Jacob, Saul, and the Psalms

“And God formed man out of the dust of the ground.” And what does this mean? Are we to say, as some do, that three men were made — one spiritual, one made of soul, and one made of earth? That is not the case. The whole account is about a single man. The words “Let us make” are about the man who was going to be; then come the words “God made man out of the dust of the ground,” so that the account is about one and the same man. First he says, “Let him be made”; now he makes him; and the account tells how he makes him. [a]

Isaac carries a figure of God the Father; Rebecca, of the Holy Spirit; Esau, of the first people and of the devil; Jacob, of the church, or of Christ. That Isaac was old points to the end of the world. That his eyes were dim means that faith had died out of the world, and that the light of religion was neglected before him. That the elder son is called expresses the Jews’ hold on the law. That the father loves his game and the meat of the hunt means the rescue of people from error — the people every righteous man hunts down by his teaching. The word of God here is the promise, given again, of the blessing and of the hope of a kingdom to come, in which the holy ones will reign with Christ and keep the true sabbath.

Rebecca is full of the Holy Spirit, since she understood the word she heard before she gave birth: “The elder will serve the younger.” And as a figure of the Holy Spirit she also takes Jacob’s side and cares for him. She says to her younger son, “Go to the flock and bring me two young goats.” This prefigures the Savior’s coming in the flesh, to work a great rescue for those who were liable to the punishment of sin; for all through the Scriptures young goats stand for sinners. That he is told to bring two means the receiving of two peoples; and by “tender and good” are meant teachable and innocent souls. Esau’s robe stands for the faith and the Scriptures of the Hebrews, which the Gentile peoples were clothed with. The skins put on Jacob’s arms are the sins of both peoples, which Christ fastened to the cross along with himself when his hands were stretched out on it.

When Isaac asks Jacob why he came back so soon, we take him to be marveling at the quick faith of those who believe. That savory food is offered means an offering that pleases God: the saving of sinners. After the eating comes the blessing, and he delights in the smell. In a clear voice he announces the fullness of the resurrection and of the kingdom, and how his brothers who believe in Israel bow to him and serve him.

Because lawlessness is set against righteousness, Esau is stirred up to strife and plots death by treachery, saying in his heart, “Let the days of mourning for my father come, and I will kill my brother Jacob.” The devil, who had already put the brother-killing Jews on show beforehand in Cain, now discloses them beyond all mistaking in Esau, and shows the time of the murder as well: “Let the days of mourning for my father come, so that I may kill my brother.” That is why Rebecca — that is, patience — told her husband about the brother’s plot. He called Jacob and told him to go to Mesopotamia and take a wife there from the family of Laban the Syrian, his mother’s brother. So, just as Jacob goes off to Mesopotamia to escape his brother’s schemes, Christ too, forced away by the unbelief of the Jews, goes into Galilee, to take for himself from there a bride out of the Gentiles — his church.

Now, so that he might be shown to have in himself at once the nature of God and the nature of man — as the apostle also says, “a mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” and “a mediator is not of one, but of two” — it was necessary that Christ, in becoming the mediator between God and men, should receive a pledge of some kind from both, so that he might be seen as the mediator between two who stand apart.

The question is raised whether Samuel rose at the hand of the sorceress or not. If we were to grant that he did rise, we would be putting forward something false. For how could a demon call a soul back — and I do not mean only the soul of a righteous man, but of anyone at all — once it had gone and was waiting somewhere no one knows?

But he asks: then why was the woman alarmed, and how did she see men coming up in so strange a way? For if what she saw had not been out of the ordinary, she would not have said, “I see gods coming up out of the earth.” She called up one; how did many come up? What then? Shall we say that the souls of all who appeared came up, and those not even called by the woman — or that what was seen was only phantoms of them? Even that will not do.

How, he presses further, did Saul recognize what appeared, and bow down to it? Well, Saul did not actually see anything. The woman told him that the figure of one of those coming up was the figure he wanted; he took it for Samuel, consulted it as Samuel, and bowed to it. And it would be no hard thing for the demon to conjure up Samuel’s shape, since he knew it.

Then how, he says, did the demon foretell the disasters that were to fall on Saul and Jonathan at the same time? He did foretell the end of the war, and that Saul would be beaten, drawing that as an inference from God’s anger against him. A physician who has no exact knowledge of his science might still see a patient past cure and predict his death, and be wrong about the hour. In the same way the demon, knowing God’s anger from Saul’s own deeds — and from this very attempt to consult the sorceress — foretells his defeat and his death together, but is wrong about the day of his death.

The book of Psalms contains new teaching, coming after the law of Moses. After the writing of Moses it is the second book of teaching. Now after the death of Moses and Joshua, and after the judges, David arose, who was counted worthy of bearing the name of father of the Savior himself. He was the first to give the Hebrews a new kind of psalm-singing, by which he sets aside the rules Moses laid down about sacrifices and brings in the new hymn and a new kind of joyful praise in the worship of God; and all through his ministry he teaches a great many other things that go beyond the law of Moses.

When he came into the world he was shown to be God and man. The man in him is easy to see: when he is hungry and shows exhaustion, when he is tired and thirsty, when he withdraws in fear, when he is at prayer and in grief, when he sleeps on a cushion in a boat, when he begs that the cup of suffering be taken away, when he sweats in agony and is strengthened by an angel, is betrayed by a Judas, mocked by Caiaphas, treated as nothing by Herod, flogged by Pilate, jeered at by the soldiers, and nailed to the tree by the Jews; when with a cry he commits his spirit to his Father, lets his head drop and gives up his life, has his side opened with a spear, is wrapped in linen and laid in a tomb, and is raised by the Father on the third day.

And what is divine in him is just as plain: when he is worshiped by angels and seen by shepherds; when Simeon waits for him and Anna bears witness to him; when wise men ask after him and a star points him out; when at a wedding he makes wine out of water, and rebukes the sea as it is thrown up by the violence of the winds, and walks on the deep; when he makes a man see who had been blind from birth, and raises Lazarus after four days dead; when he works many wonders, forgives sins, and gives power to his disciples.

And further, the ark made of imperishable wood was the Savior himself. By it was signified the imperishable and incorruptible tent of the Lord himself, which bred no corruption of sin. The sinner, for his part, makes this confession: “My wounds stank and festered because of my foolishness.” But the Lord was without sin, made of imperishable wood so far as he was man — that is, of the virgin and the Holy Spirit within, and outwardly of the word of God, like an ark overlaid with the purest gold.

He comes to the gates of heaven; angels come with him; and the gates of heaven were shut. For he had not yet gone up into heaven. Now for the first time he appears to the powers of heaven as flesh going up. So the angels who run ahead of the Savior and Lord say to those powers, “Lift up your gates, you rulers; and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory will come in.”

He it is who brought up out of the lowest place of the dead the man first made of earth, when he was lost and bound in the chains of death. He came down from above and lifted the earth-born man on high. He became the one who announced the good news to the dead, the redeemer of souls, and the resurrection of the buried. He became the helper of man in his defeat and appeared in his likeness, the firstborn Word, and took the first Adam upon himself in the virgin. Though he was spirit himself, he came to know what is of earth, in the womb. Though he was himself the ever-living One, he came to know those dead in their trespasses. Himself the heavenly one, he carried the earthly on high. Himself high-born, he chose by his own submission to set the slave free. And making man — who turns to dust and makes food for the serpent — as unbreakable as adamant, and that while hanging on the tree, he declared him lord over the one who had beaten him; and so he is himself proved conqueror by the tree.

Those who do not acknowledge the Son of God come in the flesh now will have to acknowledge him as Judge, when the one who is now despised in his inglorious body comes in his glory.

And when the apostles came to the tomb on the third day, they did not find the body of Jesus — just as the children of Israel went up the mountain to look for the tomb of Moses and did not find it.

Now, a deadly bile can build up in a man’s inward parts because of an irregular way of living, and a physician’s skill can bring it on to be a bout of vomiting — and the physician is not to be charged with producing the bad humor in the man’s body, since excess in diet is what produced it, and the physician’s science only made it show itself. In the same way, though it may be said that the painful repayment falling on people who are wicked by their own choice comes from God, it would only be in line with right reason to think that ills of that kind find both their beginnings and their causes in ourselves. For to the one who lives without sin there is no darkness, no worm, no Gehenna, no fire, and none of the other words or things that terrify — just as the plagues of Egypt were not for the Hebrews: those fine lice that stung invisibly, the dog-fly that fastened on the body with its painful bite, the storms out of heaven falling on them with hailstones, the farmer’s labor eaten up by the locusts, the darkened sky, and the rest. It is God’s plan to tend the true vine and to destroy the Egyptian one, sparing those who are to “eat the grape of gall and drink the deadly venom of asps.” And the sycamore fig of Egypt is utterly destroyed — though not the one Zacchaeus climbed so that he could see my Lord. And the fruits of Egypt are wasted, that is, the works of the flesh, but not the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, and peace.

Symmachus renders it: “who gave their cattle over to the plague, and their possessions to the birds.” For after meeting an overwhelming ruin they became prey for the flesh-eating birds. But according to the Septuagint the sense is not that the hail destroyed their cattle and the fire the rest of their goods. It is that hail, falling in an extraordinary way along with fire, destroyed first of all their vines and sycamore figs, which were entirely unable to stand up to the first attack; then the cattle grazing on the plains; and then every plant and tree, which the fire that came with the hail consumed. The whole affair was a portent, since fire ran with the water and was mixed in with it. “For fire ran in the hail,” he says — and so it was hail, and fire burning inside the hail. David also calls the cattle and the fruit of the trees their “goods,” or “riches.” And it should be noticed that although the hail is recorded as destroying every plant and every tree, some were left, which the locust consumed when it came upon them after the fiery hail; of these it is said that it eats up every plant and all the fruit of the trees that the hail left behind.

Now in a spiritual sense some sheep belong to Christ and others to the Egyptians. Sheep that once belonged to others may become his, as Laban’s sheep became Jacob’s — and the other way around. And whichever sheep Jacob rejected, he handed over to Esau. So watch out: you may be found in the flock of Jesus and still be set apart when the gifts are sent to Esau, and be handed over to Esau as rejected and unworthy of the spiritual Jacob. The single-minded are Christ’s sheep, and God saves them, as the word says: “Lord, you preserve man and beast.” Those who in their folly attach themselves to godless teaching are the sheep of the Egyptians, and they too are destroyed by the hail. And everything the Egyptians own is handed over to the fire, but Abraham’s goods are given to Isaac.