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(1) About repentance and against those who crookedly interpret the following words of the divine Paul: those whom you foreknew, those you also ordain, and so on (Rom. 8ff.). 1. I hear from many people who say that since God, as the divine Paul says, foreknew those who would be saved, and predestined them, and called them, and glorified them, then what good is it for me to take up all sorts of labor, to show my conversion and repentance, if I am not foreknown by God and not predestined to be saved? - To such people, this is what should be said in response. - Oh my brothers! Why are you thinking not about what you can be saved for, but about what you are subject to torment for? Why do you take only incomprehensible words from Holy Scripture, interpret them crookedly and misunderstand them to the destruction of your soul? Don’t you hear how the Lord Himself cries out every day: as I live, I do not want the death of the sinner, but to turn the wicked from his way and live to be him (Ezek. 33:11)? Do you not hear what He also says: repent, for the kingdom of heaven is drawing near (Matthew 4:17)? And again: will there be joy in heaven for one sinner who repents (Luke 15:7)? Or maybe He said somewhere - to some: you do not repent, because I will not accept you - and to others, that is, to the predestined: you repent, because I have you as predestined? - No and no. The Lord has not said and will never say so; on the contrary, every day in every church He cries to the whole world: come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28). Come, he says, burdened with sins, to the One who will take away the sins of the whole world. Those who thirst for salvation, turn to the ever-beating and inexhaustible Source of salvation. Did He exclude anyone here, and called one as one who had been foreseen to come to Him, and sent the other away as one who had not been foreseen? No way. Therefore, my brethren, do not try to bear the guilt of sins, do not invent excuses to justify your negligence and your indulgence in sins, and do not take from the words of the Apostle a reason for your destruction, but all of you, both small and large, flow to Christ the Lord, who calls you. Whether there is a prodigal son, or a publican, a harlot, or a robber, or anything else similar, the Lord Christ does not turn away from anyone, but immediately removes the burden of his sins from him and makes him free from them. How does one remove this burden? Just as He once removed it from the paralytic, saying to him: Be of good cheer, child, your sins will be forgiven (Matthew 9:2). With this word, the paralytic was immediately relieved of his burden, and his body regained health. And so let everyone who wants to resort to Him. Let one cry: Son of David, have mercy on me! And when, having heard this, He asks: “Whatever you want, let me do it for you,” let him answer: “Lord, let me see,” and he will immediately hear from the Lord: “Give me your sight,” and “he will receive your sight” (Mark 10ff.). Let another say: my daughter, my soul, is angry with evil, and hear from Him: I will come and heal her (Matthew 15:22, 8:7). If anyone is careless and does not want to take care of himself as a mother-in-law to Christ, at least when he sees Him coming to Himself and through the teachers and preachers of the Gospel saying to him: Come after Me, let him follow Him, like Matthew the publican (Matthew 9:9), leaving his tortilla, that is, covetousness. And I am sure that He will make him an evangelist from a publican. If only someone, like a thirty-eight-year-old paralytic, had been lying for many years on a bed of voluptuousness and carelessness, would see that the Lord Christ, either mentally through the influence of grace, or in the person of some spiritual man, comes to him and says: Do you want to be healthy? - let him immediately receive the word with joy and say: she, Lord, I want, but not a man who would cast me into the font of repentance; and if the Lord says to him: get up, take up your bed and come after Me, let him arise with readiness and come with diligence in the footsteps of Him who called him from above. And if someone does not want to love Christ, as the harlot loved Him, or turn to Him with warm repentance, like the prodigal son, or come to Him like a bleeding woman, then why else does he not feel guilty about sins - invents excuses to justify his love of sin - saying that those whom God foreknew, he called? To the one who comes up with such pretexts, one can righteously say: truly God, who has known everything from eternity before events, foresaw you too, that you would not want to listen to Him when He called you, and you would not believe His promises and words; however, despite the fact that he knew this, he bowed to the heavens, descended to earth and became a man out of love for you, and now he comes to where you live in your sins, visits you every day, sometimes in His own person through the enlightenment of His grace, and sometimes through His servants, calls you to rise from your fall and from the sin in which you wallow, and to follow Him, who has ascended to heaven, and together with Him you entered into His kingdom, but despite all this you do not want it. So, tell me, I ask you, who is the culprit of your destruction and your disobedience. Are you rebellious and unwilling to follow your Master, or is He who created you, and despite the fact that, as an omniscient, He foresaw that you would not listen to Him and would remain in your hard-heartedness and unrepentance, yet He called you to salvation? “I am sure that you will not dare to answer that He is the culprit, but will admit in every possible way that you yourself are to blame for everything.” God's foreknowledge is not the cause of our bitterness, but our disobedience. God knows everything in advance, what was, and what is, and what will be; He knows everything before the event, and sees it as if it were inherent and accomplished before His face, because everything from God has its being and existence and everything, before being, is in His creative mind - the prototypes of all things are there inside. But just as the king of the earth sees in a spectacle those who are racing and entering into a fight, but he is not the cause of either the victory of those who are victorious or the defeat of those who are defeated, but the jealousy and diligence of the victors is the cause of victory, and the laziness and negligence of the vanquished is the cause of their defeat: think the same way about God. After he honored us with autocracy and gave us commandments teaching us how to fight our mental enemies, he left it in our power whether to resist the devil and defeat him, or to indulge in carelessness and be overcome by him. However, even at the same time, He does not leave us alone in the struggle, knowing the weakness of human nature, but He Himself is present in us during the battle, helps us when we want to fight the enemy, and mysteriously strengthens us with His strength - so that He defeats the enemy more than we do. An earthly king cannot do this, because he himself, being a frail and weak person, needs the help of his subjects. But God, being omnipotent and invincible, helps those who, by their will, want to resist the devil, and makes them conquerors of the evil devil. And God does not force those who do not want to oppose the devil and fight him, so as not to violate the autocracy of our rational nature, which He created in His image, and not to reduce us to the rank of dumb animals. So, God sees us acting freely, just as an earthly king sees us competing in a spectacle. But the earthly king does not know in advance which ones will win and which ones will be defeated until he sees both of them in action at the end of the spectacle. Why, although he prepares the crowns in advance, he does not know to whom he will have to give them. And the King of heaven knows before the ages both those who are about to win and those who are about to be defeated. That is why he said to those who asked that one sit on His right hand and the other on His left side in glory: “My gift is not mine, but it has been prepared for him from My Father” (Matthew 20:23). The divine Paul knew this very thing, and he righteously wrote: those whom you foreknew, you also predestined... And those you predestined, you also called, and those you called, these you also justified (Rom. 8:29-30). Thus, it is not the foreknowledge of God that is the cause of the victory of those who have the power to win by their own will and zeal, or the defeat and fall of those who are defeated and fall through negligence and laziness, but the free will of both: zeal and courage are the cause of victory, and negligence and laziness are the cause of fall and destruction. So, when we indulge in negligence and do the desires of the flesh and the world, we should not say that those whom God foreknew and determined will be saved, without understanding what we are saying. “Yes, you are telling the truth that God foresaw that you would be lazy, careless and negligent, but did not determine or decree that you would not have the power to repent if you want, to get up from the bed of carelessness and be zealous for salvation. If you say this, you will be asserting that God is a lie. For when the Lord said: “The righteous did not come to call, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13), you are in some way saying the opposite of that - because you do not want to repent out of your own wickedness, and through this you seem to be spewing out blasphemy, as if it were not a false God who uttered something false. You come up with such an excuse that those who have to repent are predestined, so let those who are foreknown and predestined repent; I'm not one of them. - Oh, woe to the soul that makes such excuses! Woe to her, for she is worse than even the devils! Have you ever heard of demons ever uttering such a word? Now there is no need for us to blaspheme demons, because the human soul has been found to invent blasphemies worse than those of demons. How did you, man, know that you were not one of those foreknown and foreordained to be conformed to the image of the Son of God (Rom. 8:29)? Tell me who told you this? Maybe God revealed this to you specifically, either directly from Himself, or through some prophet, or through an Angel? No, you say, I come up with it on my own, that - well, I was not foreordained and not destined to be saved, so all my work will be in vain. - O foolish man! - And why don’t you better keep in your mind, with your whole soul, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world and for you, for your own salvation, because He foresaw and predestined you to be His brother and joint heir? And keeping this in mind, not to be zealous and not to be jealous, to love Him with all your soul and fulfill His commandments? - So I would have been saved. Having believed in such a way that you could no longer believe that the One who sacrificed himself on the cross for you will never want to leave you, will never allow you to perish? Or don’t you hear how He Himself says: a mother will forget the offspring of her womb, but I will not forget you (Is. 49:15)? If you make yourself unworthy of the kingdom of those who are being saved and arbitrarily, through bad deeds, separate yourself from the flock of Christ’s sheep being saved, look for yourself - no one else is to blame for your destruction except yourself. So, my brethren, let us reject all unbelief, doubt and laziness, let us resort to Christ with all our hearts with unshakable faith and warm disposition, like slaves purchased with His priceless blood; let us revere this most pure blood, given as price and redemption for us; Let us love our Lord Christ, who gave her for our redemption, and let us accept His immeasurable love, which He has for us, making sure that if He had not wanted to save all of us, redeemed by His honest blood, He would not have come to earth and would not have wanted to be slain for us. For, as it is written, wanting everyone to be saved, He did what He did - and became a man, and was crucified, and died - all for the salvation of us all. Listen to Him Himself, who says: I have not come, He says, let me judge the world, but let me save the world (John 12:47). Adam, while still in paradise, was called by God to repentance when God said to him: Adam, where are you? and: who can tell you that you are naked, except from the tree of which you were commanded not to eat this one thing? (Gen.3:9, 11). But he did not want to repent, cry and seek forgiveness, but what does he do? He portrays his wife as the cause of his foolishness and sin, for which he is expelled from paradise with all truth. Since Adam did not want to repent then, and this was at the instigation of the evil spirit, God, having come to earth, calls all his descendants to repentance, saying: repent, for the kingdom of heaven is drawing near (Matthew 4:17). Come near, - he stands before the doors of your hearts and your lips. Open your hearts by faith, and it will come within you. Then your tongue will open and you will begin to sing: we have seen the true light, we have found the true faith, we have received the Holy Spirit, we have acquired the hidden eternal life in our hearts. Remember how it was. First God called the Jews, but they did not want to go; Then he began to call all tongues through His Son, and they listened and flocked to Him - which is what He said in the parable regarding the Apostles: go out quickly into the crossroads and the haystacks of the city, and bring in the poor and needy, the blind and the lame (Luke 14:21), - where by the city is meant the whole world, by the crossroads and haystacks - the kinds of languages, in all countries living under the beggars, the poor, the blind and the lame - blinded by ignorance of God and crushed by many and various falls and sins. So, God calls everyone, from east to west, both Jews and Greeks. God foresaw both the stubbornness that the Jews had to show through unbelief, and the conversion that the tongues had to show through faith; with all this, from eternity he has predetermined that all who want, whether Jews or Greeks, all who want to believe and be baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and eat the most pure Body of His Son, and drink His holy Blood - all such will be justified and cleansed from sins and will become partakers of eternal life, as the Lord of all Himself said: eat My flesh and drink My blood will give you eternal life (John 6:54). - So, my brother, you were foreknown by God and predestined, and justified, and called to eternal life by faith in Christ and holy Baptism, and were brought not into the sensory paradise into which the primordial one was brought in at the beginning, but into heaven, to the good things that are in heaven, which no eye has seen, nor has ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man (1 Cor. 2:9). Now work in virtues and keep the commandments of God, or, better said, protect yourself through the commandments, so as not to transgress anything that God has commanded you, and not to suffer for the same thing that Adam suffered, or even more, losing greater and heavenly blessings. Do not prefer anything earthly to them, and do not let any lust of corruptible and temporary things prevail in your heart, so that you are not naked from the glory with which you are glorified in Christ, so that one day, as someone who does not have a wedding garment, you are bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Faith in Christ is a new paradise, and God, from the foundation of the world, foresaw all who believed and have to believe in Him, whom He called and will call until the end of the world, having called - justified and will justify, having justified - glorified and will glorify, showing them conformed to the image of the glory of His Son through holy Baptism and the grace of the Holy Spirit, mysteriously making them sons of God and transforming them into new ones. the old and in the immortals from the mortals, with the imposition of commandments on them, just as he imposed on Adam. Thus, those who keep the commandments until the end of their lives will then receive all the benefits prepared for them, and those who turn out to be despisers of the commandments, careless and ungrateful to their Benefactor, will fall from those blessings, just as Adam fell from paradise. And they will suffer this not because God predestined them to be so, but because of their own foolishness and evil. Therefore, God placed in the midst of this paradise, that is, in the midst of the congregation of believers, or in the midst of the Church, a saving tree of repentance, so that those who, through their negligence, fall into sins, fall from eternal life, again through repentance return to this life, still in the brightest and most brilliant glory. For if the man-loving God had not been pleased to arrange this for us, had not been pleased, that is, to grant us repentance, then not a single person would have been saved. Let us abandon all other worries and take care only to repent as much as we have the strength to do so, so that we may be worthy of both present and future blessings in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. You might be interested in: