Book of the Promises and Predictions of God 2.30–2.34

Of Christ’s disciples receiving a double spirit, in Elisha. A promise made and figured. Believed and seen in Kings. Elijah left his disciple Elisha, for, knowing by the Lord’s revelation the time of his taking up, he said to the disciple: “Ask some request for yourself before I am taken from you.” And he said: “I wish that the spirit which is in you may be double in me.” And Elijah said to him: “You have asked a hard thing; yet if you see me as I go, it shall be done for you.” Made certain by this promise, Elisha, so that he might obtain his wish in every respect, so clung to his master that no necessity separated him from him. And when the prophet wished to exercise his disciple’s zeal, he orders him, bearing it patiently, to follow necessarily on a byway. But he said: “As the Lord lives and as your soul lives, I will not leave you wherever you go.” This was done until they came to the place where, taken up in a fiery chariot, he was carried as it were into heaven. And the disciple’s intention so watched that he followed his master as he was snatched away, with weeping and a loud voice, saying: “My father Elijah, my father, charioteer of Israel!” Struck by these words, Elijah let fall to him his mantle, as provision for the journey and gift of a pledge. Receiving it, and striking with it the river Jordan, which he could not have divided by himself, he crossed by the help of the mantle. Hence the sons of the prophets say: “The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.” In this mystic action too is the likeness of our Lord and Master Jesus Christ. For when he had said to his disciples, “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do,” to show that he, Christ, had given a double gift, he added: “And he will do greater ones than these.” But this to those who cling to him and do not turn aside from him in any direction, whom he taught, saying: “If anyone serves me, let him follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be too.” On these he poured the double spirit in this way: once after the resurrection, when he breathed on their faces, saying: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, they will be forgiven; if you retain anyone’s, they will be retained in heaven”; and a second time when, taken up in a cloud, borne by angels, the disciples too following with their eyes, he said: “Stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” And on the day of Pentecost he sent the holy gift, the Spirit, in tongues of fire. We must not understand two Spirits here, since there is one Holy Spirit; but the same Spirit, dispensing the gifts of the charisms, poured out in manifold ways by the undivided Trinity itself, so that in it there are not two, but one Spirit. For, as the apostle Paul says: “One God, one faith, one baptism, one Spirit.” Hence Elisha himself did not say to his master, “Let the spirit that is in you be two,” but, “double in me.” This double the Lord explained when he said, “Until you are clothed with power from on high,” so as to do greater things through them than he had done through himself. By the touch of his fringe he healed the woman of her flow of blood; but the shadow of the disciples healed all infirmities. Even the disciples themselves scarcely believed him when he rose, though they touched and saw him; when he ascended to heaven and they preached, the whole world believed in him whom it had not seen. Finally, it is greater to justify the impious than to raise the dead. All these things the same one did through his disciples, who gave them this power, saying: “Without me you can do nothing.”

Of the same Elisha, when Christ the Lord by grace raised the dead one figured. A prediction made and figured. Believed and seen in Kings. The same Elisha, while he went about in various places proclaiming the word of the Lord, was received as a guest by a certain Shunammite woman. As a reward, her barrenness taken away, he obtained a son for her from the Lord. She received the little one and brought him up. But when he was grown and went to his father in the field, struck by the heat of the sun he ran back home and, burning with fever, breathed his last in his mother’s lap. At once the woman ran back to the man of God, threw herself at his feet on Carmel, and told him that the son whom she had received by his grace was dead. The prophet wonders that this was hidden from him by the Lord, so that the prophet might fulfil the figure of our Lord Jesus, who, though he knows all things, pretends not to know some things. As in that of Lazarus: “Where have you laid him?” And: “Of the day and the hour no one knows, neither the angels, nor the Son,” though the Son himself will come on that day and that hour. And that, when two disciples were telling of his passion and saying to him, “Do you not know what has been done in Jerusalem these days?”, he, by whom those things were done, says, like one who does not know: “What things?” But these things that are hidden are either done in a great mystery, or so that the heart’s attention may be stretched toward God, so that it seeks more eagerly to know what it does not grasp; and, when it has not understood it, fears the more, knowing that whatever is denied to mortals to know is divine and deep. Elisha does things that are sacraments of the Lord’s action. He sends his staff by his servant, to be laid on the lifeless body and restore the dead to life. The Lord sent through his servant Moses the law, which, like that staff, could not give life to the dead world; because if a law had been given that could give life, as the Apostle says, righteousness would indeed be from the law; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Afterwards Elisha himself comes down, the great to the small, the saviour to the one to be saved, the living to the dead. Our Lord too came down. He who came down is the same who also ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. What all things? Those Elisha did in mystery. For, to raise the dead child, he covered the youthful limbs. The Lord Jesus emptied himself, taking the form of a servant; he fitted himself, small, to that small one, so as to make this body of our lowliness conformed to the body of his glory. Lying on the cold one beneath him, he kindled him with his warmth. So too our Saviour, the Lord, from whose heat there is no one who can hide, breathed three times on the world lying dead, that a threefold confession might be poured into the believer. So the dead was raised, when the impious was justified from perpetual death. Many and various signs the Spirit of the Lord did through Elisha, as the same history of Kings relates. To go through them all would be long. Yet I will set out a few, since all are signs of things to come, to be fitted to Christ the Lord, who says through Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me; he has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to send the bruised into rest, to give the captives freedom and the blind sight.” Elisha crossed the Jordan by the working of that Spirit by which our Lord Jesus consecrated the same river in his baptism. The prophet handed over to the beasts the boys who mocked him. And our Lord Jesus says of little ones through Paul: “Do not be children in your minds.” Of these he handed some over to beasts, that is, to unclean spirits, that they might learn not to blaspheme. The king of Israel sent fifty men three times, with their captains, to kill Elijah, and the prophet consumed them with heavenly fire. It is said of our prophet and Lord too that a fire will burn before him and set his enemies ablaze round about. Afterwards, when the king with his whole army besieged him, he struck the enemies with a kind of blindness and led them captive into Samaria, and when their sight was restored, he also obtained pardon for them. Though these things are signified in many, the Lord showed them more plainly in Paul and those who with him persecuted the Church. For, blinded and thrown down on the road, while he became God’s captive, when his sight was restored, the persecutor became a preacher; and in him God showed all his patience as an example to those who would believe in him for eternal life. Again, Naaman the Syrian, friend of the king, was sent to the king of Israel to be cleansed by Elisha of the spot of leprosy. The man of God, looking at him, ordered him to be dipped seven times in the Jordan if he wished the spots of his body taken away. When he did it, he was cleansed. He thought gifts should be offered to the man of God, which the prophet by divine right refused, prefiguring the grace of our Christ the Lord freely given, which he commended to his disciples in the Gospel, saying: “Freely you have received, freely give.” That the soul is cleansed by the sevenfold Spirit from the vices by which the inner and outer man is polluted, the water too shows, in which those are dipped who are consecrated in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Gehazi, the prophet’s servant, who followed Naaman the Syrian and, making up a lie, wished to sell what the prophet had given freely, was struck with the same spot of leprosy of which the other had been cleansed; he shows the figure of the heretics, who, driven by the sharpness of their greed, while they sell to their own, as it were, expiations of sins, are themselves marked with the spots with which those had been stained. So that they rightly hear from the Lord: “I do not know you. Depart from me, all you who work iniquity.” [32] Of Hezekiah, in whom Christ teaches his own not to be puffed up in good. A prediction made and figured. Believed and seen in Kings. While the kings of Israel in turn, some turning aside from the ways of the Lord, were entangled in errors, and others walked faithfully in the way of the Lord, the order comes to King Hezekiah. He, rooting out all images and overturning all worship of idols, turned almost all erring Israel to the Lord. To him a divine answer was given, that he should set his house in order, because he was now going to death. When he prayed weeping, saying, “Remember, Lord, how I have walked in your way,” fifteen years were added to his life under this sign: the sun went back the degrees by which it had gone up. When the neighboring kings noticed that this had wonderfully happened, they sent messengers to Hezekiah, asking what that portent was. And, puffed up in good, he not only told what had been done for him, but also, out of boastfulness, showed them all the royal things of his house and the vessels. And the Lord, angered, rebuked the king through the prophet Isaiah, declaring that days would come in which all the things he had shown would be said to be captive in Babylon with the people. Not without reason does our King admonish us through the apostle John in the Apocalypse, saying: “Hold fast what you have, lest another take your crown.” Again elsewhere: “Blessed is he who keeps awake and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked.” And in the Gospel: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”; admonishing that in good works, which are God’s gifts, one must glory not in oneself as a man but in the Lord, lest what the humble receives the proud lose.

Of sinning kings, who lead the people with them into captivity. A prediction made and figured. Believed and seen in Kings. When Josiah and his son Zedekiah reigned, the whole people of Israel, breaking the useful bonds of the law by which it was ruled, provoked God, the author of its piety, to great anger by many grave faults. The Lord sent the prophet Jeremiah to rebuke and correct the king and the people, foretelling that, if they turned and kept the commands of the law, they would always remain unharmed in their place; but if they despised him who warned them, they would go captive into Babylon. So, the commands and the preacher’s words despised, while king and people were pressed on by their sins pushing them toward evil ends, Jeremiah expressed the divine sentence by letter to the people already taken and to the kings, saying: “Because of the sins you have sinned before God, you will be led to Babylon, and you will be there a long time, to the generations.” So King Nebuchadnezzar, having seized the kings of Judah, carried all Israel captive to Babylon, putting out Zedekiah’s eyes; so that the words of the prophets about him, which seemed to conflict, were both fulfilled: Jeremiah said that he would see the king of Babylon; Ezekiel, that he would not see Babylon. While they seemed to contradict each other, both are seen fulfilled in this way: Zedekiah, brought to Babylon with his eyes put out, both saw, because he was present, and did not see, because he lost his eyes on the way. Our Lord admonishes his own by this example and says: “Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.” That those who despise his commands, even kings, are blind, the same Lord says in the Gospel: “They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both fall into the pit,” which is the hard captivity of the unrepentant soul, of which it is said: “I gave her time to repent, and she will not repent.” So, until the measure of seventy years was filled, that people was captive in Babylon. The same king Nebuchadnezzar carried off through his men all the vessels of the temple of God. Woe to the sins of men, when for them the very sacrifices, which were always remedies for salvation, are trampled on by foreigners! With what groaning, with what most bitter weeping, with what anguish of mind Jeremiah described these things, his Lamentations show: that the Lord’s tabernacle was defiled, the feast day brought to forgetfulness, the sabbaths and all the solemnities abolished; that the sword devoured part of the priests and princes, the little ones, the old, the young men and the virgins, and part remained captive. See the sores of our sorrows; see the mourning of our reproach; see the great sins, for whose sake we too have deserved to see these things, and with a greater wound of punishment we refuse, as it were, to have our wounds healed. Crushed, we think we are whole; driven out and exiled, as was deserved, we do not grieve; no satisfaction, no sorrow; the wrath remains, and we do not ask for pardon. “Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our houses to foreigners.” Thus chastised we do not lament; thus corrected we refuse to accept discipline. Let us depart from the evils by which we have offended the Lord; let us repent of the insults we have inflicted on his sacred things. Let our pride be cured by humility. Let us not spurn the time granted for remedies, lest he whose calm and gentle mercy we have felt fix an eternal sentence of punishment for those who do not repent. For that Lord is ready to forgive who says: “Turn to me, and I will turn to you”: if only the devoted Father recognizes the voice of the son returning with repentance. History relates that in the same captivity Daniel and Ezekiel prophesied. Daniel, the man of desires (who was named Belteshazzar by the king), had three friends of his race, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael. Though all his prophecy is full of mysteries, yet one part of it shines with such clearness of its brightness that it even marked the time when the Savior and Lord himself would come. Though there are twelve prophetic visions of his, ten are found in the Hebrew. These twelve, God granting, I shall run through with a sure comparison. In the first, he defended the chastity of Susanna against the unchaste elders. This the Lord Jesus does when he guards the integrity of his Church against the wicked heretics, who strive to corrupt it with their perverse disputations. These too he marks through the apostle Paul, saying: “Of these are those who creep into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sins, who are led by various desires.” In the second, Daniel himself and his friends resolved, keeping the commands of their law, not to be defiled by the foods of the king’s table, which their other companions ate. Not only was our Teacher and Lord not defiled by the desires of this world, but he also forbade his friends, saying: “Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. For all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the ambition of the world.” All these he shows must be rejected, like those royal foods. And through the apostle Paul commanding more plainly: “Food for the belly,” he says, “and the belly for food; but God will destroy both the one and the other”; so that the one food of the soul may be the Savior himself, who shows it various and diverse flavors. In the third, the sacrament of the divine plan which had been shown to the king, which he had so forgotten, Daniel told to the king, both the dream and the interpretation of the dream, not by human learning in which he had been instructed, but by the Lord’s revelation: that four kingdoms in four metals, of which the statue standing before his face was formed, would rise in the world: the golden head was the Babylonian kingdom of the East; its silver breast and arms, the Macedonian of the North; its bronze belly and thighs, the Punic of the South; its iron legs and the toes of its feet, partly iron and partly clay, the last, the Roman, namely of the West, as that most learned man, the historian Orosius, has set out. Which kingdom, like iron, crushed and subdued all things. And Daniel adds the kingdom of Christ too in the stone cut from the mountain without the hands of hewers, as without the hands of those embracing, God-man born of a virgin. When it had struck that statue, it reduced all its parts to dust, and the breath of the wind carried them away, and no place was found for them; but the stone itself, which struck the statue, became a great mountain and filled the whole face of the earth. For when all kingdoms have been emptied, the kingdom of Christ the Lord will rise, which will be left to no other people, for it will remain for ever. This his whole Church now asks in prayer when it says: “Your kingdom come.” In the fourth, when the three aforesaid friends of Daniel refused to adore the statue and image of himself which Nebuchadnezzar had set up to be adored, they were thrown into the furnace, and God showed that wonder, that, the fire being driven off, the greedy flame consumed rather the ministers of the king’s command. And the three men, unharmed, while they sang a hymn to the true King in the midst of the furnace, were found worthy to have the Son of God with them. Him, by the revelation of grace, the king himself recognized, who leads his true worshipers, who despise most vain idols, triumphant from the flames of the present world to heavenly glory.

Of Daniel, who told of Christ the Lord in his visions. A prediction made and figured. Believed and seen in Daniel. The fifth vision contains the dream of the same king, which Daniel interpreted thus: that the magnificent tree he had seen, under whose branches all beasts, cattle, and birds dwelt, was the king himself; that when the Lord ordered it to be cut down, only the root being kept, his kingdom would be taken from him and he would dwell with the beasts; that his hair would grow like a woman’s and his nails like an eagle’s, that he would eat grass like an ox until seven times divinely ordered were fulfilled; giving the king counsel that he ought to redeem his sins by almsgiving. When he neglected to do it, all that had been foretold came upon the king, and when the measure of the times was fulfilled, he recovered the kingdom he had lost. So the presumptuous are cut down, so the proud are chastised by him who gives drink in tears by measure, for his judgments are sweet. So he restored the apostle Peter, who denied, to the place which in his presumption he had lost, when, looked upon, he saw him weeping. So, in his killers who shed his sacred blood, for whom he prayed, he gave the same blood to drink, so that they might receive the royal dignity. So daily our King restores the fallen, for whom he keeps the gift of the heavenly kingdom of the grace bestowed for the future. In the sixth, from the four beasts that appeared to him, he confirms the kingdoms of the four parts of the world mentioned above. Of these the same prophet testifies that the fourth beast was greater and terrible, having ten horns, and from their midst another small horn rose, before whose face three of those horns were struck off, until the Ancient of Days sat in judgment. But these are explained in the same way as those four kingdoms succeeding one another. The fourth beast, which, rising above all kingdoms, subdued the whole earth and made it subject. After it ten kings will rise at one time, and after them he who is to bear the name of his perdition, that is, the Antichrist. Of him, as already promised, divine testimonies will be brought forward in their place. In the seventh, from the ram and the goat, he describes the wars of the Persians and Greeks revealed to him; under the person also of the Antichrist, who will be magnified in his heart and will corrupt many, until he comes who is to come, the Lord Jesus, and will not delay. In the eighth, the same man of desires, Daniel, suggests the provident justice of God judging proud kings, in this way: King Belshazzar, making a supper for his princes, brought out the vessels of the temple of God which his father Nebuchadnezzar had carried off, drank from them with his concubines and princes, praising his gods of gold and silver, wood and stone; and at once there came out before his eyes the fingers of a man’s hand and wrote on the wall of the king’s house. Troubled by this vision, when none of the curious men he had could read the writing, Daniel was summoned, and firmly rebuking the king that this had happened because of the vessels of the house of God, he also read the writing, “Mene, Tekel, Peres,” and interpreted it: “Mene: God has numbered your kingdom and fulfilled it. Tekel: you have been weighed and found wanting. Peres: your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” When the king had conferred on the prophet the gifts promised, which Daniel had refused, at the end of his life, as had been foretold, he left the kingdom to the Medes and Persians. Let proud kings see, let them see, who have dared to plunder the vessels of the house of God, which he justly handed over to them for the sins of his ministers, and handling them without any reverence seem to have inflicted insults on God, in whose name they were consecrated. Their end is surely death, which has no end.