Circumcised with Stone Knives

When I had finished all this, I went on: I am well aware, gentlemen, that your teachers admit that every word of this passage was spoken about the Christ. I also know that they say he has not yet come; and that if they do say he has come, they say it is not known who he is — but that when he becomes visible and glorious, then it will be known who he is. And then, they say, the things spoken in this passage will come about, as though no fruit at all had yet come from the words of the prophecy. Men with no reason in you! You do not understand what has been proved through all these passages: that two comings of his have been announced. In the first he is proclaimed as one who suffers, without glory and without honor, and crucified. In the second he will be present from the heavens with glory, when the man of apostasy, who also speaks outrageous things against the Most High, dares to do lawless things on the earth against us Christians — us who came to know the true worship of God from the law and from the word that went out from Jerusalem through the apostles of Jesus, and who have taken refuge with the God of Jacob and the God of Israel. [a]

We were once filled up with war and the slaughter of one another and every kind of wickedness, and now, all over the earth, each of us has beaten his weapons of war into something else — our swords into plows and our pikes into farm tools — and we farm reverence, righteousness, love of people, faith, and hope, which we have from the Father himself through the one who was crucified. And each of us sits under his own vine; that is, each man has his own wedded wife and no other. For you know that the prophetic word says, “And his wife will be like a fruitful vine.” And it is clear that there is no one who can frighten us or make slaves of us — us who have believed in Jesus over the whole earth. Though we are beheaded and crucified and thrown to wild beasts, and given to chains and fire and every other torture, it is plain that we do not step back from our confession. The more such things happen, the more others in still greater numbers become faithful and God-fearing through the name of Jesus. It is like a vine: if someone cuts away the parts that have borne fruit, it grows up again and sends out other branches, flourishing and full of fruit. The same thing happens with us. For the vine planted by God and by Christ the Savior is his people.

The rest of the prophecy will come about at his second coming. For “the one who is crushed and driven out” — driven out, that is, from the world — means that so far as it lies with you and with everyone else, each Christian has been driven not only out of his own property but out of the whole world, since you allow no Christian to live. You say that this same thing has happened to your own people. But if you were driven out after being beaten in war, then you have suffered it justly, as all the Scriptures bear witness. We have done nothing of the kind since we came to know the truth of God, and God bears witness about us that we are being taken away from the earth along with the most righteous Christ, the only one without stain and without sin. For Isaiah cries out: “See how the righteous man perishes, and no one takes it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no one gives it a thought.”

And I said earlier that the two comings of this Christ were foretold in symbol even in the time of Moses, in the symbol of the goats offered at the fast. The same thing was announced beforehand and told in symbol again by what Moses and Jesus did. One of them stretched out his hands and stayed on the hill until evening, with his hands held up — and that shows a figure of nothing else but the cross. The other, the man renamed with the name Jesus, led the fighting, and Israel won. And this too was there to be understood in the case of those two holy men and prophets of God: that one man alone could not carry both mysteries — I mean the figure of the cross and the figure of the giving of the name. For this strength belongs, and belonged, and will belong to one alone, whose very name every ruling power dreads, writhing because they are to be destroyed through him. So our Christ, who suffered and was crucified, was not cursed by the law; instead he made it plain that he alone would save those who do not stand back from faith in him. [e]

And when the firstborn of the Egyptians were being destroyed, it was the blood of the Passover that rescued those who were saved in Egypt — the blood smeared on both doorposts and on the beam above the door. For the Passover was Christ, who was sacrificed later, as Isaiah also said: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter.” And it is written that you seized him on the day of the Passover, and that at the Passover you crucified him as well. And as the blood of the Passover saved those in Egypt, so the blood of Christ will rescue from death those who have believed. Was God, then, going to be taken in, if this sign had not been on the doors? I do not say that. What I say is that he was announcing beforehand the salvation that was going to come to the human race through the blood of Christ. For the symbol of the scarlet cord as well — the one the spies sent to Jericho by Jesus son of Nun gave to Rahab the prostitute, telling her to tie it to the window through which she let them down to slip away from their enemies — that too made plain the symbol of the blood of Christ, by which those out of every nation who were once sexually immoral and unjust are saved, receiving forgiveness of sins and sinning no longer.

But you, explaining these things in a small-minded way, are returning a verdict against God of great weakness, if you listen to them just as they stand and do not examine the force of what is said. On that reasoning Moses himself would be judged a lawbreaker. He is the one who gave the order that no likeness be made of anything in heaven or on earth or in the sea — and then he himself made a bronze serpent, set it up on a standard, and told those who had been bitten to look at it; and they were saved as they looked at it. Is the serpent, then, to be understood as having saved the people at that time — the serpent that God cursed at the beginning, as I said before, and will destroy with the great sword, as Isaiah cries out? Are we to take such things as foolishly as your teachers say, and not as symbols? Should we not rather trace the standard back to the image of the crucified Jesus, since Moses too, by the stretching out of his hands, together with the man surnamed with the name Jesus, brought it about that your people won? That is how we will stop being at a loss over the things the lawgiver did. He was not abandoning God when he persuaded the people to put their hope in a beast, the creature through which transgression and disobedience got their start. All this was done and said by the blessed prophet with great understanding, and as a mystery; and there is nothing said or done by any prophet at all that a man can justly find fault with, if you have the knowledge that is in them. [j]

But suppose your teachers explain nothing to you except why female camels are not mentioned in one place, or what the female camels mentioned in another place are, or why there are so many measures of fine flour and so many measures of oil in the offerings — and they do it in a small-minded way, keeping close to the ground, while they never dare to speak about the great matters that are worth searching out, or to explain them; or, when we explain them, they order you not to listen at all and not to come into any conversation with us. Will they not deserve to hear what our Lord Jesus Christ said to them: “Whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside and full of dead men’s bones inside — you tithe the mint and swallow the camel, you blind guides!” So unless you look down on the teachings of men who exalt themselves and want to be called “Rabbi, Rabbi,” and unless you come to the words of prophecy with the kind of persistence and understanding that would have you suffer from your own people the very things the prophets suffered, you cannot get anything useful at all out of the prophetic writings.

Here is what I mean. Jesus — as I have said many times already — was called Hoshea; he was the man sent with Caleb to spy out the land of Canaan, and Moses named him Jesus. You do not ask why he did it; you are not puzzled by it; you have no appetite to find out. And so the Christ has slipped past you. You read and you do not understand, and even now, hearing that Jesus is our Christ, you do not reason out that the name was not laid on him idly or by accident. You will make a theology out of why one alpha was added to the first name Abraham had, and you will make the same grand speeches about why one rho was added to Sarah’s name. But you will not ask in the same way why the name that Hoshea, the son of Nun, had from his father was changed completely to Jesus. And it was not only his name that was changed. He also became the successor of Moses, and he was the only man of that age among those who came out of Egypt who brought the people who were left into the holy land. And just as he, and not Moses, brought the people into the holy land, and just as he distributed it by lot to those who went in with him, so Jesus the Christ will turn back the scattering of the people and distribute the good land to each one — though not in the same way. [m]

For the first man gave them an inheritance for a time, seeing that he was not the Christ who is God, nor the Son of God; but the second, after the holy resurrection, will give us possession of it forever. It was the first who made the sun stand still, after he had been renamed with the name Jesus and had received strength from his Spirit. For I have shown that it was Jesus who appeared to Moses and to Abraham and to all the other patriarchs without exception, and talked with them, serving the will of the Father; and he is the one who came to be born a man through the virgin Mary, and he exists always. For this is the one from whom, and through whom, the Father is going to make both heaven and earth new. This is the one who is going to shine an eternal light in Jerusalem. This is the one who is king of Salem after the order of Melchizedek, and the eternal priest of the Most High.

The first is said to have circumcised the people a second time with stone knives, which was an announcement of this circumcision by which Jesus Christ himself has circumcised us away from the stones and the rest of the idols. He gathered into stacks those who came from uncircumcision — that is, from the error of the world — circumcised in every place with stone knives, which are the words of our Lord Jesus. For I have proved that Christ was proclaimed by the prophets in parables as a Stone and a Rock. So we will take the stone knives to be his words, by which so many who were wandering in error were circumcised out of uncircumcision with the circumcision of the heart. That is the circumcision God urged from that time on, through Jesus, upon those who had the circumcision that began with Abraham, when he said that Jesus had circumcised a second time, with stone knives, those who entered that holy land.

For sometimes the Holy Spirit made something be done openly and visibly that was a figure of what was going to happen; and sometimes he spoke words about things that were still to come, saying them as though they were happening then, or had already happened. Unless the people reading know this craft, they will not be able to follow the words of the prophets as they should. For the sake of an example, let me say over a few prophetic passages, so that you can follow what I am saying. When he says through Isaiah, “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb in front of the man shearing it,” he speaks as though the suffering had already happened. And when he says again, “I stretched out my hands to a people who disobey and answer back,” and when he says, “Lord, who has believed what we reported?” — those words were spoken as though they were the report of things that had already taken place. And I have shown that Christ is often called a Stone in parable, and, in figures of speech, Jacob and Israel. [r]

And again, when he says, “I will look at the heavens, the works of your fingers,” then unless I take in how his word works, I will not be listening with any understanding, but the way your teachers think fit — imagining that the Father of all, the unbegotten God, has hands and feet and fingers and a soul, like a creature put together out of parts. That is exactly why they teach that it was the Father himself who appeared to Abraham and to Jacob.

Blessed are we, then, who have been circumcised the second time with stone knives. Your first circumcision was made, and still is made, with iron, since you go on hard-hearted. But ours, the second one in order, made known after yours, is made with sharp-edged stones — that is, with the words spoken through the apostles of the cornerstone, the stone cut without hands. It circumcises us away from idol worship and from absolutely every kind of wickedness. The hearts of these men have been so circumcised away from evil that they even rejoice as they die for the name of that good Rock, which makes living water burst out for the hearts of those who have loved the Father of all through him, and gives the water of life to drink to all who are willing. But when I say these things you do not take them in. You have not understood what was prophesied that the Christ would do, and you do not believe us when we bring you to what has been written. For this is how Jeremiah cries out: “Woe to you, because you have abandoned a living spring and dug out cisterns for yourselves, broken ones, that will not be able to hold water. Shall there be a wilderness where Mount Zion is? — because I gave Jerusalem a certificate of divorce in front of you.”

But you ought to believe Zechariah, when he shows the mystery of Christ in a parable and announces it in hidden words. These are the words: [w]

Rejoice and be glad, daughter of Zion, for look, I am coming, and I will make my dwelling in the middle of you, says the Lord. And many nations will be added to the Lord on that day, and they will be my people; and I will make my dwelling in the middle of you, and they will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you. And the Lord will take Judah as his inheritance, his portion in the holy land, and he will choose Jerusalem again. Let all flesh stand in awe before the face of the Lord, for he has been roused out of his holy clouds. And he showed me Jesus the high priest, standing before the face of the angel of the Lord; and the devil stood at his right hand to oppose him. And the Lord said to the devil: The Lord who chose Jerusalem rebuke you. Look — is this not a brand snatched out of the fire?

Trypho was about to answer and argue back, and I said: Wait first, and hear what I have to say. I am not about to give the explanation you suppose — as though there had never been any priest named Jesus in the land of Babylon, where your people were captives. Even if I were, I have shown that there was a Jesus who was a priest among your people; but the prophet had not seen that man in his revelation, just as he had not seen the devil or the angel of the Lord with his own eyes, in his ordinary state, but saw them in a trance, when the revelation came to him. What I say now is this. Scripture said that the son of Nun, through the name Jesus, did powerful works and certain deeds that announced beforehand what our Lord would do. In the same way I am now going on to show that the revelation given among your people in Babylon, in the days of Jesus who was priest, was an announcement beforehand of the things our Priest was going to do — he who is both God and Christ, the Son of the Father of all.

Then I said: In fact, I have been wondering why you kept quiet a little while ago while I was speaking, and how you did not catch me out when I said that the son of Nun was the only one of his own age among those who came out of Egypt who went into the holy land — that, and the ones on record as being under age in that generation. For you run and settle on sores the way flies do. Even if a man says ten thousand things well, if there happens to be one small thing not to your liking, or not understood, or not exact enough, you take no notice of the many good things but seize on the little phrase and work hard to build it up into an act of impiety and a crime. And so, when you are judged by God with that same judgment, you will have far more to answer for over your own great acts of daring, whether they are evil deeds or bad explanations that you produce by twisting the truth. For with the judgment you judge, it is right that you be judged.