Discourse 10

Concerning the fact that the words of the Scriptures are like sickles for the sick, spoken in a healing manner, lest they be utterly lost from the living God. But it is not for this reason: that one should take a more excessive license for sin from them. For the hearts that give to you from your fathers in their writings, and the power of the books of the prophets and the apostles concerning repentance, one should not take from them an occasion for boasting over the passions of the divine decree, nor to set at the head of the beginning boundaries that are not to be crossed, concerning those who from the height of the days, through the mouth of all his saints and all the zealous of the laws, were mightily strengthened for their destruction from God. As with this: that there is hope for repentance, there are occasions that were found for you to flee from yourself the sensible fear, so that you may find a more peaceful and unhindered way to sin. These, in the conclusion concerning them in all the orders of the discourse, confirm by the very nature of the word of God, in all the books of our salvation. And from them it is clearly revealed in many and in examples, by setting at the heads concerning them that it is so, as to show that sin is a help. By what cause, then, were they bound in the tradition of the generations in the days of Noah? Was it not by the hand of the knowledge of humility, that they were extended over the beauty of the words of the text?

There was no love of money in that city, nor abundance of merchants, nor sorcery, nor wars that are waged against one another. And why did the five cities of the Sodomites burn forever? Was it not because they gave place to lust in their members, and it ruled over them according to its will, in all the filth of wantonness? Was it not because of the victory of one man who fell from Israel, the firstborn of God, twenty-five thousand in a single sign of death? How was Samson, the mighty hero, cast out from God, the Nazirite who was from the womb and consecrated to God, whose deeds were through an angel like John son of Zechariah, and who performed in his hand mighty deeds and signs? And by a strength that cannot be described, which was like a fire in his body, he taught men by the jawbone of an ass, and he became a deliverer and judge for Israel? Was it not because he defiled and profaned the consecrated members by the force of the people with victory? And because of this, the Lord was estranged from him, and he was delivered into the hands of his enemies?

David, the heart of God: because of his excellence, through his seed was given the covenant with the holy fathers, and from him sprang the Messiah for the salvation of the whole world—not through the marriage of one woman and the purity of one hour, for from the moment of his conception he received the arrow in himself, and set up evil against himself from his own house, and his son pursued him, who went out from his side? And this, when he showed repentance, and the Lord said to him: “Even I would pass over your folly; you shall not die.” With all that discipline of his tears, by which, through the abundance of his weeping, he would anoint his bed at night. Come to me and to that which is even before this. By what, by what did the Davids and Gomorrahs of the brief passages reach the house of Eli the priest, the righteous elder, priest and judge of Israel for forty years? Was it not because of Phinehas and his sons’ haste, that they were diminishing the women who came to pray at the tent of the sacrifice, when it was not a sin, nor by his will, but solely because of that which ceased, and solely by a word he angered, and he did not consider the merit of his sons, and he followed from them the judgment of the Lord?

and no man thought that through the deeds of those from whose days the sinners were, the Lord would show his vengeance. Because of this sin, this insolence and rebellion against God, behold, through his relatives he shows his vengeance, and through his priests and judges and heads of the people, and through men, those who sanctified him, and the pure ones, he wrought with their hands. So that even when they were sent to establish the laws that he set, he did not spare their faces. As it is written in Ezekiel, that he said to the man whom he commanded to destroy the men of Jerusalem with a hidden sword, from before the altar he began, and he did not spare, neither the old man nor the youth nor the young man. As it is shown that these were his relatives, those who walked before him in fear and trembling and did his will. The saints of the Lord and his relatives, they were good deeds and pure contemplation. But those who turn away from the paths of the Lord's will, he also turns them away and casts them from before him, and removes his grace from them. And in what did the decree of the high judgment fall upon Belshazzar through the sign of the hand writing because of his insolence? Was it not? Because we said concerning the vessels of the sanctuary that were brought from Jerusalem, and he and his nobles drank from them?

Thus, when the members of the sanctuary of the Lord were separated for a time, they became remote and were occupied with the affairs of the world. This entire insolence—from the silent, lofty decree, a sudden blow struck it. Like Belshazzar, of whom we spoke, concerning the sacred vessels that were taken from the sanctuary of the Lord. Indeed, not because of the trust in repentance and the encouraging words of the Scriptures, but he scoffed at the words of God and his commands, and he scorned his saints by the deeds of their hands, and he also scorned the members who for a time offered the offering, as those who had used his own sacred things, and the darkness of his deed. Behold, the sanctuaries of God and the ascetics from among women. And like Elijah, Elisha, and the prophets, and the rest of the holy ascetics and virgins, by whose hands great and wondrous things were accomplished, and they conversed face to face with God. And like those after them, like John the Virgin, and Simeon the Holy, and the rest of the heralds of the New [Covenant], who sanctified themselves to the Lord and received from him mysteries—some from his mouth, and some by revelation. And they were mediators between God and men, and channels of his revelations, and bearers and announcers of the kingdom to the inhabitants of the world.