Short Roads to Salvation

Now that we have worked through the other matters in their order, it is time to go to the prophetic Scriptures. The oracles hold out to us, as plainly as anything could, the means of reverence for God, and so they lay the foundation of the truth. The divine Scriptures — and disciplined ways of living along with them — are short roads to salvation. Stripped of cosmetics, of outward beauty of sound, of chatter and of flattery, they raise up a person who is being strangled by evil. They pay no regard to the slippery footing of ordinary life. With one and the same voice they cure a great many ills. They turn us back from the deceit that ruins us, and they turn us plainly forward to the salvation set in front of us. So let the Sibyl, our prophetess, be the first to sing us the song of salvation: [a]

With that, deeply inspired, she likens deceit to darkness and the knowledge of God to the sun and to light; and by setting the two side by side she teaches us which to choose. For a lie is not scattered merely by placing the truth next to it. It is forced out and driven into exile by the practice of truth.

Jeremiah the prophet — wise through and through, or rather the Holy Spirit in Jeremiah — shows us God. He says: “I am a God who is near, and not a God far off. If a person does something in hiding, will I not see him? Do I not fill the heavens and the earth? says the Lord.” And again through Isaiah: “Who will measure heaven with the span of his hand, and the whole earth in a cupped palm?” Look at the greatness of God, and be astonished. Let us worship the one about whom the prophet says: “Before your face the mountains will melt, as wax melts before fire.” This, he says, is the God “whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth,” the one who, “if he opens heaven, will send trembling over you.” Do you want to hear what this same prophet says about idols? “They will be made an example of in the face of the sun, and their corpses will be food for the birds of the sky and the wild animals of the earth; and they will rot under the sun and the moon, which they themselves loved and served; and their city will be burned down.” He says that the elements and the world will be destroyed along with them. “The earth,” he says, “will grow old, and the heaven will pass away” — “but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

And what of the time when God wants to show himself again, through Moses? “See, see that I am, and there is no other god besides me. I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal, and there is no one who can pull anything out of my hands.” But do you want to listen to another oracle-singer as well? You have the whole prophetic chorus, the fellow initiates of Moses. What does the Holy Spirit say to them through Hosea? I will not shrink from quoting it: “See, I am the one who makes the thunder firm and creates the wind” — he whose hands laid the foundation of heaven’s host. And again through Isaiah; and I will recite this saying for you too: “I am, I am the Lord, who speaks righteousness and announces truth. Gather yourselves and come. Take counsel together, you who are being saved from among the nations. They knew nothing, the men who lift up a block of wood, their own carved work, and who pray to gods that will not save them.” Then, further down: “I am God, and besides me there is no one righteous, and there is no savior except me. Turn to me and you will be saved, you who are from the end of the earth. I am God, and there is no other. I swear by myself.” And with the idol-worshipers he is out of patience: “To whom have you likened the Lord? Or to what likeness have you compared him? Surely a craftsman did not make the image, or a goldsmith melt down gold and plate it over?” — and so on. Are you still idol-worshipers, then? At least now be on your guard against the threats. “For the carved images and the things made by hand will howl” — or rather, those who trusted in them will — since matter has no feeling. He says further: “The Lord will shake the inhabited cities, and he will take hold of the whole world in his hand like a nest.”

Why should I announce to you the mysteries of wisdom, and sayings out of a Hebrew boy schooled in wisdom? “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, for his works.” And: “The Lord gives wisdom, and from his face come knowledge and understanding.” “How long will you lie there, lazy man? When will you be roused out of your sleep?” “But if you are not lazy, your harvest will come to you like a spring” — the harvest that is the Father’s Word, the good lamp, the Lord who brings on the light, faith for all, and salvation. For “the Lord who made the earth by his power,” as Jeremiah says, “set the world upright by his wisdom.” We had fallen away to idols, and wisdom — which is his Word — sets us upright again toward the truth. And this is the first resurrection out of our fall.

That is why Moses, the man God spoke through, turning us away from every kind of idol-worship, cries out so magnificently: “Hear, Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one,” and “you shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve.” So now understand, you people, as that blessed psalmist David says: “Take hold of discipline, or the Lord will be angry and you will be destroyed off the righteous road, when his anger flares up in a moment. Blessed are all who put their trust in him.” But the Lord, in his overflowing pity for us, has already given out the song of salvation, like a marching rhythm: “Sons of men, how long will you be heavy-hearted? Why do you love emptiness and go looking for a lie?” So what is the emptiness, and what is the lie? The Lord’s holy apostle, laying the charge against the Greeks, will explain it to you: “Because although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became empty in their reasonings, and exchanged the glory of God for the likeness of an image of a perishable man, and gave their religious service to the creation instead of to the Creator.” And this is in fact the God who “in the beginning made the heaven and the earth.” But you have no idea of God, and you worship the sky. How is that not irreverence? Listen again to the prophet speaking: “The sun will fail and the sky will be darkened, but the Almighty will shine forever; and the powers of the heavens will be shaken, and the heavens will be rolled up like a leather curtain, stretched out and drawn together” — these are the prophets’ own expressions — “and the earth will flee from before the face of the Lord.”

I could bring you countless passages of Scripture, and not one stroke of a letter in them will pass away without being fulfilled; for the mouth of the Lord, the Holy Spirit, has spoken them. He says: “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline any longer, and do not lose heart when he corrects you.” What overwhelming love for humanity! Not as a teacher speaks to his pupils, not as a master to his household slaves, not as God to human beings — but “gently, as a father,” the Lord warns his sons. Moses admits that he “was afraid and trembling” as he listened about the Word. And you, hearing the divine Word itself — you are not afraid? You are not anxious? Are you not at once on your guard and in a hurry to learn it through, that is, in a hurry toward salvation — afraid of the anger, loving the grace, eager for the hope, so that you may turn aside from the judgment? [u]

Come, come, my young people! For unless “you become like children again” and are born again, as the Scripture says, you will certainly not receive the Father who truly is, and “you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” For how is a stranger allowed in? Only when he is registered, I think, and made a citizen, and receives a father — then he will be “about his Father’s business”; then he will be judged worthy to inherit; then he will share the Father’s kingdom with the true and “beloved” Son. For this is the firstborn church, put together out of many good children. These are “the firstborn enrolled in heaven,” keeping festival with so many “tens of thousands of angels.” And we are firstborn sons, the ones God rears, the true friends of the “firstborn,” the first of all other people to have understood God, the first torn away from our sins, the first separated from the devil.

But as things stand, the more God loves humanity, the more godless some people are. He wants us to become sons instead of slaves; they think it beneath them to become sons at all. What enormous madness! You are ashamed of the Lord. He promises freedom; you run off into slavery. He makes a gift of salvation; you are carried down into death. He hands over eternal life; you sit waiting for punishment, and you keep your eye on “the fire that the Lord has prepared for the devil and his angels.” That is why the blessed apostle says: “I testify in the Lord that you are no longer to walk as the nations walk, in the emptiness of their mind, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart — men who, past all feeling, handed themselves over to debauchery, to the working of every kind of uncleanness and greed.” When a witness like that convicts human stupidity and calls on God, what is left for those who will not believe except judgment and condemnation?

The Lord never tires of advising, alarming, urging, waking, warning. He rouses people out of that darkness and raises up those who have wandered off. “Get up, sleeper,” he says, “and rise from the dead, and Christ the Lord will shine on you” — Christ, the sun of the resurrection, “born before the morning star,” who makes a gift of life with rays of his own. So let no one look down on the Word, or he may find, without noticing, that he has looked down on himself. For the Scripture says somewhere: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test by trial.” And what was the trial? If you want to learn, the Holy Spirit will explain it to you: “And they saw my works,” he says, “for forty years. That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said: they always wander in their heart, and they have not known my ways. So I swore in my anger that they would not enter my rest.” Look at the threat! Look at the encouragement! Look at the honor! Why, then, do we still change grace into anger, instead of taking the word in with open ears and giving God lodging in pure souls? For the grace of his promise is great, if today we hear his voice. And that today grows longer with each day, as long as it is named today. Right up to the end, the today and the learning both go on; and then the real today, God’s day that never runs short, stretches out alongside the ages. So let us always obey the voice of the divine Word. For the today is an image of the everlasting age; and day is a symbol of light; and the light of human beings is the Word, through whom we see God in full light. Naturally, then, for those who have believed and who obey, grace will overflow; while with those who refused to be persuaded, who wander in their heart and have not known the Lord’s roads — the roads John gave orders to make straight and to get ready — with them God was angry, and them he threatens.

And in fact the old Hebrew wanderers received the end of that threat in riddling form. They are said not to have entered the rest because of their unbelief, until they followed Moses’ successor and learned by experience, late in the day, that they could not be saved any other way than by believing as Jesus did. But the Lord loves humanity, and he calls all people “to the knowledge of the truth”; he is the one who sends the Helper. And what is this knowledge? Reverence for God. “And reverence for God,” Paul says, “is useful for everything, holding a promise of the life that is now and of the life to come.” If everlasting salvation were for sale, my friends, how much would you agree to pay for it? If a man measured out the whole of Pactolus, that legendary stream of gold, he would not count out a price worth as much as salvation.

So do not give up. If you want to, you may buy this salvation, precious as it is, with a treasure of your own — love, and faith of life — which is a price worth naming. God is glad to take this payment: “for we have set our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe.”

The rest of them have grown fast to the world, like seaweed on rocks in the sea, and they make little of immortality. Like the old man of Ithaca, what they long to see is not the truth, not the homeland in heaven, not even the light that really is — but smoke. Reverence for God, though, makes a person as like God as a person can be, and it enrolls God himself as the fitting teacher, the only one who can make a human being resemble God as he deserves. The apostle knew that this teaching was truly divine: “And you, Timothy, have known the sacred letters from infancy — the letters that are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ.” Sacred those letters truly are, since they make holy and make divine; and the writings put together out of those sacred letters and syllables, the collected volumes, the same apostle goes on to call “God-breathed, useful for teaching, for conviction, for setting straight, for the discipline that is in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fitted out for every good work.” No one would be so struck by the encouragements of any of the other holy men as by the Lord himself, who loves humanity; for he has no work at all except this one — that a human being be saved. So he shouts, pressing us on toward salvation: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” He turns people around as they come close through fear. In the same way the Lord’s apostle, encouraging the Macedonians, becomes the interpreter of the divine voice when he says, “The Lord has come near; take care that we are not caught empty-handed.” But you are so free of fear — or rather, so free of faith — that you will not be persuaded either by the Lord himself or by Paul, and this while he is in chains for Christ.

“Taste and see that God is good.” Faith will bring you in; experience will teach you; Scripture will walk you to school, saying, “Come here, children, listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord.” Then, as though speaking to people who already believe, it briefly adds, “Who is the man who wants life, who loves to see good days?” We are, we shall say — we who worship the good, we who are eager for good things. So listen, “you who are far off”; listen, “you who are near.” The Word has been hidden from no one. It is a light held in common; it shines on all people. No one is a Cimmerian where the Word is concerned. Let us hurry to salvation, to being born again. Let us who are many hurry to be gathered into one love, in keeping with the union of the single Being; and let us, by being made good, pursue oneness to match it, searching out the good Monad.

Out of many voices and out of scattering, the union of the many takes on a divine harmony and becomes one symphony, following one leader of the dance and one teacher, the Word, and it comes to rest on the truth itself, saying, “Abba, Father.” This is the true voice God welcomes from his own children, gathering it from them as his first fruit.