The Spiritual Man Judges All

A spiritual disciple of this kind truly receives the Spirit of God — the Spirit who was there from the beginning, present with mankind through every one of God’s arrangements, announcing what was still to come, revealing what was present, and telling over what was past. Such a man does indeed “judge all men, but is himself judged by no one.” He judges the Gentiles, who “serve the creature rather than the Creator” and spend all their labor on what is empty, with minds that have failed the test. He judges the Jews as well. They will not accept the word that sets men free, and they are not willing to walk out free, though the one who can release them is standing right there. Instead they keep up a show of service at a time when the time for it has passed — piling on observances beyond anything the law asked — and the God they serve that way needs nothing from anyone. They do not recognize the coming of Christ, which he carried through for the salvation of men, and they are unwilling to understand that all the prophets announced his two comings. [a]

The first was the coming in which he became a man whose back was open to the whip, a man who knew what it is to carry weakness; who sat on the foal of a donkey; who was the stone the builders threw away; who was led like a sheep to the slaughter; who destroyed Amalek by stretching out his hands; who gathered the scattered children from the ends of the earth into his Father’s fold, and remembered his own dead who had fallen asleep long before, and came down to them to set them free. The second is the coming in which he will arrive on the clouds, bringing on the day that burns like a furnace, striking the earth with the word of his mouth and killing the godless with the breath of his lips, with the winnowing fork in his hand, clearing his threshing floor, gathering the wheat into his barn and burning the chaff with fire that is never put out.

He will also examine what Marcion teaches, and ask how he can hold that there are two gods, cut off from each other by an infinite distance. How can a god be good who pulls men who do not belong to him away from the one who made them, and calls them into a kingdom of his own? And why is his goodness so defective that it does not save everyone? Why, too, does he look good where men are concerned, and thoroughly unjust toward the one who made men, since he strips him of what belongs to him? How could the Lord, with any justice at all, have acknowledged the bread to be his body — bread he took from the very creation we belong to — and declared the mixed cup to be his blood, if he belonged to some other father? How could he call himself the Son of Man, if he had not gone through the birth that belongs to a human being? How could he forgive us the sins we have to answer for to our Maker and God? And if he was not flesh, but only a man in appearance, how could he have been crucified, and how could blood and water have come out of his pierced side? What body did the men who buried him lay in the tomb? And what was it that rose again from the dead?

He will judge all the followers of Valentinus too. With their tongues they confess one God the Father, from whom everything derives its existence — and at the same time they hold that the one who formed everything is the offspring of a falling away, a defect. With their tongues they likewise confess one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and then in their system they assign a separate production to the Only Son, another to the Word, another to Christ, and yet another to the Savior. On their showing, all these beings are said in Scripture to be, so to speak, one — while they insist that each is to be understood as existing apart from the others, each with an origin of its own, according to its own particular pairing. So it turns out that only their tongues have conceded that God is one. Their real opinion and their understanding, trained by the habit of prying into deep things, have fallen away from that oneness and taken up the idea of many gods. All of it will come out when Christ examines them on the points of doctrine they have invented. They say, besides, that he was born later than the Fullness of the Aeons, and that his production came after a degeneration, a falling away; and they hold that they themselves were brought to birth because of the suffering Sophia went through. But their own private prophet Homer — the man they were listening to when they invented such teachings — will be the one to reprove them, when he says:

He will also judge the empty talk of the perverse Gnostics, by showing that they are the disciples of Simon Magus.

He will judge the Ebionites as well. How can they be saved, unless it was God who worked out their salvation on earth? How is man to pass over into God, unless God has first passed over into man? How is he to get out of the family line that is subject to death, except by a new birth — a birth given by God in a wonderful and unlooked-for way, as a sign of salvation — the new birth that comes from the virgin through faith? How are they to receive adoption from God, if they stay inside the kind of birth a man naturally has in this world? And how could he have been greater than Solomon, or greater than Jonah, or David’s Lord, if he was of the same substance they were? How could he have overpowered the one who was stronger than men — the one who had not only beaten man but kept him in his grip — and conquered the conqueror, setting free the mankind that had been conquered, unless he was greater than the man who had been beaten? And who is higher and greater than the man formed after God’s likeness, except the Son of God, in whose image man was made? That is why in these last days he displayed the likeness: the Son of God was made man, taking the ancient handiwork up into himself, as I showed in the book just before this one.

He will also judge the men who say Christ became man only in appearance. How can they suppose they are carrying on a real discussion, when their Teacher was an imaginary being? How can they receive anything solid from him, if he was a thing imagined and not a fact? And how can such men really have a share in salvation, if the one they claim to believe in showed himself as nothing but an appearance? Everything about these men is unreal, then, and nothing about them has the character of truth — and in that case one might raise the question whether, since perhaps they are not men either but dumb animals, they do not for the most part present a mere shadow of humanity. He will judge false prophets: men who never received the gift of prophecy from God and do not have the fear of God in them, but who pretend to prophesy for the sake of empty glory, or with an eye to some advantage of their own, or under the influence of a wicked spirit in some other way — and who all the while are lying against God.

He will judge those who cause splits: men with no love for God, who look to their own particular advantage rather than to the unity of the church, and who for trifling reasons, or any reason that happens to occur to them, cut the great and glorious body of Christ to pieces and divide it, and destroy it so far as it lies in their power. They talk peace while they make war. They really do strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. No reform they could bring about is important enough to make up for the damage their split does. He will judge everyone outside the boundary of the truth as well, that is, everyone outside the church. But he himself will be judged by no one. For everything holds together for him. He has full faith in one God Almighty, from whom all things are; and in the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom all things are, and in the arrangements bound up with him, by which the Son of God became man; and he firmly believes in the Spirit of God, who supplies us with knowledge of the truth and has set out the arrangements of the Father and the Son, and who by them pitches his tent among every generation of men, according to the Father’s will.

True knowledge is the teaching of the apostles; and the ancient framework of the church throughout the whole world; and the distinctive stamp of the body of Christ, according to the successions of the overseers, by which they have handed down the church that exists in every place — the church that has come down even to us, guarded and kept safe, with no forging of Scriptures, by a very full treatment of doctrine that neither receives any addition nor allows anything to be cut away. It is reading the word of God without falsifying it, and a lawful and careful exposition of it that agrees with the Scriptures, holding no danger in it and no blasphemy. And above all it is the outstanding gift of love, which is more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, and greater than all the other gifts.

That is why the church everywhere, out of the love she has toward God, sends a great crowd of martyrs on ahead to the Father in every age, while the others have nothing of the kind to point to among themselves — and even maintain that bearing such witness is not necessary at all, since their system of doctrine is the true witness for Christ. There is perhaps this exception: one or two of them, in the whole stretch of time since the Lord appeared on earth, have now and then carried the reproach of the name alongside our martyrs, as though they too had been shown mercy, and have been led out to death with them, as a sort of escort granted to them. For the church alone carries with a clean record the reproach of those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, who put up with every kind of punishment and are put to death because of the love they bear toward God and because they confess his Son. She is often weakened by it, and then her members grow back at once and she is whole again — just as her pattern was, Lot’s wife, who became a pillar of salt. She goes through what the old prophets went through, as the Lord says: “That is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” She suffers persecution in a new fashion, at the hands of people who will not receive the word of God, while the same Spirit rests on her that rested on them.

The prophets, in fact, along with everything else they foretold, foretold this as well: that all those on whom the Spirit of God came to rest, who would obey the word of the Father and serve him as far as they were able, would be persecuted, stoned, and killed. The prophets pictured all of this beforehand in themselves, because of their love for God and for the sake of his word. Since they were themselves members of Christ, each of them, in his place as one member, set out the prophecy assigned to him. Many as they were, all of them were picturing one, and proclaiming the things that belong to one. The working of a whole body is displayed through its members, and the shape of a complete man is not shown by one member but by all of them together. In the same way all the prophets together pictured the one Christ beforehand; and each of them, in his own place as a member, filled out his part of the arrangement and sketched in advance that particular working of Christ which belonged to his own member.

Some of them saw him in glory and saw the glorious life he lives at the Father’s right hand. Others saw him coming on the clouds as the Son of Man. Those who declared about him, “They will look on the one they have pierced,” were pointing to his second coming, about which he himself says, “Do you think that when the Son of Man comes he will find faith on the earth?” Paul refers to the same event when he says, “If indeed it is a righteous thing with God to repay trouble to those who trouble you, and to give you who are troubled rest along with us, at the revealing of the Lord Jesus from heaven with his mighty angels, in a flame of fire.” Others spoke of him as a judge, and of the day of the Lord as a burning furnace: he “gathers the wheat into his barn, but will burn up the chaff with fire that is never put out” — and with that they used to threaten the people who would not believe. The Lord himself says about those same people, “Get away from me, you who are cursed, into the everlasting fire my Father has prepared for the devil and his angels.” And the apostle says the same about them: “They will be punished with everlasting death, away from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his power, when he comes to be glorified in his holy ones and marveled at in those who believe in him.”

There are some of them who declare, “You are more beautiful than the sons of men”; and, “God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your companions”; and, “Strap your sword on your thigh, Mighty One, with your beauty and your loveliness, and go forward and prosper; and reign, because of truth and gentleness and righteousness.” Whatever else of that kind is said about him was pointing to the beauty and splendor that belong to his kingdom, along with the surpassing height to which everyone under his rule is raised — so that those who heard it would want to be found there, doing the things that please God. Then there are those who say, “He is a man, and who will know him?” and, “I went to the prophetess, and she bore a son, and his name is called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God.” Those who proclaimed him Immanuel, born of the virgin, were showing the union of the Word of God with his own handiwork — declaring that the Word would become flesh and the Son of God the Son of Man: the pure one purely opening that pure womb which gives men new birth to God, the womb he himself had made pure. And having become what we also are, he is nevertheless the Mighty God, and has a generation that cannot be told.

There are also some of them who say, “The Lord has spoken from Zion and uttered his voice from Jerusalem”; and, “God is known in Judah” — these pointed to the coming of his that took place in Judea. And those who declare that “God comes from the south, and from a mountain thick with leaves” announced his coming at Bethlehem, as I pointed out in the previous book. It is from that place that the ruler has come, the one who shepherds his Father’s people. And those who declare that at his coming “the lame man will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will speak plainly, and the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf will hear,” and that “the hands that hang down and the weak knees will be made strong,” and that “the dead who are in the grave will rise,” and that he himself “will take our weaknesses on himself and carry our sorrows” — all of them were proclaiming the healings he did.

Some of them foretold that he would come to Jerusalem as a weak man with no glory about him, a man who knew what it was to carry infirmity, sitting on the foal of a donkey; that he would give his back to the whip and his cheeks to the hands that struck him; that he would be led like a sheep to the slaughter; that he would be given vinegar and gall to drink; that he would be abandoned by his friends and by those closest to him; that he would stretch out his hands all day long; that he would be mocked and insulted by the people looking at him; that his clothes would be divided and lots cast for his robe; and that he would be brought down to the dust of death — along with other things of the same kind. In all of that they were prophesying his coming in the character of a man, when he entered Jerusalem, where by his suffering and crucifixion he endured everything just named. Others gave us the reason he suffered all of it, when they said, “The holy Lord remembered his own dead who were sleeping in the dust, and came down to them to raise them up and save them.” And those who said, “On that day, says the Lord, the sun will go down at noon, and there will be darkness over the earth in broad daylight; and I will turn your feast days into mourning and all your songs into a funeral song,” plainly announced the blotting out of the sun that took place at his crucifixion from noon onward — and announced that after this the days that were their festivals under the law, and their songs, would be turned into grief and mourning, when they were handed over to the Gentiles. Jeremiah makes the point still clearer when he speaks this way about Jerusalem: “She who has borne seven grows faint. Her soul has become weary. Her sun has gone down while it was still noon. She has been put to shame and has suffered reproach. What is left of them I will give to the sword in the sight of their enemies.”

Then there were those who spoke of his having slumbered and slept, and of his rising again because the Lord sustained him, and who ordered the rulers of heaven to throw open the everlasting doors so that the King of glory might come in. They were announcing beforehand his resurrection from the dead by the Father’s power, and his reception into heaven. And when they put it this way — “His going out is from the height of heaven, and his return is to the highest heaven, and there is no one who can hide from his heat” — they were announcing this very truth: that he was taken back up to the place he had come down from, and that no one can escape his righteous judgment. Those who said, “The Lord has reigned; let the peoples rage — he who sits on the cherubim; let the earth be shaken,” were predicting partly the anger from all the nations that came after his ascension upon the people who believed in him, with the whole earth moving against the church; and partly the fact that when he comes from heaven with his mighty angels the whole earth will be shaken, as he himself says: “There will be a great earthquake, such as there has not been from the beginning.” And again, when one of them says, “Whoever is judged, let him stand opposite; and whoever is counted righteous, let him come near to the servant of God”; and, “Woe to you, for you will wear out like a garment, and the moth will eat you up”; and, “All flesh will be brought low, and the Lord alone will be lifted high” — what is being shown is that after his suffering and his ascension God will throw down under his feet everyone who set himself against him, and he will be raised above all, and there will be no one who can be counted righteous beside him or compared to him.

And those of them who declare that God would make a new covenant with men — not the kind he made with the fathers at Mount Horeb — and that he would give men a new heart and a new spirit; and again, “Do not remember the things of long ago. Look, I am making new things which will spring up now, and you will know it; and I will make a way in the desert and rivers in a dry land, to give drink to my chosen people, the people I have acquired for myself, so that they may show forth my praise” — these plainly announced the freedom that marks out the new covenant, and the new wine that is put into new wineskins. That is, they announced the faith which is in Christ, by which he has proclaimed the way of righteousness springing up in the desert, and the streams of the Holy Spirit in a dry land, to give water to God’s chosen people, whom he has acquired for himself, so that they might show forth his praise — and not so that they might blaspheme the one who made these things, that is, God.

As for all the other points I have shown the prophets to have uttered, through such a long run of Scripture: the man who is truly spiritual will interpret them by pointing out, for every single thing that was said, which particular part of the Lord’s arrangement it refers to, and so setting out the whole system of the work of the Son of God. He always knows the same God. He always acknowledges the same Word of God, even though the Word has only now been made plain to us. He always acknowledges the same Spirit of God, even though the Spirit has been poured out on us in a new way in these last times — knowing that the Spirit comes down on the human race, simply as the human race, from the creation of the world to its end, and that from him those who believe God and follow his word receive the salvation that comes from him. Those, on the other hand, who go away from him, who despise his instructions, who by what they do bring dishonor on the one who made them, and by their opinions blaspheme the one who feeds them, are piling up against themselves the most righteous judgment there is. So the spiritual man sifts and tests them all, but is himself tested by no one. He does not blaspheme his Father. He does not set aside his arrangements. He does not attack the fathers. He does not dishonor the prophets by claiming that they were sent from a different God than the one he worships, or that their prophecies came from two different substances.