Блага

Let us look impartially, in the light of the Gospel, into our earthly life. She's insignificant! All its benefits are taken away by death, and often much earlier than death by various unexpected circumstances. These perishable, so quickly disappearing blessings are not worthy to be called blessings! Rather, they are deceptions, networks. Those who get bogged down in these nets and become entangled in them are deprived of the true, eternal, heavenly, spiritual benefits delivered by faith in Christ and following Him along the mysterious path of living the Gospel. Repent! How terribly blind we are! How clearly our fall is proved by this blindness! We see the death of our brothers; we know that it will certainly and perhaps very soon be presented to us, because none of the people remained forever on earth; we see that for many even before death, earthly well-being changes, that it often turns into misfortune, similar to the daily taste of death. Despite this such clear evidence of experience itself, we are chasing only temporary goods, as if they were permanent, eternal. All our attention is focused on them alone! God is forgotten! The majestic and at the same time formidable eternity has been forgotten! Repent! They will change, brothers, they will certainly change all perishable blessings for us: the rich will be changed by their wealth, the glorious by their glory, the young by their youth, the wise by their wisdom. Only one eternal, essential good can be acquired by a person during his earthly wanderings: true knowledge of God, reconciliation and union with God, bestowed by Christ. But in order to receive these supreme benefits, one must also leave a sinful life, one must hate it. Before eternal, heavenly, Divine gifts, what do short-term, earthly, perishable blessings mean? Less than nothing. Their meaning is negative, and if a person gives them a positive meaning, for their sake he must lose eternal blessings - he must be subjected to the disaster that the Jews suffered. The Jews were given temporary blessings, as a shadow, as a transformation of true, eternal blessings; they wanted to remain in the shadow and rejected that essential good that from Heaven cast a rough shadow onto coarsened humanity in order to attract humanity to Heaven. For this reason, the God-man commands humanity to renounce temporal blessings. This is not enough: He demands that humanity recognize itself as fallen and lost, that it recognize the earth as the place of its temporary exile and punishment, the threshold of the prisons of hell and eternal torment; He demands that humanity rush towards God and eternity, leaving the earth unattended as a temporary inn or prison, doomed to destruction; He demands that people diligently submit to all the sorrows of temporary life, by this submission they actively confess their fall and the need for a Redeemer, give glory to the justice of God that punishes them, and become worthy of God’s mercy. The Jews did not like this teaching. The word of the cross seemed like a temptation to seekers and admirers of earthly prosperity. They considered their earthly position to be precious, the only asset worthy of any sacrifice. To justify their behavior regarding the Divine Messenger, they cited the desire to preserve this position intact (see John 11: 49–50). Eternity and spiritual blessings were forgotten by them. In their blindness and delusion, pursuing the idea of ​​earthly prosperity, of world domination, supposedly promised by the Word of God to the people of Israel, the Jews rebelled against the powerful Romans, the rulers of the universe of that time. The consequence of the outrage was war. The war ended with the defeat of the rebels, the capture and destruction of Jerusalem, the death of countless Jews, the captivity and scattering of those who survived the sword across the face of the earth. 14 Forget everything earthly, ignore the earth - this shelter given to you for the shortest time, ignore all the accessories of the shelter that will be taken away from you after the shortest possible time, turn all your concerns to your fatherland, to heaven, taken away by the fall, returned by redemption, bring a prayer for the granting of eternal, spiritual, all-holy, Divine blessings to you, exceeding the immeasurable with its dignity not only the comprehension of people, but also the comprehension of Angels. They, these blessings, are already prepared for you, they are already waiting for you. The justice of God, inseparable from His goodness, requires that your will to accept heavenly treasures be revealed through your prayer and your life. The greatest, only good for man is the knowledge of God. Other goods in comparison with this good are not worthy of being called goods. It is a sure guarantee of eternal bliss, and in our very earthly journey it provides the highest and most abundant consolation. In the greatest disasters and sorrows, when all other consolations become insufficient and powerless, it retains all its strength. It is God's greatest gift. The most blessed, highest service on earth is to attract this gift of God into oneself through repentance and fulfillment of the Gospel commandments, and to communicate it to one’s neighbors. Happy is he who is entrusted with such service, no matter how insignificant he may be in appearance. Earthly concerns are incompatible with this service. It requires that the minister be as simple and innocent as a baby, and be as alien to sympathy for everything desirable and sweet in the world as his babies are alien to him. It is necessary to lose the very concept of evil, as if it did not exist at all, otherwise the concept of good cannot be complete, pure, perfect. Love, which is the union of perfection, “thinks no evil,” said the apostle (1 Cor. 13:5). The pure in heart see everyone as pure. One must succeed so much in goodness that one must immediately recognize with a heartfelt spiritual sensation the approaching evil, no matter how hidden and disguised it may be, immediately reject it with courageous determination - and remain invariably good, good in the all-good Lord, who bestows His goodness on man. To do this, you need to leave earthly cares and the very responsibilities associated with worries and harmful entertainment. The historical information in this teaching is borrowed from: Fleury. Church history. T. 1, book. 1. You might be interested in: