again, when he speaks in his own person, he acknowledges that he is the Instructor: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Who, then, has the power to lead in and to lead out? Is it not the Instructor? This is the one who appeared to Abraham and said to him, “I am your God; be pleasing in my sight” — and then, exactly as an instructor would, shapes him into a trusting child by saying, “And be blameless; and I will make my covenant between me and you, and your offspring.” There is the Instructor holding out his friendship. And he shows himself most plainly as Jacob’s instructor. He says to him: “Look, I am with you, to keep you in every way you go; and I will bring you back into this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I told you.” He is also said to have wrestled with him: “And Jacob was left alone, and a man” — the Instructor — “wrestled with him until morning.” This was the one who led him and brought him back, who wrestled with him and oiled the athlete Jacob for the match against evil. And that the Word was at once Jacob’s trainer and the Instructor of the human race comes out in what follows. Scripture says that Jacob asked him his name and said to him: “Tell me what your name is.” “Why is it that you ask my name?” For he was keeping the new name for the new people — the babe — and was as yet unnamed, since the Lord God had not yet become man. Yet Jacob called the name of the place “Face of God.” “For I have seen God face to face, and my life has been kept safe.” The face of God is the Word, through whom God is shown and made known. And that was when Jacob was named Israel, because he saw God the Lord. It was God, the Word, the Instructor, who said to him again later: “Do not be afraid to go down into Egypt.” See how the Instructor stays close to the righteous man, and how he oils the athlete and teaches him to trip his opponent.

It is he, too, who teaches Moses how to act as an instructor. For the Lord says: “If anyone has sinned before me, I will blot him out of my book; but now go, lead this people into the place I told you of.” Here he is the teacher of the art of instruction. For it was really the Lord who instructed the older people through Moses; the new people he instructs himself, face to face. “Look,” he says to Moses, “my angel will go before you” — which stands for the Word’s power to bring good news and to give orders, while guarding what belongs to the Lord alone. “On the day when I visit them,” he says, “I will bring their sins upon them”; that is, on the day I sit as judge, I will pay back what their sins deserve. For the same one who is Instructor is judge, and he judges those who disobey him; and the Word who loves us will not pass over their wrongdoing in silence. He reproves them so that they may repent. For “the Lord wants the sinner’s repentance rather than his death.”

And let us, as babes, hear about other people’s sins and keep clear of the same offenses, in dread of the threat, so that we do not have to suffer what they suffered. What, then, was the sin they committed? “For in their anger they killed men, and in their craving they hamstrung bulls. Cursed be their anger.” Who, then, would train us more lovingly than he does? Formerly the older people had an old covenant, and the law disciplined the people by fear, and the Word was an angel. But to the fresh and new people a new covenant has been given as well; the Word has become flesh, fear has been turned into love, and that hidden angel has been born — Jesus. For this same Instructor said back then, “You shall fear the Lord God”; but to us he has addressed the call, “You shall love the Lord your God.” That is why these things are laid on us too: “Stop your own works, your old sins”; “Learn to do good”; “Turn away from evil and do good”; “You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness.” This is my new covenant, written in the old letter. So the newness of the word must not be thrown up against us as a reproach.

But the Lord has also said in Jeremiah: “Do not say, ‘I am a youth’; before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before I brought you out of the womb I made you holy.” Prophecy can speak this way about us, who were known to God for faith before the world was founded, but who are babes now, through the recent carrying out of God’s will, by which we are born now to his call and to salvation. That is why he adds, “I have set you as a prophet to the nations” — saying that he must prophesy, so that the name “youth” should not become a reproach against those who are called babes.

Now the law is ancient grace, given through Moses by the Word. That is why Scripture says, “The law was given through Moses” — not by Moses, but by the Word, and through Moses his servant. So it was only for a time; but eternal grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Notice how Scripture puts it. Of the law alone is it said that it “was given”; but truth, which is the Father’s grace, is the eternal work of the Word, and it is not said to be given but to be “through Jesus,” apart from whom nothing came to be. So presently Moses, prophesying, gives place to the perfect Instructor, the Word, and foretells both the name and the office of the Instructor. Handing the people the commands of obedience, he sets the Instructor before them: “A prophet like me,” he says, “God will raise up for you from among your brothers” — pointing to Jesus the Son of God by an allusion to Jesus the son of Nun; for the name Jesus, foretold in the law, was a shadow of Christ. And so, with the people’s good in view, he adds, “Him you shall hear”; and against “the man who will not hear that Prophet” he speaks his threat.

Such, then, is the name he foretells for the Instructor, who is the author of salvation. And prophecy puts a rod in his hand — a rod of discipline, of rule, of authority — so that those whom the persuading word does not heal, the threat may heal; and those whom the threat does not heal, the rod may heal; and those whom the rod does not heal, the fire may devour. “There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse,” it says. See the care, the wisdom, and the power of the Instructor: “He will not judge by what people think, nor by what he hears reported; he will give judgment for the lowly and rebuke the sinners of the earth.” And through David: “The Lord instructing has instructed me, and has not handed me over to death.” For to be corrected by the Lord and instructed is rescue from death. And by the same prophet he says, “You shall rule them with a rod of iron.” So too the apostle, stirred, says in his letter to the Corinthians, “What do you want? Shall I come to you with a rod, or in love and a spirit of gentleness?” And, “The Lord will send out the rod of strength from Zion,” he says through another prophet. And it is this same rod of instruction that someone else meant when he said, “Your rod and your staff have comforted me.” Such is the power of the Instructor — holy, comforting, saving.