The Sowers and the Reapers

Our faith too was sketched out beforehand in Abraham. He was the patriarch of our faith, and, you might say, its prophet. The apostle taught this at full length when he wrote to the Galatians: “Does the one who supplies you with the Spirit and works miracles among you do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. So you know that those who are of faith are Abraham’s children. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would count the nations righteous through faith, announced the good news to Abraham beforehand: that in him all the nations would be blessed. So then those who are of faith are blessed along with faithful Abraham.” That is why the apostle called him not only the prophet of faith but also the father of those from among the nations who believe in Jesus Christ; for his faith and ours are one and the same. He believed in things still to come as though they had already happened, because God had promised them; and in the same way we, because God has promised, see by faith the inheritance laid up for us in the kingdom that is coming. [a]

The story of Isaac is not without its own sign either. In the letter to the Romans the apostle says: “And when Rebecca had conceived by one man, our father Isaac,” she received an answer from the Word, “so that God’s purpose according to his choosing might stand — not from works, but from the one who calls — it was said to her: Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples will come out of your body; and the one people will overcome the other, and the elder will serve the younger.” From this it is clear that there were not only prophecies spoken by the patriarchs, but that the children Rebecca bore were themselves a prediction of the two nations: one of them greater and one less, one in slavery and one free — and both of them from one and the same father. Our God, one and the same, is their God too. He knows what is hidden and knows everything before it can happen, and that is why he said, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

And if anyone looks into what Jacob did, he will not find it empty of meaning; it is full of significance for God’s arrangements. First, at his birth he took hold of his brother’s heel, and so was called Jacob, that is, the supplanter: one who holds and is not held, who ties another’s feet and is not tied himself, who wrestles and wins, gripping his opponent’s heel in his hand — and the heel is victory. That is what the Lord was born for, and Jacob’s birth set out the pattern of his beforehand. John says of him in the Revelation: “He went out conquering, so that he might conquer.” Next, Jacob received the rights of the firstborn when his brother thought nothing of them — just as the younger people received Christ, the firstborn, when the elder people rejected him and said, “We have no king but Caesar.” Every blessing is gathered up in Christ, and so the later people has carried off from the Father the blessings that belonged to the earlier one, exactly as Jacob carried off the blessing of that Esau. And for the same reason Jacob had to endure a brother’s plots and a brother’s persecution, which is the very thing the church endures from the Jews.

The twelve tribes, the race of Israel, were born in a foreign country, because Christ too was to bring to birth in a foreign country the twelve-pillared foundation of the church. Jacob’s wages were sheep of many colors; and Christ’s wages are human beings, gathered out of many different nations into one company of faith, as the Father promised him: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession.” And since the Lord’s prophets later came out of the crowd of his sons, it was altogether necessary that Jacob should father sons by the two sisters, as Christ did by the two laws of one and the same Father — and by the slave women as well, showing that Christ would raise up sons of God both from free men and from slaves in the flesh, giving all of them alike the gift of the Spirit who makes us alive. But everything Jacob did was for the sake of the younger sister, the one with the beautiful eyes — Rachel, who stood beforehand for the church, and for whom Christ waited patiently. In those days he was already, through his patriarchs and prophets, sketching what was to come and announcing it in advance, playing his own part ahead of time in God’s arrangements. He was training his inheritance to obey God, to travel through this world as a stranger passing through, to follow his word, and to point ahead to what was coming. For with God nothing is aimless, and nothing is without its meaning.

Now in the last days, when the full time of freedom had come, the Word himself, with his own hands, “washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion” — he washed the disciples’ feet. For this is the goal of a human race that inherits God: at the beginning, through our first parents, we were all brought into slavery by being made subject to death; and at the last, through the New Man, all who from the beginning were his disciples were to be cleansed and washed of everything belonging to death, and to come into the life of God. The one who washed the disciples’ feet made the whole body holy and clean. That is also why he served them their food while they lay at table: a sign that the ones lying in the earth were the ones he had come to give life to. As Jeremiah declares, “The holy Lord remembered his dead Israel, who slept in the land where the graves are; and he went down to them to make his salvation known to them, so that they might be saved.” [j]

That is also why the disciples’ eyes were heavy as Christ’s suffering drew near. The first time the Lord found them asleep he let it pass, showing God’s patience with the sleep that people were lying in; but when he came the second time he woke them and made them stand up — a sign that his suffering is the waking of his sleeping disciples. It was for their sake that he also “went down into the lower parts of the earth,” to see with his own eyes the condition of those who were resting from their labors. They are the ones he had in mind when he said to the disciples, “Many prophets and righteous men have wanted to see what you see and to hear what you hear.”

For Christ did not come only for the people who believed in him in the days of Tiberius Caesar, and the Father did not make provision only for the people who are alive now. He came for all people together — everyone who from the beginning, each as far as he was able and in his own generation, both feared God and loved him, and dealt justly and reverently with his neighbors, and longed to see Christ and hear his voice. So at his second coming he will first wake all such people out of their sleep and raise them up, along with the rest who are to be judged, and give them a place in his kingdom. For it is truly one God who guided the patriarchs into his arrangements, and who “counted the circumcised righteous by faith, and the uncircumcised through faith.” We were sketched out beforehand in the first of them; and they in turn are represented in us, that is, in the church, and they receive the reward for what they carried out.

This is why the Lord said to the disciples: “Look, I tell you — lift up your eyes and look at the countryside, for it is white for harvest already. The harvester is paid his wages and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that the one who sows and the one who reaps may be glad together. For here the saying is true, that one sows and another reaps. I sent you out to reap what you did no work on; others did the work, and you have come into their labor.” So who are the ones who did the work and carried God’s arrangements forward? Plainly the patriarchs and the prophets. They sketched out our faith in advance and scattered through the earth the news that the Son of God was coming, and who and what he would be — so that later generations, holding the fear of God and taught by the prophets, might accept Christ’s coming without difficulty. [p]

That is why, when Joseph realized that Mary was pregnant and meant to divorce her quietly, the angel said to him in his sleep: “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you will call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” And to press the point he added: “Now all this has happened so that what the Lord said through the prophet might be fulfilled: Look, a virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and his name will be called Emmanuel.” So he moved Joseph with the prophet’s own words and turned the blame away from Mary, showing that she was the virgin Isaiah had spoken of long before, the one who would give birth to Emmanuel. And Joseph, convinced past all doubt, did take Mary, and gladly obeyed in everything else that had to do with bringing Christ up: the journey into Egypt and back again, and then the move to Nazareth. People who did not know the Scriptures, or God’s promise, or the arrangement made for Christ, ended up calling Joseph the child’s father.

This is also why the Lord himself read out the prophecy of Isaiah at Capernaum: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim release to the captives and sight to the blind.” And at the same time, to show that he himself was the one Isaiah the prophet had foretold, he said to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

For the same reason Philip had so little trouble with the eunuch of the Ethiopian queen. He found him reading these written words: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb is silent before its shearer, so he did not open his mouth; in his humiliation his judgment was taken away” — and all the rest the prophet went on to say about his suffering and his coming in the flesh, and how he was treated with contempt by those who did not believe him. Philip easily persuaded him to believe in him: that he was Christ Jesus, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and suffered everything the prophet had foretold, and that he was the Son of God, who gives eternal life to human beings. As soon as Philip had baptized him, he left him. Nothing else was missing in a man the prophets had already taught. He was not ignorant of God the Father, nor of the rules for how a person should live; the one thing he did not know was that the Son of God had come. Once he had learned that, in a very short time, he went on his way rejoicing, to be the herald in Ethiopia of Christ’s coming. So Philip had no great labor over this man, because the prophets had already prepared him in the fear of God. In the same way the apostles gathered up the lost sheep of the house of Israel, argued with them out of the Scriptures, and proved that this crucified Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God. They persuaded a great many — people who already had the fear of God. And in a single day three thousand, and four thousand, and five thousand men were baptized.

And that is why Paul, being the apostle to the nations, says, “I worked harder than all of them.” Teaching the Jews was easy work, because proofs could be brought from the Scriptures, and because people used to hearing Moses and the prophets readily received the Firstborn from the dead and the Prince of the life of God — the one who by the spreading out of hands destroyed Amalek, and who gave life to man from the serpent’s bite through the faith directed toward him. As I showed in the previous book, with the nations the apostle had first to teach them to leave the superstition of idols and worship one God, the Maker of heaven and earth and the Framer of the whole creation; and that his Son was his Word, through whom he founded everything; and that in the last times this Son was made a man among men; that he made the human race over again, and destroyed and defeated the enemy of humankind, and gave his own handiwork the victory over the adversary. The circumcised, for their part, still did not obey the words of God — they were scornful of them — but they had at least been taught beforehand not to commit adultery, not to be sexually immoral, not to steal, not to cheat, and that whatever is done to a neighbor’s harm is evil and hated by God. So they agreed readily enough to keep away from such things, because that was how they had been trained. [u]

With the nations, though, this very thing had to be taught them as well: that acts of that kind are wicked, harmful, useless, and ruinous to the people who do them. So the man who had been given the mission to the nations worked harder than those who preached the Son of God among the circumcised. The others had the Scriptures to help them, which the Lord confirmed and fulfilled by coming just as he had been announced. But among the nations there was a whole foreign body of learning and a new teaching to be taken in: that the gods of the nations were not gods at all, but the idols of demons; that there is one God, who is “above every rule and authority and power and every name that is named”; that his Word, invisible by nature, was made touchable and visible among men and went down “to death, even the death of the cross”; and that those who believe in him will be beyond decay and beyond suffering, and will receive the kingdom of heaven. All this was preached to the nations by word of mouth, without the Scriptures to help; and so the men who preached among the nations went through greater labor. But on the other side, the faith of the nations turns out to be the nobler kind, since they followed the word of God without any schooling from the written texts.

This is what Abraham’s sons had to be — the sons God raised up for him out of the stones and set beside the man who was made the head and the forerunner of our faith. Abraham received the covenant of circumcision after he had already been counted righteous by faith, while he was still uncircumcised, so that both covenants might be sketched out in him. That way he could be the father of everyone who follows the Word of God and lives in this world as a stranger passing through: of the believers who come from among the circumcised and of those who come from among the uncircumcised. In the same way “Christ is the chief cornerstone,” holding everything up. And God gathered into the one faith of Abraham those from either covenant who are fit to go into his building. This faith held in uncircumcision joins the end to the beginning, and so it has been made both the first and the last. As I have shown, it was there in Abraham before circumcision, and in the rest of the righteous who pleased God; and in these last times it has sprung up among people again through the coming of the Lord. Circumcision and the law of works filled the stretch of time in between. [z]

Many other things set this out, but the clearest picture of it is the story of Tamar, Judah’s daughter-in-law. She had conceived twins, and one of them put out his hand first. The midwife thought he was the firstborn and tied a scarlet token on his hand. But after that was done he drew his hand back, and his brother Perez came out first; then, after him, Zerah, the one with the scarlet line on him, was born second. Scripture is plainly pointing out the people who had the scarlet sign — that is, faith held under circumcision, which was shown beforehand in the patriarchs first and then drawn back so that the brother could be born. And it is pointing out the elder as well, born in the second place, marked out by the scarlet token fastened on him. The token is the suffering of the Righteous One, which was sketched out from the beginning in Abel, described by the prophets, and brought to completion in the last times in the Son of God.

Some things had to be announced beforehand by the fathers, in the manner of fathers; others sketched out by the prophets in the manner of the law; and others described after the pattern of Christ by those who have received adoption as sons — and all of them are displayed in one God. Abraham was one man, but he sketched out in himself the two covenants: in the one some have sown, and in the other others have reaped. As it says, “Here the saying is true, that one people sows and another will reap.” But it is one God who gives each of them what suits it: seed to the sower, and bread for the reaper to eat. In the same way one man plants and another waters, but it is one God who gives the growth. The patriarchs and the prophets sowed the word about Christ; the church reaped it, that is, took in the fruit. That is also why those very men pray to have a lodging in it, as Jeremiah says, “Who will give me the last lodging place in the desert?” — so that the one who sows and the one who reaps may be glad together in the kingdom of Christ, who is present with everyone whom God approved from the beginning, and to whom he granted his Word to be with them.