AXE.—This word occurs twice in the Gospels (Matthew 3:10, Luke 3:9), each time in the report of the preaching of the Baptist. The old familiar tool of peace and weapon of war (1 Kings 6:7, Psalms 74:5, Jeremiah 51:20) has become a metaphor for the ministry of men with a mission of reform. This suits the spirit of one who, like John the Baptist, is filled with the teaching of the OT. For the axe gleams in its histories and flashes in its songs, while in prophetic mood the tool is changed to the person—the wielder is himself the weapon (Isaiah 10:33 f., Daniel 4:14, Jeremiah 51:20). All this is the forerunner’s inherited world of ideas on this implement of industry and weapon of attack. He is a part of all that his race has been. He sees the men of old times ‘as men that lifted up axes upon a thicket of trees’ (Psalms 74:5). The Messiah, the Coming One, is the last of the line. Nor are all in that line of the lineage of the house of David. ‘As the Assyrian axe in the days of old, so now the Roman axe was laid at the root of Israel’ (Philochristus, ch. 4). Thoroughly as these powers had done their part, yet more drastic was to be the work of the future (‘every tree,’ Matthew 3:10). Under this image of the axe, the road-maker (Matthew 3:3) has his vision of the wood-cutter and his effectual working (Matthew 3:10).

But ‘God fulfils Himself in many ways.’ And when the Carpenter laid aside the axe of the workshop in Nazareth, the wood-cutter, ‘thoroughly furnished unto every good work, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed,’ was already prepared for going up against the trees. Jesus had been tempered by waiting, in solitude and temptation. And the stroke of His axe, when it fell, was deliberate, radical, universal (cf. Hebrews 4:12 f.). Men and institutions, the priests, the temple felt it. He would save the tree of humanity, even ‘as a tree whose stock remaineth when they are felled’ (Isaiah 6:13). Therefore He struck at the root of the evil in man and nature—sin. And because the strokes were meant to be regenerating and reforming, they were clean, swift, sharp, and stout (John 2:17; John 8:1 ff., Luke 13:1 ff.).

Finally, the axe is not only the sign-manual of the mission of the forerunner and the Fulfiller, it is that of reformers in general. As the axe of the backwoodsman has been tempered in fire and water past the useless state of brittleness and beyond the extremity of hardness, so the tempering of the reformer is done, on the one hand, in a series of Divine and delicate processes in the personality of him who is being touched to fine issues by the Spirit, for the service of God and man, and, on the other hand, in a parallel series of providential dispensations in the mind and environment of the people, the race, or the institution with which he has to deal.

Literature.—Ecce Homo, ch. 1; Reynolds, John the Baptist, Lecture 4; Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘The Coming of Arthur,’ ap. fin.; Morley, Life of Gladstone, ii. 252.

John R. Legge.

Bibliography Information
Hastings, James. Entry for 'Axe'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/a/axe.html. 1906-1918.

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