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The devil usually enters us through one false thought or false thought and sinful lust and then acts in us and bothers us: he is so simple. Doesn’t the Lord God of spirits dwell in us through one thought and true and holy love, and happens to us, and acts in us, and is everything to us? So, pray without doubt: just as it is easy to think, so it should be easy to pray (1). “Submit yourselves to God; resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you; Cleanse your hands, you sinners; straighten your hearts, you double-minded. Lament, weep and howl; Let your laughter turn into crying, and your joy into sadness. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (James 4:7–10). How distorted the order of moral life is in our country! We obey someone whom we should resist with all the strength of our soul, and sometimes we resist with all our strength the One to whom we owe perfect obedience. Our Creator has an inalienable and indisputable right to our perfect obedience to Him as the Author of our life and our well-being. Isn’t it much better, therefore, to take a firm intention to obey God in everything, and to resist the devil without fail and with all our might, to the point of blood, as a creature, moreover, hostile to God, which has absolutely no right to our obedience to it, which, on the contrary, as fallen and being in irreconcilable enmity with God, we are obliged at its very birth in the Sacrament of Baptism to resist with all measures. Let us resist him in everything, and he will run away from us. If we are constantly in captivity with him, if he is constantly with us, it is precisely because we do not resist him at all. And how many wonderful means we have to defend ourselves from it: the sweetest and all-powerful name of the Lord Jesus, His Life-giving Cross constitute horror and a terrible scourge for the devil and his angels; you just need to say with consciousness and faith a short prayer to the Lord more often: Lord, have mercy and save me, and make an image of His Life-giving Cross on yourself (2). The first apostate from God, the devil, who became proud before the Creator, declared war on God and His truth and then on the human race, which listened to his flattering speeches in the person of Adam and Eve. A person, defeated by the enemy through inattention and frivolity and captured from the enemy by all kinds of sins, must wage a continuous war with the enemy and sin and defeat him with the help of God in order to regain the truth of God, the holiness and peace of God, lost frivolously, and achieve the crowns of victory - incorruption. God's truth demands this. Restore the lost likeness of God and a blessed life with immortality (4). Why did the Lord allow the enemy to have freedom to tempt and destroy people? Why is he not completely bound, and continues to do great harm to the human race, and by the end of the visible world he will receive such power and strength that almost the whole earth will serve Satan in the person of the Antichrist, so that when Christ comes, will He find faith on earth (Luke 18:8)? In allowing the enemy to act temptingly in the world until the second coming of Christ lies wisdom, long-suffering - the truth and mercy of God. Satan and his kingdom are not connected, but act in the world to a certain extent so that believing and faithful people, struggling with sin and with enemies and being in the crucible of temptations and troubles, are thereby purified and strengthened in faith, patience, hope and love and complete devotion to God, and are worthy of His shrine, and receive the greater bliss in the future life, the more they were tempted and suffered here, and strengthened in love for God; it is known that a person who has not been tested in the crucible of troubles and misfortunes is weak in faith and love, not trustworthy and fickle, but those who have gone through this crucible are as hard as an anvil. On the other hand, evil spirits are allowed to tempt people who are unbelievers, proud, money-loving, voluptuous, lazy, and entice them into various vices so that these people receive righteous retribution for their wickedness, unbelief, for their pride, addiction to vanity, greed and laziness, and for neglect of their souls and God’s care for their salvation. “Let the unjust still do injustice; let the unclean one still become unclean; let the righteous still do righteousness, and let the holy one still be sanctified. Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to reward everyone according to his deeds” (Rev. 22:11, 12), says the Lord (5). May Christians always know and remember that the devil is allowed to tempt us either for our good, so that we do not doze off, but stay awake and work for our salvation, or for our punishment for laziness and negligence about our salvation and for our worldly addictions; for the devil himself, all his dirty tricks will serve to unimaginably increase his eternal torment (5). The most striking proof that there is a devil in the world is that people do not feel or feel very little (although others try) of the mercy of God in creation, providence, and redemption: there is a strong counteractor to everything good and righteous (6). The devil strikes the hearts of priests with laziness, dryness and sterility, so that they do not preach the truths of the Gospel to the people of God, do not tell them the whole will of God; During prayer, he sometimes acts in the heart and strikes with insensibility, so that the prayer is not sincere, but only habitual; he does not allow the heart to contemplate in prayer the greatness of all the perfections of God, the greatness of the Mother of God, the holy Angels and holy men of God. The devil is such an evil spoke that at all times and everywhere climbs into the eyes of your heart, overshadowing and suppressing them, it is such a poisonous dust that constantly floats in our mental atmosphere and sits causticly on the heart, eating away and drilling it. He does the same with other teachers of the law, striking their hearts with dryness, sterility and crampedness, so that they cannot compassionately teach the young branches of the vine of Christ the truths of God, water them with the life-giving streams of the Gospel (6). All the many different machinations of the enemy have one name - the devil; Be convinced of this, my heart, and do not be faint-hearted, do not lose heart in enemy circumstances, in enemy storms (6). Everyone needs to know and believe that there is a spiritual, deadly serpent, called the devil and Satan, condemned by the Creator to eternal torment, who can drag unbelievers, lawless and unrepentant people into eternal torment. Everyone also needs to know and believe that the Savior was sent into the world from God to save people from the deadly sting of this serpent - sin and eternal death, and that this Savior gives everyone His saving medicine against the remorse of this serpent: faith, prayer, repentance and the Holy Mysteries of His Body and Blood (6). The devil, as a spirit, as a simple being, can stumble and wound the soul with one instantaneous movement of thoughts of wickedness, doubt, blasphemy, impatience, irritation, anger, an instantaneous movement of the heart’s attachment to something earthly, the movement of contemplation, fornication and other passions; he can fan the spark of sin with his characteristic cunning and malice into a flame that rages with hellish force in the insides of a person. We must hold on and strengthen ourselves with all our might in the truth of God, rejecting the lies, dreams and malice of the devil at their very beginning. Here a person must be all attention, all eye, all adamant, indestructible in all its parts, hard and invulnerable (6). In comparison with holy ascetics, what do lay people mean, living of their own free will in luxury, in pleasures of every kind, in glorious clothing and food, indulging in pride, ambition, envy, hatred, stinginess, irritability, anger, revenge, entertainment, fornication, drunkenness - all vices, although not committed in one person? They are caught alive without any resistance into the will of the devil, and therefore he does not attack them, leaving them, long ago entangled in his nets, in dying peace and self-forgetfulness (6). Wonderful is the power of faith! A living thought about God, heartfelt faith in Him - and He is with me; heartfelt repentance of sins with faith in Him, and He is with me; good thought, and He is with me; pious feeling, and He is with me. But the devil enters me through the thoughts of doubt, fear, pride, irritability, anger, stinginess, envy; This means that his power over me completely depends on me: just be attentive to myself and constantly keep in mind the name of the Lord Jesus Christ with faith and love, and he is powerless to do me any harm (7). All creation testifies to the infinite goodness and truth of the Creator; Satan himself and his angels, with their shameful existence and all-evil intrigues over people, prove the immeasurable goodness and truth of the Creator; for who were Satan and his angels before, what lights, what treasuries of so many blessings, and what did they lose through their decisively arbitrary ingratitude, pride, malice and envy against the Lord? Didn’t they fall completely deliberately and intentionally, with the goal of eternally fighting against the Creator and His creatures, rational-verbal people? Judging by the evil actions of Satan in the world, by their multitude and strength, we can guess what a great powerful spirit Satan, the former Dennitsa, was. Judging by the multitude of darkness and his charms in people scattered throughout the world (“he who deceives the whole world” - Rev. 12:9), one can guess how bright and full of truth he was before! “You were in Eden, in the garden of God; your garments were adorned with all kinds of precious stones” (Ezek. 28:13). Judging by the all-evil carnal and unclean lusts induced from him, one can conclude how desirable and amiable he was in his goodness, which he received from the Creator! Judging by his cunning and evil machinations, one can guess how smart he was and how much good he could bring, how much he could serve His Creator in His providence for lower spirits or people. By this evil, huge colossus, Satan, judge what a great, good, embellished, bright, powerful, intelligent creature Satan was before. How much he contained within himself the gifts of the Creator’s goodness and what he lost due to his evil and deliberate madness! By his malice in people, judge how much good he was before, by envy, judge by his former benevolence, by his boundless greed and stinginess in people, judge his generosity, by his pride - by his greatness received from God, by his despondency in people, boredom, melancholy, sometimes unbearable - by his former bliss. For he was as good before as he is now evil! It is an eternal lesson of humility and obedience for all heavenly Angels and for all right-thinking people, for no matter how perfect the Angels are or no matter how smart people are and in general no matter how perfect they are in anything, they have all this from the sole goodness of the Creator, and not from themselves and must thank the Creator for everything and pray for everything with undoubted faith in His goodness and omnipotence, with the hope of receiving everything from Him. Evil spirits fell through pride and malice - this is a lesson for all people: to humble yourself before the Creator, to consider yourself as nothing and to attribute everything to the Creator and to live solely by the Creator and by fulfilling His will, and - marvelous are Your deeds, Lord! - what Dennitsa, with all her wisdom, could not and did not want to acquire, was acquired by the Virgin from a race that was both mortal and spiritually immortal: the Most Holy Virgin Mary acquired unparalleled humility for herself, acquired the highest shrine. Rejoice, O Blessed One! The Lord is with you. “The Lord had regard for the lowliness of His servant” (Luke 1:28, 48). Likewise, all of us, as beings who are small in ourselves, as all who have from God except sin, must constantly and deeply humble ourselves before the Creator, resorting to His mercy in everything (7). When you are very young or live the life of a sinful world, then you know both Christ the Savior and the enemy of God and man, the all-evil Satan, just by name and you think that Christ is far from you - in heaven, and the devil is somewhere, just not close or near you, and although you hear that he is angry, you think that his anger does not concern you. But when you are in mature years and enter into an ascetic life, when you serve God with a clear conscience, then you will experience on your heart both the good yoke of the Savior and the heavy, unbearable yoke of Satan, who mercilessly insults us (7). The devil takes a huge part in the sins of people, therefore, in prayers before confession, sinful people are condescendingly condemned for their sins before the Lord as “deceived by the devil.” Therefore, no one should consider himself an outcast, even if he were a great sinner: the devil is largely to blame for your sins. Remember Jesus Christ immediately and turn to Him immediately for the forgiveness of your sins. He is the Lamb, “Who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29): He is the Lamb of God for this purpose, to take upon Himself and cleanse our sins (7). The flesh and the world are the tools of the devil, with which he works to our destruction; The world is a society dear to the devil, in which he breathes, in which he is at enmity with God and the Church. So, in order to defeat the devil, one must defeat the passions: pride, self-love, envy, malice, love of money, gluttony, and so on. To defeat the devil, you need to move away from the ungodly rules, customs and habits of the world (8). The property of sin (according to the intention of the devil) is to pervert everything - to understand, imagine, imagine, undertake, speak and do incorrectly, in general to pervert, if possible, the moral order, or the laws established by God and the All-Creator. Thus, the devil distorted people’s concept of God and taught them absurd idolatry, which still exists among many nations. Thus, through crafty and proud people, he managed to pervert the God-revealed faith of Christ, giving rise to many heresies and schisms, dividing Christians into many dissenting camps that hated the true Christian faith in the world, the Orthodox, and among the Orthodox themselves he created and is producing little faith, unbelief, schisms and absurd teachings like Tolstoyism 27, Pashkovism 28, Stunda 29 or coldness towards faith and the Church. He, the devil, perverted the concept of the purpose and purpose of life, turned the gaze of many Christians away from heaven and eternal life and riveted their eyes and hearts only to a temporary, testing, preparatory life, which many consider the only one, and the future - as if non-existent (10). When the devil is in our heart, then there is an extraordinary, killing heaviness and fire in the chest and heart; the soul is extremely embarrassed and darkened, everything irritates it, it feels disgust for every good deed, it interprets the words and actions of others in relation to itself crookedly and sees in them malice against itself, against its honor and therefore feels deep, murderous hatred towards them, is furious and rushes to revenge. By his fruits you will know him (cf. Matt. 7:20) (11). Tolstoyism – views of L.N. Tolstoy, relating to the second half of his life, when he fell away not only from the Orthodox Church, but in general from the entire dogmatic side of Christianity. Tolstoy described his views in his works “Confession”, “What is My Faith”, etc. The Pashkovites are a sect that arose among the upper strata of society in Russia in the 70s of the 19th century. under the influence of the sermons of the English Lord Redstock, it received its name after retired Colonel V.A. Pashkova. Pashkovites, like other movements of the Baptist persuasion, do not recognize the Sacraments, the obligatory adherence to church institutions, the performance of rituals, believing that personal faith is sufficient for salvation. Stundism is an evangelical sect that arose in the mid-19th century. in Russia, close to the Baptists. You might be interested in: