The Stone Cut Without Hands

John, in the Revelation, has shown the Lord’s disciples in a still clearer light what will happen in the last times, and who the ten kings are who will arise then, among whom the empire that now rules the earth will be divided up. He teaches us what those ten horns were that Daniel saw, telling us that this is what was said to him: “And the ten horns that you saw are ten kings, who have not yet received a kingdom, but will receive authority as kings for one hour along with the beast. These are of one mind, and they hand over their strength and their power to the beast. These will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them, because he is Lord of lords and King of kings.” So it is clear that of these rulers the one who is to come will kill three and bring the rest under his own power, and that he himself will be the eighth among them. And they will lay Babylon waste and burn her with fire, and will hand their kingdom over to the beast, and drive the church into hiding. After that they will be destroyed by the coming of our Lord. That the kingdom has to be divided, and so come to ruin, is what the Lord says: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to ruin, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.” So the kingdom, the city and the house must be divided into ten; and that is why he has already pointed ahead to the partition and division that is coming. [a]

Daniel too says specifically that the end of the fourth kingdom lies in the toes of the statue Nebuchadnezzar saw — the statue that the stone cut out without hands came down upon. In his own words: “The feet were partly iron and partly clay, until a stone was cut out without hands and struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and shattered them to pieces, right to the end.” Then, when he interprets it, he says: “And as you saw the feet and the toes, partly clay and partly iron, the kingdom will be divided; and there will be in it a root of iron, just as you saw iron mixed with baked clay. And the toes were partly iron and partly clay.” The ten toes, then, are these ten kings, among whom the kingdom will be divided. Some of them will be strong and vigorous, others sluggish and useless, and they will not agree together. As Daniel also says: “Part of the kingdom will be strong, and part of it will be broken off from it. As you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, there will be minglings in the human race, but no holding together with one another, just as iron cannot be welded onto pottery.” And since an end is to come, he says: “And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will raise up a kingdom that will never decay, and his kingdom will not be left to another people. It will break in pieces and shatter all these kingdoms, and it will itself be lifted high forever. As you saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and broke in pieces the baked clay, the iron, the bronze, the silver and the gold, God has shown the king what is to happen after these things; and the dream is true and its interpretation trustworthy.”

So if the great God showed what was coming through Daniel, and confirmed it through his Son; and if Christ is the stone cut out without hands, who will destroy the kingdoms of this present time and bring in an eternal one, which is the resurrection of the righteous — since Daniel says, “The God of heaven will raise up a kingdom that will never be destroyed” — then let these people come to their senses, now that they stand refuted: the people who reject the Creator, and who will not agree that the prophets were sent ahead by the same Father the Lord himself came from, but claim instead that the prophecies came from a variety of powers. For everything the Creator foretold, one and the same through all the prophets, is what Christ has fulfilled at the end, serving his Father’s will and carrying his Father’s arrangements for the human race through to completion. So let everyone who worships God recognize as Satan’s agents the men who speak against the Creator — whether in plain words, like the disciples of Marcion, or by twisting the sense of Scripture, like the followers of Valentinus and all those who are called Gnostics and are not. It is through them that Satan has now, and not before, been heard speaking against God: the God who has prepared eternal fire for every kind of apostasy. Satan did not dare to blaspheme his own Lord out in the open and in his own person, any more than at the beginning he led man astray in his own person, but used the serpent and hid himself, as it were, from God.

Justin put it well. Before the Lord appeared, Satan never dared to speak against God, because he did not yet know his own sentence — it was still held in parables and figures. But after the Lord appeared, when Satan had learned plainly from the words of Christ and his apostles that eternal fire has been prepared for him, since he revolted from God by his own free choice, and prepared in the same way for everyone who stays unrepentant in that apostasy, then he began to blaspheme. He does it through men like these. He speaks against the Lord who brings the judgment on him, as one already condemned, and he charges the guilt of his own revolt to his Maker instead of to his own willing choice. It is like men who break the laws. When the punishment catches up with them, they throw the blame on the men who framed the laws and not on themselves. These men do exactly the same. Filled with a satanic spirit, they bring countless charges against our Creator, who gave us the spirit of life and laid down a law suited to everyone; and they will not admit that God’s judgment is just. So they set about inventing some other Father, one who neither cares about our affairs nor watches over them — in fact one who is content with every kind of sin.

If, then, the Father passes no judgment, either judging is no business of his, or he consents to everything that is done. And if he does not judge, everyone will be on the same level and reckoned to be in the same condition. In that case Christ’s coming has no point to it — it is absurd — since he exercises no power to judge. For he came “to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law”; and, when two are in one bed, to take the one and leave the other; and, of two women grinding at the mill, to take one and leave the other; and, at the time of the end, to tell the reapers to gather the weeds first and tie them in bundles and burn them in the fire that is never put out, but to gather the wheat into the barn; and to call the lambs into the kingdom prepared for them, but to send the goats away into the eternal fire that his Father has prepared for the devil and his angels. And why is that? Has the Word come for the fall and the rising again of many? For the fall, certainly, of those who do not believe him — the ones he has threatened with a heavier judgment on the day of judgment than Sodom and Gomorrah got — but for the rising again of those who believe and who do the will of his Father in heaven. So if the coming of the Son does reach everyone alike, but comes for the purpose of judging and of separating those who believe from those who do not — since those who believe do his will by their own choice, and those who disobey refuse his teaching by their own choice as well — then it is clear that his Father made them all in the same condition, each with a choice of his own and an understanding that is free, and that he has regard for everything and watches over everyone, “making his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sending rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” [l]

To everyone who keeps on loving him, God grants fellowship with himself. And fellowship with God is life and light and the enjoyment of all the good things he holds in store. But on everyone who by his own choice goes away from God, he lays exactly that separation from himself which they chose of their own accord. And separation from God is death; separation from light is darkness; and separation from God amounts to the loss of all the good things he holds in store. So those who throw all this away by apostasy are in fact left with nothing good at all, and they undergo punishment of every kind. God, however, does not punish them directly and by himself. The punishment comes upon them because they have been stripped of everything good. And with God good things are eternal and without end, so the loss of them is eternal and never-ending too. It works here the way it works with a flood of light. Men who have blinded themselves, or who have been blinded by others, are shut out from the enjoyment of the light for good. It is not that the light has punished them with blindness; it is the blindness itself that has brought the trouble on them. That is why the Lord said, “Whoever believes in me is not condemned” — that is, is not separated from God, since he is joined to God through faith. And on the other side he says, “Whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” — that is, he separated himself from God by his own act. “And this is the judgment: that light has come into this world, and men have loved the darkness more than the light. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, so that his deeds may not be exposed. But whoever does the truth comes to the light, so that his deeds may be shown for what they are — that he has done them in God.”

So, since in this present age some men make for the light and join themselves to God by faith, while others shun the light and separate themselves from God, the Word of God comes and prepares a fitting home for both: for those in the light, so that they may have the enjoyment of it and of the good things in it; and for those in the darkness, so that they may share in its miseries. That is why he says that those on the right hand are called into the kingdom of heaven, but those on the left he will send into the eternal fire — for they have robbed themselves of everything good. [r]

And this is why the apostle says: “Because they did not receive the love of God, so that they might be saved, God will send them the working of error, so that they may believe a lie, and so that all of them may be judged who did not believe the truth but consented to wrongdoing.” For when he comes — the Antichrist — he gathers the whole apostasy into his own person by his own act, and does whatever he does by his own will and choice, and sits in the temple of God as well, so that the men he has fooled may worship him as the Christ. And so he will deservedly “be thrown into the lake of fire.” God foresaw all this by his foreknowledge and sends such a man at the proper time, “so that they may believe a lie, and so that all of them may be judged who did not believe the truth but consented to wrongdoing.” John describes his coming in the Revelation like this: “And the beast that I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like a bear’s, and his mouth like a lion’s mouth; and the dragon handed over to him his own power, and his throne, and great authority. And one of his heads was as though it had been struck dead, and his death-wound was healed, and the whole world went wondering after the beast. And they worshiped the dragon, because he gave power to the beast; and they worshiped the beast, saying, ‘Who is like this beast, and who is able to make war on him?’ And there was given him a mouth speaking great things, and blasphemy; and power was given him for forty-two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name and his dwelling and those who live in heaven. And power was given him over every tribe and people and tongue and nation. And all who live on the earth worshiped him — everyone whose name was not written in the book of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If anyone has ears, let him hear. If anyone leads into captivity, into captivity he goes. If anyone kills with the sword, he must be killed with the sword. Here is the endurance and the faith of the holy ones.”

After this he describes the beast’s armor-bearer as well, whom he also calls a false prophet: “He spoke like a dragon, and exercised all the power of the first beast in his sight, and made the earth and those who live on it worship the first beast, whose death-wound was healed. And he will perform great wonders, so that he can even make fire come down from heaven onto the earth in front of men, and he will lead the inhabitants of the earth astray.” Let no one imagine that he does these wonders by divine power. He does them by the working of magic. And we should not be surprised at it: the demons and the rebel spirits are at his service, and through them he performs wonders that lead the inhabitants of the earth astray. John says further: “And he will order an image of the beast to be made, and he will give breath to the image, so that the image will speak; and he will have those killed who will not worship it.” And he also says: “And he will have a mark put on the forehead and on the right hand, so that no one is able to buy or sell except the man who has the mark of the beast’s name, or the number of his name; and the number is six hundred and sixty-six.” That is, six times a hundred, six times ten, and six units — a summing up of the whole of that apostasy that has taken place over six thousand years.

For in as many days as this world was made, in that many thousands of years it will be brought to its close. And this is why the Scripture says: “So the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their adornment. And on the sixth day God brought to completion the works he had made, and on the seventh day God rested from all his works.” This is an account of the things made in the past, and it is also a prophecy of what is to come. For a day of the Lord is like a thousand years, and created things were completed in six days; so it is plain that they will come to their end at the six-thousandth year.

And so, all through that time, man — moulded at the beginning by the hands of God, that is, by the Son and by the Spirit — is made after the image and likeness of God. The chaff, which is the apostasy, is thrown out; but the wheat, that is, those who bear fruit to God in faith, is gathered into the barn. And this is why hard pressure is needed for those who are being saved: so that, after being broken up in a manner of speaking, and ground fine, and worked into dough by the patience of the Word of God, and then put into the fire, they may be fit for the king’s banquet. As one of our own men said, when he had been condemned to the wild beasts for his witness to God: “I am the wheat of Christ, and I am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, so that I may be found the pure bread of God.”