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When our first parents in paradise listened to the advice of the serpent and transgressed God’s commandment, they became captives of the devil with all their descendants, that is, with the entire human race. And he triumphed and mocked them like an evil giant and tormentor, and did with them what he wanted. Whatever you look at, whatever you turn your mind to, all this shows God’s love for us and good deeds... Our Creator allows the devil himself to benefit us. And he allows it to the extent that it is useful to us, and this enemy tempts us to the extent that it is beneficial to us. How useful? It awakens us from laziness and encourages us to pray. Feeling the presence of this enemy, we resort to God and ask Him for help and protection. And just like a warrior: the more often he fights in battle, the more skillfully he becomes, so is a Christian: the more temptations from this enemy he courageously endures, the better and more skillful he becomes in the Christian rank, and the more victories he wins over this enemy, the more beautiful crown he will be awarded by the Hero of Jesus Christ... St. Paul says: a thorn was given to me in the flesh, an angel of Satan, to afflict me, so that I would not become arrogant ( 2 Cor. 12:7). Do you see how useful a hostile spirit is to us, do you see how a proud one leads to humility? It's harmful to us so that we don't become arrogant. And so an evil and malicious spirit promotes our good with an evil intention. In this world we see how fishermen throw their nets into the water and spread them out to catch fish. So the devil with his demons everywhere has spread various networks on us, O Christian. Spread it in the house, spread it along the way, spread it in cities and villages, spread it in the desert, spread it on the land and in the sea. He hid the nets in food, in drink, in voluptuousness. Hid the nets in honor and wealth. Hid the networks in conversations and silence. He hid the nets in sight and hearing - he hid them to catch us to his destruction. How many destructive networks there are - so many intrigues and tricks against us. How many cunnings and intrigues are his - so many dangers, troubles and misfortunes of ours. Oh, who can find out these hidden networks and get rid of them? Many networks, various networks, networks everywhere, hidden and invisible networks, networks for our disaster and destruction! Who can see them and avoid them, if You, Lord, do not show them and with Your all-powerful right hand do not preserve them from them? Be sober and watchful, because your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour (1 Pet. 5:8)… Any fish that does not escape the fisherman's net gets caught and gets stuck in the net. So, whoever does not avoid the devil’s snare gets stuck in it. The fornicator and the adulterer are caught in his snare, the slanderer and slanderer are caught in his snare, the drunkard is caught in his snare. The shepherd, not caring about the salvation of his own and Christ’s flock, got stuck in his net. The ruler, seeking not the common good, but his own nasty self-interest, got stuck in his network. The judge, corrupted by bribes and gifts, got stuck in his net. The master who torments or burdens his peasants with excessive rents is stuck in his net. In a word, every sinner who does not repent and does not care about his salvation is stuck in its net. All of them were captured by him into his will (2 Tim. 2:26). The fisherman drags the fish stuck in his net towards him. So the devil drags a sinner, caught in his destructive net, into the destruction in which he himself finds himself. Oh! It attracts and will attract you if you don’t get out of its network. O poor sinner! Moan and cry from the depths of your heart to Jesus, the Liberator of our souls. Beware of this evil whisperer [the devil] - so that you do not lose your peace of mind. How many times do you feel some evil thought rising in your heart, know for sure that then the enemy has come to your soul and is giving it his evil advice, like a serpent to Eve. The spirit is known by smell. The evil spirit is evil and emits a smell. If you smell an evil smell, you know for sure that there is an evil spirit here, spewing out its vile and stinking smell. Drive away this evil smell from yourself - and you will drive away the evil spirit. So submit yourself to God; Resist the devil, and he will flee from you (James 4:7). Do not allow your soul to listen to his whisperings for a long time, lest he deceive you like the serpent deceives Eve. But immediately, as soon as you hear his evil advice, turn away from him and turn to the all-powerful Jesus, your Intercessor and Savior, and pray to Him to help you in your feat. This feat is boring and difficult, but a glorious victory will follow. We fight and do not yield to the enemy, but Jesus Christ, the Conqueror of death and hell, helps us and conquers in us. To him be thanksgiving and glory. Bless the Lord, my soul (Ps. 102:1)! An assistant and patron, he was my salvation. He is my God, and I will glorify Him (Ex. 15:2). How many times do we resist our enemy and repel his evil advice, so many times do we defeat and put him to shame. How many times we defeat him, so many times we rejoice the holy angels and glorify our God and Father, Who is in heaven. If an evil enemy approaches you and you hear his evil advice, immediately take heart and become like a warrior of Christ, remember that God sees everything, and looks at you, and expects your feat, and wants to help you. And how many times do you undertake a feat against your enemy and defeat him, so many times does the hero Jesus crown you and His holy angels rejoice over you. There is joy among the Angels of God over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:10). For this feat - a feat against the devil and sin - is necessary for true repentance. A truly repentant person fights against all sin and its inventor, the devil. Therefore, stand firm in your struggle and do not yield to your enemy - let him not laugh at you, but even put him to shame. Christ the Lord from the throne of His glory looks at your feat and prepares for you a crown of eternal glory. The holy angels also look at you and rejoice over your feat. Christ the Lord says to you: be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life (Rev. 2:10). When holy and pious souls become impoverished from this world, the devil very cruelly arms himself against them and embitters them, either himself or through his servants; and the closer the end of the world is, the greater and more severe the suffering that follows the pious. The devil first of all rebels against those who stand and struggle against him, and neglects those who obey his will. He uses all his strength to embitter this small flock (Luke 12:32). The Israelites, leaving Egypt, although Pharaoh embittered them, nevertheless came out with silver and gold, according to what is written: and he brought them out with silver and gold (Ps. 104:37); So Christians, although they suffer a lot from the devil and his servants in the end, nevertheless come from the world with a priceless treasure of eternal bliss. When you are in a foreign country or on the road, you fear all sorts of misfortunes from evil people. This case suggests the following reasoning: we, who follow the path of this world, must be just as or much more wary of the wiles of the devil, who, like robbers on travelers, and especially those burdened with spiritual goods, attack, surround and expose. Peter, the holy apostle of Christ, exhorts us to this caution and diligence: be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Resist him with firm faith (1 Pet. 5:8-9). It’s like the devil’s trick that before we sin, he presents God to us as merciful, so that it’s more convenient to lead us into sin, and his cunning that after sin, he presents God’s justice in order to cast the sinner into despair. Both this and this advice are harmful advice of an evil and hostile spirit. The devil is chasing after us, Christians, whom Christ, the Son of God, delivered from slavery, and wants to enslave him again. So he opposes Christ. Christ wants to save us - he wants to destroy us, and so the evil spirit strives to make His merits ineffective and thereby diminish His glory, which comes from those who are saved for the sake of His salvation. The more people are saved by the grace of Christ, the greater glory comes to Christ from this. Seeing this and being indignant, he seeks to create an obstacle to our salvation and diminish the glory of Christ. We, with the help of God, must fight against this enemy of ours and the adversary of Christ by faith, knowing that we are Christ’s, redeemed from him at the price of His Blood (see 1 Cor. 6:19-20; 7:23). He seduces us with the vanity of this world and advises us to cunningly seek the honor, glory, wealth and sweetness of this age, in order to thereby create an obstacle for us in this feat of ours, as he advised our ancestors in paradise to eat from the commanded tree, by which he tempted and destroyed them. We must not listen to his evil advice and not love the world, according to the apostolic admonition: do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world: whoever loves the world does not have the love of the Father. For everything that is in the world: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the Father, but from this world (1 John 2:15-16). So the holy martyrs, when their tormentors, the servants of the devil, seduced and convinced them into idolatry, gave them the following answer: “We are Christians, we serve Christ, we are Christ’s servants, but we will not worship idols.” Thus, we, Christians, must, when Satan seduces and convinces us with evil thoughts as his servants to sin and the creation of his evil will, answer him: “We are servants of Christ, we must serve Christ, we do not listen to you and we do not accept your evil advice.” How many times, dear Christian, do ungodly thoughts arise in your heart, the lust for carnal impurity, the lust for exaltation in honor and glory, the lust for nasty gain, theft, theft, extortion, revenge and bitterness, and so on, so many times must you fight and struggle against the enemy of your soul. Really understand that this is the evil advice of our enemy Satan, who opposes Christ and hinders our salvation. Christ turns us away from sin, but he leads us into sin and so wants to catch us again in his net and subjugate us from the kingdom of Christ to his own power. For all those who work under sin are under the power of the devil, and therefore have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God (Eph. 5:5). When Satan, the Christian enemy, notices that a person is trying to please God and do good deeds pleasing to Him, then he tries in any way to discredit those deeds, so that what is done outwardly is praiseworthy, but inside his heart is not praiseworthy. Not every good deed is truly good, but only that which is good and done for a good purpose. A deed may outwardly appear to be good, but when it happens for an evil purpose, it is vicious within itself. Thus, almsgiving, patience, and so on are denigrated when their goal is vanity, and therefore God does not like such a thing. How can God please something that is not done for God’s sake? Therefore, the devil, noticing this, tries to turn a good deed into a vice, so that what looks outwardly good will not be good inside and in itself, and so the evil and evil spirit strives to obtain self-interest and rent from our good deeds. Moreover, our glory-loving flesh wants to turn everything into glory and praise. When we want to please God, we must not please ourselves, that is, the flesh, with good deeds, but look out for the machinations of the enemy, who wants to discredit our work and, while outwardly spiritual and pleasing to God, make it carnal and unpleasing from the inside. The leader and inventor of sin is the devil - the first apostate with his evil angels from God and his Creator. This rebel and opponent of God is followed by people who were created in the image of God and with great honor - in the image of God - venerable from God, who retreat from God and their Creator, Father and Provider. Such people sin of their own free will, and so from God’s children they become sons of the devil, and instead of God’s image, they are marked in the soul by the devil’s image, like some kind of terrible monster. From this evil seed of the devil, godless fruits are born and appear outside. For just as those who bear the image of God, true Christians to God their Father, from whom they were born by water and spirit (see John 3:5), are conformed by love, patience, mercy, truth and other virtues, so those who have the image of Satan in themselves are likened to evil deeds: hatred, malice, envy, wickedness and others. The leader and leader of sin, vile before God, are vile and his followers, poor and damned people.