1.
A spiritual disciple of this sort truly receiving the Spirit of God, who was from the beginning, in all the dispensations of God, present with mankind, and announced things future, revealed things present, and narrated things past--[such a man] does indeed "judge all men, but is himself judged by no man." 1 For he judges the Gentiles, "who serve the creature more than the Creator," 2 and with a reprobate mind spend all their labour on vanity. And he also judges the Jews, who do not accept of the word of liberty, nor are willing to go forth free, although they have a Deliverer present [with them]; but they pretend, at a time unsuitable [for such conduct], to serve, [with observances] beyond [those required by] the law, God who stands in need of nothing, and do not recognise the advent of Christ, which He accomplished for the salvation of men, nor are willing to understand that all the prophets announced His two advents: the one, indeed, in which He became a man subject to stripes, and knowing what it is to bear infirmity, 3 and sat upon the foal of an ass, 4 and was a stone rejected by the builders, 5 and was led as a sheep to the slaughter, 6 and by the stretching forth of His hands destroyed Amalek; 7 while He gathered from the ends of the earth into His Father's fold the children who were scattered abroad, 8 and remembered His own dead ones who had formerly fallen asleep, 9 and came down to them that He might deliver them: but the second in which He will come on the clouds, 10 bringing on the day which burns as a furnace, 11 and smiting the earth with the word of His mouth, 12 and slaying the impious with the breath of His lips, and having a fan in His hands, and cleansing His floor, and gathering the wheat indeed into His barn, but burning the chaff with unquenchable fire. 13
-
1 Cor. ii. 15. [The argument of this chapter hinges on Ps. xxv. 14, and expounds a difficult text of St. Paul. A man who has the mind of God's Spirit is the only judge of spiritual things. Worldly men are incompetent critics of Scripture and of Christian exposition. ↩
-
Rom. i. 21. ↩
-
Isa. liii. 3. ↩
-
Zech. ix. 9. ↩
-
Ps. cxviii. 22. ↩
-
Isa. liii. 7. ↩
-
Ex. xvii. 11. ↩
-
Isa. xi. 12. ↩
-
Comp. book iii. 20, 4. ↩
-
Dan. vii. 13. ↩
-
Mal. iv. 1. ↩
-
Isa. xi. 4. ↩
-
Matt. iii. 12; Luke iii. 17. ↩