Книга двадцатая

About the last judgment and about the testimonies of both the new and old testaments foreshadowing the future Chapter I. The fact that although God judges at all times, this book will actually deal with His final judgment. Intending to talk about the day of the last judgment of God, which He himself will carry out, and with the goal of defending its reality against the wicked and unbelievers, we must begin with divine testimonies, placing them, as it were, as the foundation of the building. Those who do not want to believe these testimonies try to oppose them with false and deceptive arguments of human reason, either in order to prove that the evidence cited from the Holy Scriptures has a different meaning, or in order to completely deny the divinity of the sayings in them. For there is not, in my opinion, a mortal who, understanding these testimonies in their literal sense and believing that they are spoken by the highest and true God through holy souls, would not take them to heart and would not agree with them; will he express it openly or will he be ashamed and afraid to admit it due to some weakness; or, out of stubbornness, very similar to insanity, he will with all possible diligence defend a known and conscious lie against a known and recognized truth. So, the whole church of the true God confesses and preaches that Christ must come from heaven to judge the living and the dead. This we call the final day of divine judgment, that is, the last time. For how many days this trial will last is unknown; but everyone, even if he inattentively reads the Holy Scriptures, knows that there the word “day” is usually used in the sense of time. But, speaking about this day of judgment, we add: final or last, because God judges now, and judged from the very beginning of the human race, when he expelled from paradise and removed from the tree of life the first people who committed a great crime; He judged, undoubtedly, even when he did not spare the sinned angels, whose head, having destroyed himself, also destroyed people out of envy. Not without His high and just judgment, both in the airy spaces of heaven and on earth, the most unfortunate life of both demons and people is filled with errors and sorrows. Yes, even if no one had sinned, not without a good and righteous judgment He would have kept in a blissful state all rational creation, which has an unchanging affection for Him as its Lord. He judges, moreover, not only in a universal manner, punishing the demonic and human race with wickedness according to the severity of the first sins, but He also judges the personal affairs of each, committed according to the will. For demons also pray so as not to endure torment (Matthew VIII, 29); and when they are shown mercy or each of them suffers torment according to his indecency, this in any case happens without violating justice. And people, for the most part openly, but always secretly, bear divine punishments for their deeds, whether in this life or after death; although no person acts properly without the assistance of divine help, not a single demon and not a single person acts unjustly if this is not allowed to him by the same fair divine court. For, as the apostle says, there is no unrighteousness with God (Rom. IX, 14). And as the same apostle says in another place: “His destinies are incomprehensible and His ways unsearchable” (Rom. XI, 33). So, in this book I will talk not about those first and not about these intermediate judgments of God, but about the very last judgment, to the extent that He will create this judgment, when Christ comes from heaven to judge the living and the dead. It is called the day of judgment in the proper sense, because there will no longer be room for puzzling questions about why this unjust man is happy, and that righteous man is unhappy. For then true and complete happiness will turn into the lot of the good, and deserved and greatest misfortune will turn into the lot of the evil. Chapter II. About the incongruities of human fate, about which it cannot be said that the judgment of God is not inherent in them, although there is no way to trace this judgment At the present time, we are learning to endure evil with indifference, since the good ones also endure it, and not to attach much importance to benefits, since the evil ones also take advantage of them. Therefore, divine teaching turns out to be saving even in present circumstances, when divine justice is not evident. For we do not know by what judgment of God that good man is poor, and that evil man is rich; the one who, in our opinion, should be tormented by sorrows for his depraved morals, rejoices, and the one whose praiseworthy life should bring joy suffers grief; the innocent comes out of court not only unavenged, but also convicted, without the strength to fight the judge’s untruth or refute false evidence, and the villain, his opponent, on the contrary, not only unpunished, but also triumphant over him; the wicked enjoy excellent health, the pious languish in relaxation; young men of the most excellent health commit robbery, and those who could not offend anyone with a word are exposed to all sorts of cruel diseases; early death takes away children useful to humanity, and those who, it would seem, should not have been born live beyond measure for a long time; a person burdened with crimes is surrounded by public respect, and a blameless person is hidden in the darkness of the unknown, and so on; who will collect or list all such phenomena? If in these phenomena, despite their very absurdity, there was a certain constancy, so that in this life, in which “man,” in the words of the sacred psalm, “is like a breath; his days are like a evasive shadow” (Ps. 143:4), only the evil would enjoy transient and earthly blessings, and only the good would endure evil, - this could be attributed to a fair and even favorable judgment God; for those who do not have the opportunity to inherit eternal blessings that give bliss, transitory and earthly blessings would serve either as a temptation, according to their malice, or as a consolation, according to the mercy of God; and for those who are not threatened by eternal torment, temporary disasters would serve either as a punishment for their great or small sins, or as an exercise for their virtues. prosper, which seems unfair, but when it very often happens that the wicked suffer disasters, and the good achieve prosperity, the destinies of God become even more incomprehensible, and His ways unsearchable (Rom. XI, 33). So, although we do not know by what judgment God does or allows this, in Whom is the highest power, the highest wisdom and the highest truth and in Whom there is no weakness, no imprudence and no untruth, yet we learn savingly not to attach great importance to those goods or evils that we see common to both the good and the evil, but to seek those goods that exclusively belong to the good, and to avoid those evils that are the exclusive property of the evil. When we appear at this judgment of God, the time of which is primarily called the day of judgment, and sometimes the day of the Lord, then the highest degree of justice will be revealed not only of the judgment that will be pronounced at that time, but also of the one that was pronounced from the beginning, and the one that will be spoken until that time. There it will also be revealed how just the judgment of God is in the fact that at present so many, even almost all, of the just judgments of God are hidden from the feelings and understanding of mortals; although, however, in this matter it is not hidden from the faith of the pious that this hidden thing is fair. Chapter III. What Solomon said in the book of Ecclesiastes about what is common in this life to both the good and the evil Solomon, for example, the wisest king of Israel, who reigned in Jerusalem, began this book, which is called the book of Ecclesiastes and is placed by the Jews in the canon of sacred books: “Vanity of vanities, said Ecclesiastes, vanity of vanities, all is vanity! What profit does a man get from all his labors with which he toils under the sun?” ( Eccl. 1:2–3 ). Developing this thought in application to everything else, mentioning the sorrows and errors of this life and the vanishing flow of time, in which nothing remains strong, nothing stable, he in some way mourns in this vanity of things under the sun and the fact that although there is an advantage of wisdom over stupidity, as there is an advantage of light over darkness, and although the eyes of a wise man are in his head, and a fool walks in darkness, yet one fate befalls them all (Eccl. II, 13–14); alone, of course, in this life that passes under the sun. He calls fate those disasters that we see common to the good and the evil. He also points out that the good suffer evil as if they were evil, and the wicked enjoy good as if they were good, saying this: “There is such a vanity on earth: the righteous suffer what the deeds of the wicked deserved, and the wicked suffer what the deeds of the righteous deserved. And I said: this too is vanity!” (Eccl. VIII, 14). to this vanity, to the sufficient clarification of which the wise man devoted the entire mentioned book so that, of course, we would have as the object of our desires that life that is not composed of vanity under the sun, but has as its content the truth under Him who created this sun - in this, I say, vanity, is it not by the just and correct judgment of God that a person who has become like this very vanity turns into insignificance? It is extremely important, however, whether in the days of this vanity he resists or obeys the truth, is not involved or is involved in true piety. This is important not for the sake of acquiring benefits or avoiding the evils of this life, which pass away due to their insignificance; This is important for the sake of the future judgment, as a result of which the good will receive good, and the evil - evil, which will remain until the end. Finally, the wise man concludes his book with these words: “Fear God and keep His commandments, because this is everything for man; for God will bring every deed into judgment, even every secret thing, whether it is good or bad” (Eccl. XII: 13-14). Is it possible to say anything shorter, fairer, more salutary? “Fear,” he says, “Keep God and His commandments, because this is everything for man.” Everyone who exists is a keeper of God’s commandments, for whoever is not this (keeper) is nothing, since he is not transformed in the image of the truth, but remains in the likeness of vanity. “For every work (i.e., everything that is done by man in this life) God will bring to judgment, and everything secret, whether it is good, or bad,” that is, to the judgment of everything that seemed despicable here and therefore did not pay attention to itself. For God sees this and does not despise it, and does not bypass it with His judgment when He judges. Chapter IV. In order to talk about the final judgment of God, let us first cite the evidence of the Old Testament and then the New Testament So, from the evidence of the Holy Scriptures about this last judgment of God, which I proposed to present, we should first cite the evidence of the books of the New, and then the Old Testament. Although the Old precedes in time, the New, however, must be preferred to it in dignity; for that Old was the forerunner of this New. The new one will therefore be presented first, and for greater confirmation the ancient evidence will also be cited. The Old includes the Law and the Prophets, the New includes the Gospel and the Apostolic Epistles. The Apostle says: “By the law is the knowledge of sin. But now, regardless of the law, the truth of God has appeared, to which the law and the prophets testify. The truth of God through faith in Jesus Christ is in all and on all who believe” (Rom. III, 20–22). This truth of God belongs to the New Testament and has evidence of itself in the old books, that is, in the Law and the Prophets. So, first the case itself must be presented, and therefore testimony must be taken from witnesses. Showing that it is precisely this order that should be observed, Jesus Christ himself says: “A scribe taught in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a master who brings out of his treasury new and old” (Matthew XIII, 52). He did not say: “old and new,” which he would certainly have said if he had not wanted to give preference to dignity over time. Chapter V. By what sayings of the Lord the Savior is the divine judgment that is to take place at the end of the age announced? So, reproaching the cities in which He showed great powers, but which did not believe, and placing foreigners above them, the Savior himself says: “It will be more bearable for Tire and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you” (Matthew XI, 22). And a little lower he says to another city: “It will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you” (Matt. XI, 24). Here He most obviously foretells the future day of judgment. And in another place He says: “The Ninevites will rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented from the preaching of Jonah; and behold, there is more Jonah here. The Queen of the South will rise up in judgment with this family and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, here is greater than Solomon” (Matthew, xii, 41–42). We learn two things from these words: that judgment will come, and that it will come with the resurrection of the dead. For when he spoke of the Ninevites and the Queen of the South, he undoubtedly spoke of the dead; however, he predicted that they would rise up on the day of judgment. And he said “they will condemn” not because they themselves judged, but because in comparison with them they will be worthily condemned. In another place, speaking about the mixing of good and evil at the present time and their separation later, on the day of judgment, He gave a parable about sowing wheat and sowing tares on it. Explaining this parable to his disciples, He said: “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world; the good seed are the sons of the Kingdom, and the tares are the sons of the evil one; the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Therefore, just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so it will be at the end of this age: the Son of Man will send His angels, and they will gather from His kingdom all temptations and those who practice iniquity, and will throw them into the fiery furnace; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth; then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matt. XIII, 37–43). Although He did not name the judgment or the day of judgment here, He quite clearly depicted it by the deed itself and predicted that it would take place at the end of the age. He said to his disciples: “Truly I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in the end of life, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of His glory, you also will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew XIX: 28). Here we learn that Jesus will judge along with his disciples. Why, in another place, did He say to the Jews: “And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whose power do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges” (Matthew XII: 27). Because He speaks of only twelve having to sit on thrones, we must not think that only twelve people will judge with Him. The number twelve denotes a certain totality of all judges because of the two parts of the number seven, which usually denotes the totality of everything: these two parts, that is, three and four, multiplied by one another, give twelve. For four times three and three times four are twelve. However, another reason is possible, which sufficiently explains the use of this number twelve. But with a literal understanding of it, after we read about the delivery of the Apostle Matthew to the place of Judas the traitor (Acts I, 26), the Apostle Paul, who worked more than anyone else (I Cor. XV, 10), would not have had a throne for judgment; and yet he directly indicates that, together with other saints, he himself belongs to the number of judges when he says: “Do you not know that we will judge the angels” (I Cor. VI, 3). The same incongruity, if the number twelve were taken literally, would apply to those who are subject to judgment. From the fact that it is said “to judge the twelve tribes of Israel” it does not follow that the tribe of Judah, which is thirteenth in number, will not be judged by them, or that they will judge only this people, but not all the others. And by saying “in re-existence,” He meant by the name of re-existence the resurrection of the dead. For our flesh will be regenerated through incorruption, just as our soul is regenerated through faith. I leave aside such sayings about the last judgment, which, upon careful examination, seem doubtful or, rather, relate to another subject, such as: the coming of the Savior, which He has been revealing all this time in His church, that is, in its members, privately and in a certain share, since all of it is His body; or to the destruction of earthly Jerusalem, since even when speaking about this subject, it is spoken for the most part as if we were talking about the end of the age and that last and great judgment. It is impossible to understand all this except by comparing with each other everything that is said about this subject in the same way by the three evangelists: Matthew, Mark and Luke. What one of them says more obscurely, the other states more clearly; so that it becomes obvious what meaning to give to what is said regarding the same subject. Once upon a time I already did this in a letter, which I wrote to my husband Hezichius, Bishop of Salok, of blessed memory; This letter is entitled “On the End of the Century.” In the present case I will go directly to what the Gospel of Matthew says about the division of good and evil at the judgment of Christ, which is the subject of our study and the very last. “When,” says Jesus Christ, “the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory, and all nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; And He will place the sheep on His right side, and the goats on His left. Then the King will speak to those on His right hand. His: “Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was a stranger, and you clothed Me; did you feed the thirsty and give you something to drink? When we saw you as a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and clothed you? When did we see You sick, or in prison, and came to You? And the King will answer them: “Truly I say to you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did it to Me.” Then he will also say to those on the left side: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew XXV, 31–41). Next, He lists to them in great detail what they did not do, what, according to Him, the righteous did. To a similar question from them, when they saw Him in need, He answers that what was not done to His younger brothers was not done to Him; and concluding his speech, he says: “And these will go away into eternal torment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew XXV, 46). The Evangelist John narrates that He predicted that judgment would take place after the resurrection of the dead. For having said: “The Father does not judge anyone, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that everyone may honor the Son as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him,” he immediately added: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John V, 22-24). Here He said that His faithful will not come to judgment. How will they be separated from the evil ones by judgment and stand on His right side? It is obvious that in this place He used the word “judgment” instead of the word “condemnation.” Indeed, those who listen to His word and believe in Him who sent Him will not come to such a judgment. Chapter VI. What is the first resurrection and what is the second Continuing, He says: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the time is coming, and has already come, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and having heard it, they will live. For just as the Father has life in Himself, so He gave to the Son to have life in Himself” (John V, 25-26). He does not yet speak about the second resurrection, that is, about the resurrection of bodies, but speaks about the first, which is taking place now, in order to distinguish precisely the last. He uses the expression: “The time is coming, and it has already come,” but this is the resurrection not of bodies, but of souls. For souls also have their death in wickedness and sins; they are dead by this death. It is about them that the same Lord says: “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matthew VIII, 22), that is, so that the dead in the soul bury the dead in the body. So, having in mind these dead in the soul through ungodliness and unrighteousness, He says: “The time is coming, and has already come, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and having heard it they will live.” He said “having heard,” that is, having obeyed, believed and remained steadfast to the end. This time He made no distinction between good and evil. For it is good for all to hear His voice and come to life, passing to a life of godliness from the death of ungodliness. The Apostle Paul speaks about this death: “If one died for all, then all died. But Christ died for all, so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and rose again for them” (II Cor. V, 14-15). So, everyone died, not excluding anyone, in sins, whether original or added by will, out of ignorance or consciously, or through failure to fulfill what is required by justice; and for all these dead one died alive, that is, without any sin, so that those who have received life through the remission of sins may no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for all because of our sins and rose again for our justification, so that by believing in Him, the justifier of the ungodly, we, having been justified from wickedness, as if alive from death, could participate in the first resurrection, which is now taking place. In this first resurrection only those who are destined to be blessed forever participate; in the second, which follows this, according to Him, both the blessed and the unfortunate will participate. The first is a matter of mercy, the second is of judgment. That is why in the psalm it is written: “I will sing to You of mercy and judgment, O Lord” (Ps. 100:1). Turning to this judgment, He then says: “And He gave Him authority to execute judgment, because He is the Son of Man” (John V, 27). Here He shows that He will come to judge in the same flesh in which He came to be judged. For this purpose, He uses the expression: “Because He is the Son of Man.” And following the words that we cited, he says: “Do not be surprised at this: for the time is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who have done good will come out to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation” (John V, 28-29). This is the judgment that He named a little earlier, saying: “He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John V, 24), that is, by participating in the first resurrection, which now marks the transition from death to life, he will not be subject to condemnation, which He designated by the word “judgment.” Let him, therefore, be resurrected on the first resurrection who does not wish to be condemned on the second resurrection. For “the time is coming, and has already come, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and having heard them they will live,” that is, they will not fall under condemnation, which is called the second death; into this second death, after the second bodily resurrection, those who were not resurrected in the first resurrection, which is the resurrection of souls, will be cast down. “The time is coming (now he does not say: “And it has already come”; because it will come at the end of the age, that is, at the last and great judgment of God), in which all who are in the tombs will hear the voice of the Son of God, and will come out.” He did not say, as about the first resurrection: “And those who hear will live.” For not everyone will come to life with that life, which, since it is blessed, alone should bear the name of life. Of course, they cannot hear and come out of the graves at the resurrection of the flesh without any kind of life. But why not everyone will come to life, He teaches in the following words, saying: “Those who have done evil (will come out) into the resurrection of judgment” - these are those who will not come to life, because they will die the second death. They did evil because they lived badly; but they lived badly because in the first resurrection of souls that is now taking place they did not come to life, or, having come to life, they did not remain in it to the end. So, just as there are two rebirths (rebirths) that I spoke about above, one by faith, which is now accomplished through baptism, and the other by the flesh, which will be incorruptibility and immortality at the great and final judgment, so there are two resurrections, one, which exists now, is the resurrection of souls, which does not allow them to fall into the second death; the other is the second, which does not exist now, but which will be at the end of the age, and it will be the resurrection not of souls, but of bodies, and at the last judgment it will assign the second death to some, and life without death to others. Chapter VII. What is written in the Apocalypse of John about two resurrections and a thousand years, and what reasonable considerations can there be regarding this? The same Evangelist John, in the book called the Apocalypse, speaks of these two resurrections in such a way that the first of them, being not understood by some of us, turned into a kind of funny fable. The Apostle John says in the mentioned book: “And I saw an angel descending from heaven, who had the key of the abyss and a large chain in his hand. He took the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the abyss, and shut him up, and put a seal over him, so that he would no longer deceive the nations until the thousand years were ended; after this he should be released for a short time. And I saw thrones and those sitting on them, to whom judgment had been given, and the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their foreheads or on their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years: but the rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection: the second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years” (Apoc. XX, 1–6). Those who, on the basis of these words of the Apocalypse, came to the conclusion that the first resurrection would be bodily, stopped, by the way, special attention on the number one thousand, finding in it an indication that supposedly the saints were supposed to have a kind of sabbath during such a period of time in the form of holy rest after the labors of six thousand years from the time man was created and, as punishment for his great sin, was cast out of heavenly bliss into the miseries of real mortality; so that according to the words of Scripture: “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day” (2 Pet. III, 8), when six thousand years are completed, equal to six days, a seventh day Sabbath will follow, as it were, in the form of the last thousand years, with the resurrection, that is, for the celebration of this Sabbath, the saints. This opinion might be to some extent tolerable if it were supposed that on this Sabbath the saints would have some spiritual joys from the presence of the Lord. We once thought so too. But since they claim that those resurrected at that time will indulge in the most immoderate carnal feasts, at which there will be so much food and drink that they will not only not observe any moderation, but will exceed the measure of unbelief itself, then no one except the carnal can in any way believe this. The spiritual ones call them who believe this by the Greek name χιλιάστας; Translating this name literally, we can call them thousanders. It would take a long time to go into a special refutation of them; rather, we must in the present case show how this passage of Scripture is to be understood. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself says: “No one can enter the house of a strong man and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house” (Mark III, 27). By the name of the strong He means the devil, because the devil was able to hold the human race in captivity; by his things, which he had to plunder, he means his future faithful, whom he kept in various sins and impiety. Since the strong one had to be bound, the mentioned apostle saw in the Apocalypse “an Angel descending from heaven, who had the key to the abyss and a large chain in his hand. He took the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years” (Apoc. XX, 1–2), that is, he eliminated and limited his power to deceive and hold in his hands those who were awaiting liberation. A thousand years, it seems to me, can be understood in two ways: either that this takes place in the remaining years of the millennium, that is, in the sixth millennium, as if on the sixth day, the last hours of which are passing at the present time, and then will follow the Sabbath, which does not have an evening, i.e. the endless rest of the saints; so that the apostle called the last part of the millennium, remaining until the end of the century, a thousand years, as if part of a day, using that method of expression by which a part is called the name of the whole; or he called all the other years of this century a thousand years, so that the perfect number denotes the fullness of time. For the number one thousand is the perfect square of the number ten. Ten taken ten times makes a hundred; The result is a square, but flat figure. In order for it to gain height and become complete, one hundred is multiplied again by ten, and the result is a thousand. Sometimes even a hundred is used to designate the entirety of something, as in the case when the Lord makes a promise to the one who left everything and followed him, saying: “He will receive a hundredfold” (Matthew XIX, 29; Mark X, 30); as if explaining this, the apostle says: “We have nothing, but we possess everything” (II Cor. VI, 10); because it has already been said before: “To the faithful the whole world is wealth” (Prov. XVII, 6). Moreover, to denote the totality of everything, a thousand is used, which represents the completeness of the decimal quadrature. A better interpretation cannot be given to the expression that is read in the psalm: “He always remembers His covenant, the word that He commanded for a thousand generations” (Ps. 104:8), that is, for all generations. “And he cast him down,” he says, “into the abyss, and imprisoned him” (Apoc. XX, 3). The last name (the abyss) denotes the countless number of wicked people, whose hearts are too immeasurable in malice against the church of God. ("I imprisoned" is said there not because the devil was not there before, but because, having been removed from the believers, he began to have greater control over the wicked. For he is in greater power of the devil who is not only alienated from God, but also hates those who serve God without any reason or reason. "And he imprisoned him, and put a seal over him, so that he would no longer deceive the nations, until the thousand years were ended" (Apoc. XX, 3); i.e. took measures so that he could not go out, that is, transgress the forbidden. The addition: “And he put a seal over him,” in my opinion, means that he wanted to keep in secret who belongs and who does not belong to the part of the devil. After all, in the present century it is completely hidden; By applying a seal and imprisonment, the devil is restrained and removed from deceiving those nations belonging to Christ that he deceived or that he held in his power before. For God chose them before the foundation of the world, to snatch them out of the power of darkness and place them in the kingdom of His beloved Son, as the apostle says (Eph. 1:4; Colossians I, 13). After all, who among the believers does not know that the devil deceives and drags nations into eternal punishment even at the present time, but only those who are not destined for eternal life? The fact that he often deceives those who, having already been reborn in Christ, enter the path of God, should also not confuse. For “the Lord knows those who are his” (2 Tim. II:19): of these he will not drag anyone into eternal condemnation. The Lord knows them as God, from whom nothing is hidden even from the future, and not as a person who sees a person in the present (if only he sees someone whose heart does not see), and what he will be like later - he does not even see himself. So, the devil is bound and imprisoned in the abyss so that he would no longer deceive the nations of which the Church consists and whom, being deceived, he held in his power before, while the Church did not exist. For it is not said: “Let him not deceive anyone,” but: “Let him no longer deceive the nations,” by which he, without any doubt, meant the Church. He says: “Until the thousand years are completed,” that is, either what remains from the sixth day, consisting of a thousand years, or all the years that still remain to be lived in this century. These words: “So that he no longer deceives the nations until the thousand years are completed” should not be understood in the sense that then he will deceive only those nations of which the predestined Church consists, from the deception of which he is restrained by chains and imprisonment. In this case, either the way of expression was used, which is sometimes found in the Scriptures, for example in the psalm: “So our eyes are towards the Lord our God, until He has mercy on us” (Ps. 122:2), not, of course, in the sense that when He has mercy, the eyes of the servants of the Lord will not be towards the Lord their God; or, rather, the order of the words is: “And he shut it up, and set a seal over it, until the thousand years were ended”; and the intermediate words: “So that he no longer deceives the nations” represent an insertion that does not stand depending on the place it occupies, but has a separate meaning, as if it were added later; so that the whole saying could be stated like this: “And he shut it up, and set a seal over it, until the thousand years were ended, so that he would no longer deceive the nations,” i.e. For this reason he concluded until the thousand years were completed, so that he would no longer deceive the nations. Chapter VIII. On the imposition of bonds on the devil and on his release “After this,” he says, “he should be freed for a short time” (Apoc. XX, 3). If for the devil to be bound and imprisoned means not to be able to deceive the Church, then does his release not mean that he will have this opportunity? Not at all. He will never deceive the Church, destined and chosen from the creation of the world, about which it is said: “The Lord knows those who are His” (2 Tim. II, 19). And yet this Church will be here at the time when the devil receives freedom, as it has been here since its establishment and will always be in those members who, being born, take the place of the dying. For a little lower he says that the freed devil will lead the nations deceived by him all over the world into a war against her and that the number of these enemies will be like the sand of the sea. “And they went out into the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire fell from heaven from God and consumed them; and the devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Apoc. XX, 8-10). But the latter already refers to the final judgment; I considered it necessary to present this testimony in the present case so that no one would think that in that short period of time for which the devil will gain freedom, there will be no Church on this earth, so that the freed devil will either no longer find it here, or will destroy it, using all kinds of persecution. So, for the entire time that the mentioned book covers, that is, starting from the first coming of Christ until the end of the age, when His second coming will be, the devil will not be bound in such a way that these very bonds prevent him from deceiving the Church during that period of time, which is called a thousand years; although he will in no way seduce her even after his release. After all, if being bound meant for him not to have the opportunity and permission to seduce, then what would his release mean if not receiving the opportunity and permission to seduce? But let it not be; putting the devil in bonds means not allowing him to produce temptations to the fullest extent that he can give them through force or cunning to seduce people, either by force, or by deception, attracting them to his side. If he had been allowed to do this for such a long time and with such cowardice of the majority, then he would have forced very many of those whom God wants to protect from this to fall and would not have allowed to believe; to prevent him from doing this, he is imprisoned. He will be released when time is short, because with all his strength and the strength of his supporters he will rage, according to the Scriptures, for three years and six months; and when those with whom he will have to wage war will be such that such an attack by such a great army will not break them. But if he had never received freedom, his evil power would not have been sufficiently revealed, the most devoted patience of the holy city would not have been sufficiently tested; and it would not have been sufficiently clear how wonderfully the Almighty took advantage of his great malice. For the Almighty did not completely prevent him from tempting the saints, although he removed him from their inner man, in which faith in God lives, so that his attacks, having an external character, would benefit them; He bound him to his own supporters so that those countless weak ones with whom the Church was supposed to be multiplied and filled, he, pouring out and exercising all the power of his malice, some who had to believe, others who had already believed, would not turn the first away from the faith of piety with fear, and would not deprive the latter of courage; and at the end he freed him so that the city of God could see what a strong enemy he had defeated for the glory of his Redeemer, Helper and Liberator. What are we after this compared to those saints and faithful who will be at that time? To test them, such an enemy will be given freedom, with whom we, when connected, fight great dangers! However, even during this period of time, without any doubt, there were and are some soldiers of Christ so wise and courageous that if they had lived in this mortality and at the time when the devil received freedom, they would have wisely foreseen and with the greatest patience endured all his intrigues and attacks. These bonds were not only imposed on the devil at the time when the Church, which had gone beyond the borders of Judea, began to spread among new and new nations, they are imposed now and will be imposed until the end of the century, when the devil will receive freedom. For even now people are turning to faith from the unbelief in which he kept them, and will, without any doubt, turn to the very end mentioned. In relation to each of them, this strong one is certainly bound at the time when someone, like his thing, is stolen from him. And the abyss in which he is imprisoned was not destroyed with the death of those who lived at the time when his imprisonment began; they were interceded by others when they were born, and until this age ends, they will be interceded by haters of Christians, in whose blind and gloomy heart it will be imprisoned as in an abyss. But the question arises: in these last three years and six months, when the liberated devil will rage with all his might, will anyone accept faith who previously did not contain it? In this case, how will what is said remain valid: “How can anyone enter the house of a strong man and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man?” (Matthew 12:29)? This saying, apparently, makes us assume that in that short time no one will join the ranks of the Christian people and that the devil will fight with those whom he already finds Christians; and if any of the latter, being defeated, go over to his side, such should not be counted among the predetermined number of sons of God. It is not in vain that the same Apostle John, who wrote the Apocalypse, says in his epistle about some: “They went out from us, but were not ours; for if they were ours, they would remain with us” (1 John II, 19). But what will happen to small children? It is extremely incredible that that time would not find among the children of Christians newly born and not yet baptized infants, that in those days themselves no one else would be born, or, if such were to be, that their parents would not in one way or another lead them to the font of regeneration. If this happens, then how will these things be stolen from the devil, who is already untied, when no one can enter his house to steal his things without first tying him up? But it is much more likely to think that at that time there will be no shortage of either those falling away from the church or those turning to the church; Moreover, both parents in relation to the baptism of their little ones, and those who then have faith for the first time, will be so courageous that they will defeat this strong and unbound one, that is, when he plots and attacks with all the forces that he never had before, they will prudently understand and patiently endure; and thus will be stolen from him and not bound. This will not make the above Gospel saying lose its truth: “No one entering the house of a strong man can steal his belongings unless he first binds the strong man.” For, according to the literal meaning of the saying, the order indicated in it will be preserved; At first the strong one is bound, and after his things are stolen for a long time and everywhere among all nations, from the strong and the weak, the church will multiply in such a way that, strengthened in faith by seeing the fulfillment in practice of events predicted above, they will be able to steal things from the untied one. It must be admitted that the love of many will grow cold when iniquity abounds (Matt. XXIV, 12), and that many who are not written in the book of life will succumb to the unusual and greatest persecutions and deceptions of the devil, who at that time was released, one should also think that not only those whom time will not find good and faithful, but also some of those who will still be outside the Church, through a careful study of the Scriptures, with the help of the grace of God, who predicted, among other things, this very end, the approach of which they will feel, will turn out to be more firm in order to defeat the devil and not bound. If this is so, then it must be said that the imposition of bonds preceded it so that the theft would take place both at the time when he was bound and at the time when he was untied; because it is said about this: “No one entering the house of a strong man can plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man.” Chapter IX. What is the thousand-year reign of the saints with Christ, and how does it differ from the eternal reign? While the devil is bound for a thousand years, the saints undoubtedly reign with Christ for these very thousand years, that is, they already reign at this time of His first coming. If, regardless of the reign about which Christ will say at the end: “Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom” (Matt. XXV, 34), His saints, to whom He says: “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. XXVIII, 20), had not already reigned with Him now in some different, although far from equal, way, then His church, of course, would not now be called His kingdom or kingdom of heaven (Matt. XIII, 52). At the present time, of course, the scribe who brings out from his treasury the new and the old, about whom we spoke above, is learning about the reign of heaven. From the Church, the reapers will gather and those tares that He allowed to grow along with the wheat, about which, explaining, He says: “The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are Angels. Therefore, just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so it will be at the end of this age: the Son of Man will send His angels, and from His kingdom they will gather all temptations” (Matt. XIII, 39-41). Will they gather the kingdom from that in which there are no temptations? Obviously, they will be collected from this kingdom, which is the Church here. He also says: “Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches people so, he will be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven; and whoever does and teaches will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matt. V, 19). And both, and not actually fulfilling the commandments that he teaches, for to break means not to observe, not to fulfill in practice; and the one who does it in practice and teaches so, He represents in the kingdom of heaven, but the first is the least, and the second is great. And, continuing the speech, he adds: “For, I tell you, if your righteousness does not exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees (that is, it will not be higher than the righteousness of those who violate what they teach. For about the scribes and Pharisees He says in another place: “They say and do not” (Matthew XXIII, 3); therefore, if your righteousness does not surpass them in the sense that you will not violate, but if you practice what you teach), then you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew V, 20). In this sense, therefore, we must understand the kingdom of heaven in which they both appear, but the first as the smallest, and the last as the great. Where this and that kind of people exists, there the Church is such as it is at the present time; and where there is only one last generation, there the Church will be such as it will be at the time when there is no evil in it. Consequently, at the present time the Church is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, at the present time, His saints reign with Him, although differently than they will reign then; Only the tares do not reign with Him, although they grow in the Church along with the wheat. For they reign with Him who do what the Apostle says: “If you have been raised with Christ, then seek the things that are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God; Set your mind on things above, and not on earthly things” (Col. III, 1–2). About the same ones in another place he says: “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philip. III, 20). Finally, those who so belong to His kingdom reign with Him that they themselves constitute His kingdom. But how do those constitute the kingdom of Christ who, not to speak of others, although they are in it until at the end of the age all temptations are gathered from it, yet seek in it what is their own, and not what is Christ’s? About this militant kingdom, in which there is still a struggle with the enemy and a battle with vices, and sometimes they command those who have resigned themselves to vices, until they reach that complete peace of the kingdom in which there will be a reign without an enemy, and about this first resurrection, which is taking place now, the above-mentioned book says the following. Having said that the devil is bound for a thousand years and then will be freed for a short time, and after briefly mentioning what the church will do during these thousand years or what will be done in it, the book says: “And I saw thrones and them sitting on them, to whom it was given to judge” (Apoc. XX, 4). This speech is not about the final judgment; we must understand those thrones of presidents and those very chairmen by whom the Church is currently governed. By this judgment nothing better can be understood than what is said: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven” (Matthew XVIII: 18). Why does the apostle say: “Why should I judge those who are outside? Are you not judging the internal ones? (I Cor. V, 12). “And the souls,” he continues, “of those who were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God” (Apoc. XX, 4); this means what she will talk about later - about reigning with Jesus for a thousand years; the souls are understood to be martyrs who have not yet received their bodies back. For the souls of the pious dead are not separated from the Church, which even today represents the kingdom of Christ. Otherwise, the memory of them would not be accomplished in the communion of the body of Christ; It would bring no benefit in case of danger to life to resort to His baptism, if it happened that someone was excommunicated from the same body by repentance or a bad conscience. Why is all this done, if not because the dead are members of Him? So, although they are not yet with their bodies, their souls will already reign with Him until this thousand years pass. Why does the same book read in another place: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; to her, says the Spirit, they will rest from their labors, and their works will follow them” (Apoc. XIV, 13). So, at the present time the Church reigns with Christ for the first time in the persons of the living and the dead. “For this is why Christ died and rose again and came to life,” as the apostle says, “in order to rule both over the dead and over the living” (Rom. XIV: 9). Only the souls of martyrs are mentioned because among the dead, those who reign predominantly are those who fought for the truth even to death. But as by part the whole, we mean by them also others who have died and belong to the Church, which is the kingdom of Christ. The following words: “Who did not worship the beast, nor his image, and did not receive his mark on their foreheads or on their hands” (Apoc. XX, 9) we must understand as spoken together about the living and the dead. The beast mentioned here may be the subject of special study; however, it does not contradict right faith to understand by it the wicked city itself and the people of infidels, hostile to the faithful people and the city of God. His image, in my opinion, is his wickedness in those people who seem to profess the faith, but live as infidels. For they pretend to be something other than what they really are, and are called not the true form, but the false likeness of a Christian. The same beast includes not only the open enemies of the name of Christ and His most glorious city, but also those tares that at the end of the age must be gathered from His kingdom, by which is meant the Church. And these, who did not worship either the beast or his image, who are they if not those who fulfill the words of the apostle: “Do not be unequally yoked with the unbelievers” (II Cor. VI, 14)? They don't worship him, that is. do not sympathize, do not obey; and they do not accept the mark, that is, the stigma of a crime: on the forehead - for the sake of confession, on the hand - for the sake of deeds. Alien to this evil, they, whether while still alive in this mortal flesh, or after death, reign with Christ and in a now known manner corresponding to the present time, throughout that period, which is designated by the number one thousand years. “The rest of the dead,” he says, “have not come to life” (Apoc. XX, 5). For now there is an hour when the dead hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who heard are alive (John V, 25), but the rest of them do not live. And the addition: “Until the thousand years are ended” should be understood in the sense that they did not come to life at the time when they should have come to life, having passed from death to life. And therefore, when the day comes on which the resurrection of the bodies takes place, they will come out of the graves not for life, but for judgment, that is, for condemnation, which is called the second death. For whoever did not live until the end of the thousand years, that is, whoever did not hear the voice of the Son of God during the entire period of time in which the first resurrection took place, and did not pass from death to life, will be definitively in the second resurrection, which will be the resurrection of the flesh. together with this flesh will pass into the second death. It further says: “This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection” (Apoc. XX, 5-6), that is, he who participates in it. Its participant is the one who not only returned to life from death, which consists of sins, but also remained firm in the life to which he returned. “Over them,” he says, “the second death has no power.” Consequently, it has this power over those others, about whom he says above: “The rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were ended”; because no matter how much each of them lived in the body for the entire period of time, which is called a thousand years, none of them returned to life from that death in which wickedness kept him, so that, having thus come to life, he became a participant in the first resurrection and so that the second death would not have power over him. Chapter X. What to answer those who think that the resurrection applies only to bodies and not to souls Some think that we can only talk about the resurrection of bodies; and therefore they claim that this first resurrection will also be in bodies. Whoever it is natural, they say, to fall, it is also natural for him to rise (resurrect). And bodies fall, dying; from the fall they are called carrion 193. Therefore, they conclude, it is possible that the resurrection is not of souls, but of bodies. But why do they speak contrary to the apostle, who understands this resurrection? Those, undoubtedly, were resurrected according to the internal man, and not according to the external one, to whom he says: “If you have been raised with Christ, then seek the things that are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God; Set your mind on things above, and not on earthly things” (Col. III, 1–2). He expresses the same thought in another place in other words, saying: “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also should walk in newness of life” (Rom. VI, 4). Hence the famous saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph. V, 14). Regarding what they say that only those who fall can rise (resurrect); and therefore they think that resurrection can only apply to bodies, and not to souls; then why do they ignore the following: “Before his Lord does he stand or fall” (Rom. XIV, 4); and again: “Whoever thinks that he stands, beware lest he fall” (I Cor. X, 12). I think that the warning is given regarding the fall of the soul, not the body. So, if resurrection is characteristic of those who fall, and souls also fall, then it should go without saying that souls are resurrected. And what after the words: “The second death has no power over them” is added: “But they will be priests of God and Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years” (Apoc. XX, 6), then this, in any case, is not said about only bishops and presbyters, who are currently exclusively called priests in the Church. Just as we call everyone Christians because of the sacramental anointing, so we call everyone priests, because they are members of one Priest. The Apostle Peter says about them: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood” (1 Pet. II, 9). The idea that Christ is God is aptly, although briefly and casually, inserted with the expression “priests to God and Christ,” i.e., the Father and the Son; although, due to the appearance of a slave, Christ, as the son of man, thus became a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek (Ps. 109:4). We have talked about this more than once in this essay. Chapter XI. About Gog and Magog, whom the devil, released before the end of the age, will incite to persecute the Church of God “When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea” (Apoc. XX, 7). At that time, therefore, he will deceive precisely in order to draw him into this war. For in every way he could, he deceived with the multitude and variety of evil before. It is said “it will come out,” that is, it will move from secret hatred to open persecution. This will be the last persecution to which, before the onset of the final judgment, the holy Church, that is, the city of Christ, will be subjected throughout the entire earth from the entire city of the devil, while they are both still on earth. By the peoples who are called Gog and Magog, one should not understand any barbarians inhabiting any part of the earth, like the Getae and Massagetae, as some think on the basis of the similarity in the letters of their names, or like other foreign peoples not under Roman rule (peoples). For they are shown to be living throughout the whole earth when it is said: “He will come out to deceive the nations that are in the four corners of the earth,” and then it is added: “Gog and Magog.” The meaning of these names in translation is as follows: Gog - roof, Magog - from under the roof; as if - a house, and the one who leaves the house. So, these are the nations in which, as we showed above, the devil is imprisoned, as in an abyss; and he himself, as it were, protrudes and emerges from them: they are the roof, he is from under the roof. If we attribute both names to the peoples, and not one to them, the other to the devil, then they will also be a roof, because the ancient enemy is currently contained in them and is in some way covered by them; and they will come out of the woodwork when they move from secret to open hatred. What was said: “And they went out into the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city” (Apoc. XX, 8) does not mean that they came or will come to one place, as if the camp of the saints and the beloved city would be located in one place at that time. We are talking about the Church of Christ, spread throughout the entire earth. Wherever she will be at that time - and she will be among all nations, which is indicated by the name of the breadth of the earth - there will be the camp of the saints, there will be His beloved city of God; there all her enemies - since they, together with her, will be among all nations - will surround her with their cruel persecution, i.e. They will embarrass, disturb, put in a hopeless situation with serious misfortunes. And she, for her part, will not leave her militant position, because she is named after the camp. Chapter XII. Is it talking about the final execution of the wicked when it is said that fire came down from heaven and devoured them? And what the book says: “And fire came down from heaven from God and devoured them” (Apoc. XX, 9), then this should not be understood as the final execution that will come when it is said: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew XXV, 41). For then they will be sent into the fire, and fire will not come on them from heaven. Here, by fire from heaven, it is appropriate to understand the very firmness of the saints, with which they will not succumb to those who carry out cruelty, and will not act according to their will. For the firmament is heaven, the firmness of which will make them tormented by the most severe jealousy; since they will not be able to win the saints of Christ to the side of the Antichrist. And this jealousy will be the fire that will consume them, and it will be from God; it is a gift of God that the saints remain invincible, causing their enemies to be tormented. As they say in a good way: “Zeal for Your house consumes me” (Ps. 69:10), so it is said vice versa: jealousy has taken possession of a people who hate, and now “fire will devour Your enemies” (Is. XXVI, 11). Precisely now, that is, regardless of the fire of that last judgment. If the book called the fire descending from heaven and devouring them the blow that will strike the persecutors of the Church, whom Christ will find living on earth at His very coming, when “the wicked one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of His mouth” (2 Thess. II, 8), then this will not be the last execution of the wicked, but such a execution will be what they will undergo after the resurrection tel. Chapter XIII. Should the time of the Antichrist persecution be counted as a thousand years? This last persecution, which will come from the Antichrist, as we have already said (because it is said so both in this book above and in the book of the prophet Daniel), will last three years and six months. Naturally, bewilderment arises whether this time, albeit a short one, refers to the thousand years during which, according to the book, the devil is bound and the saints reign with Christ; or this short time is added to those years and is not included in their number. If we say that it refers to the same thousand years, then it turns out that the reign of the saints with Christ will last not the same amount of time, but longer than the time for which the devil is bound. For, without any doubt, the saints will reign with their King, triumphing over the power of evil, especially during that persecution when the devil will no longer be bound and will be able to pursue them with all his might. How, after this, does Scripture define both by the same thousand years, i.e. and the imprisonment of the devil, and the reign of the saints, when during this thousand years will the imprisonment of the devil cease three years and six months earlier than the reign of the saints with Christ? If we say that this short period of persecution should not be counted among the thousand years, but should be added to these years when they are fulfilled, the addition made after the words: “They will be priests of God and Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years,” the addition: “When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison” will retain its direct meaning; for it will thus show that both the reign of the saints and the imprisonment of the devil will cease at the same time, so that the time of persecution that follows appears to belong neither to the reign of the saints nor to the imprisonment of the devil, but is additional and has its own special account, but in this case we will be forced to admit that the saints will not reign with Christ during this persecution. Meanwhile, who will dare to assert that His members will not reign with Him when they are united with Him in the closest and strongest way, and at such a time when the fiercer the onslaught of battle, the greater the glory of resistance, the thicker the leafy crown of martyrdom? Is it really because it cannot be said that they will reign because they will suffer certain disasters? But in this case, consistency would require saying that those of the saints who suffered tribulations did not reign with Christ in the previous time during the same thousand years, since this was the time of their tribulations; it would turn out that those about whom the writer of the book says that he saw the souls of those killed for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God did not reign with Christ at the time when they suffered persecution; and they themselves were not the kingdom of Christ - they, who were primarily the property of Christ! The conclusion is extremely absurd and inconsistent with anything. There is no doubt that the victorious souls of the most glorious martyrs, having triumphed over all sorrows and accomplished feats, after having laid down their mortal members, reigned and reigned with Christ until the end of a thousand years, in order to then reign with their newly assumed, immortal bodies. Thus, during these three and a half years, the souls of those killed for His testimony, both those who were separated from their bodies before, and those who were separated during that last persecution, will reign with Christ until the mortal age ends and they pass on to that reign in which there will be no death. Therefore, there will be a greater number of years for the saints to reign with Christ than for the devil to be imprisoned and imprisoned; they will reign with their King, the Son of God, for those three and a half years when the devil will no longer be bound. So when we hear: “They will be priests of God and Christ and will reign with Him a thousand years. When the thousand years are over, Satan will be freed from his prison” (Apoc. XX, 6-7), we can only understand that the millennium will end not of the reign of the saints, but of the imprisonment and imprisonment of the devil; so that each side has different and special dates for the end of the millennium, that is, all its years: the reign of the saints is more distant, the imprisonment of the devil is closer; or, what is more likely, to present the matter in such a way that, due to the insignificance of the period of three years and six months, Scripture did not want to subtract it from the time of imprisonment of Satan, nor add it to the time of the reign of the saints. I indicated an example of this kind in the sixteenth book of this work regarding forty years; although the years were somewhat longer, they are spoken of as forty. Such examples are often found in Holy Scripture, of course, for the attentive reader. Chapter XIV. About the condemnation of the devil and his supporters, and again about the bodily resurrection of all the dead and about the judgment of final retribution After this story about the final persecution, a brief summary is given of what the devil will be subjected to at the final judgment, and together with his prince, the enemy city. The book says: “And the devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Apoc. XX, 10). By the beast, as we said above, we should understand the wicked city itself. His lying prophet is either the Antichrist, or that image, that is, an invention about which we spoke at the same time. Then, returning to the story of that final judgment that will take place in the second resurrection of the dead, which is to be for bodies, John, in accordance with the revelation given to him, says: “And I saw a great white throne and Him who sat on it, from whose presence heaven and earth fled, and no place was found for them” (Rev. XX, 11). He does not say: “I saw a great and white throne, and Him sitting on it, and heaven and earth fled from His presence, because this happened at the wrong time,” i.e. before the judgment of the living and the dead; but he said that he saw Him sitting on the throne, from whose face heaven and earth fled - they fled, but then. For this heaven and this earth will cease to exist after the completion of the judgment, when the new heaven and the new earth appear. This world will pass not in the sense of complete destruction, but as a result of a change in things. Why does the apostle say: “The image of this world is passing away. And I want you to be without worries” (1 Cor. VII, 31-32). His image will be destroyed, but not his nature. So, having said that he saw Him sitting on the throne, from whose presence heaven and earth fled, what will happen later, John says: “And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged according to what was written in the books, according to their deeds” (Apoc. XX, 12). He said that books and another book had been opened, but he did not keep silent about the last one, what kind of book it was. This book, he says, is the book of everyone’s life. Consequently, by those books about which he spoke before, we must understand sacred books, both ancient and new; so that in these books it was shown what God commanded to do with His commandments, and in that which is the book of life, what of the things everyone did or did not do. If the last book is represented in a bodily image, who is able to determine its size and length? Or how long would it take to read a book that describes everyone's entire life? Will not the same number of angels appear as the number of people, and each of the people will listen to his life read from the angel assigned to him? But in this case, the book would not be one for everyone, but separate for everyone. Meanwhile, making it clear that this book will be one, Scripture says: “And another book was opened.” So, you need to imagine some kind of divine power, by the action of which all his deeds, both good and evil, will be reproduced in memory and with amazing vividness will appear before the mental gaze of everyone; so that knowledge will condemn or justify conscience, and thus everyone and everyone will be judged together. This divine power obviously received the name of the book. It seems to read in it what is reproduced in memory by its action. And in order to show how the dead, small and great, are to be judged, he, as if in memory, returning again to what he had previously omitted or, rather, put aside for a while, says: “Then the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and hell gave up the dead that were in them” (Apoc. XX, 13). This happened, undoubtedly, before the dead were judged; and yet the judgment has been spoken of before. That’s why I said that he returned from memory to what he had left out. Now he adheres to order, and in order for this order itself to be clear, he finds it appropriate to repeat in this case what was said before about the judgment of the dead. Having said: “Then the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and hell gave up the dead that were in them,” he immediately adds what he already mentioned a little higher: “And each one was judged according to his deeds.” Chapter XV. Who are these dead that the sea gave, or gave death and hell to judgment But who are these dead that the sea gave up? After all, it cannot be assumed that those who die at sea are not in hell, or that their bodies are preserved in the sea, or, what would be even more absurd, that the sea contains good dead, and hell contains evil ones. Who would come up with such a thought? Some people quite rightly think that in this case the word “sea” is used in the sense of the present century. So, making it clear that along with those who will be resurrected, those whom Christ will find here still in their bodies will be subject to judgment, he also called them dead, both the good, about whom it is said: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. III, 3), and the evil, about whom it is said: “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matt. VIII, 22). They can be called dead already because they bear mortal bodies, which is why the apostle says: “The body is dead to sin, but the spirit is alive to righteousness” (Rom. VIII, 10), he says, showing that both, the dead body and the living spirit, exist in a living person who is in this body. And he did not call the flesh mortal, but called it dead; although a little lower he calls the same bodies a more common word - mortal (Rom. VIII, 11). So, the sea gave up the dead who were in it, that is, it gave up the real age of the people who were in it, because they had not yet died. “And death and hell delivered up the dead that were in them.” The sea gave up because they appeared as they were caught; death and hell returned because they were called again to a life that had already passed away. It is possible that there were reasons why it was not enough to say simply "death" or "hell", but both had to be said: death - as applied to the good, who could only suffer death, but not be in hell; hell - as applied to the evil ones who are punished in hell. For if it is not unreasonable to believe that the ancient saints, who professed faith in the Christ who had not yet come, were, although in wicked places very far from the torment, but still in hell, until the blood of Christ, which penetrated into those places, took them out from there, then it is completely in the order of things if good believers, after this price of redemption has already been shed, do not know hell at all, until, according to their own perception bodies, will not receive the benefits they deserve. Having said: “And each was judged according to his deeds” (Apoc. XX, 13), (the author) briefly explains how they were judged. “Both death and hell,” he says, “have been cast into the lake of fire” (Apoc. XX, 14); By these names he designates both the devil, since he was the culprit of death and the executions of hell, and the entire society of demons. This is the same thing that he said above, but with greater clarity: “And the devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.” Then he added something less understandable: “Where is the beast and the false prophet, they will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Apoc. XX, 10). But what he added there with greater darkness, he says here more clearly: “And whoever was not written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire” (Apoc. XX, 15). This book is not to remind God, not so that He will not forget, it points to the destiny of those who will be given eternal life. God knows them and does not read this book to know. His very foreknowledge of them, which cannot be deceived, is this book of life in which they are written, that is, foreknown. Chapter XVI. About a new heaven and a new earth At the end of the trial, at which he predicted the condemnation of the evil, it remains for him to speak about the good. He explained what the Lord had already said in brief words: “And these will go away into eternal torment”; it was necessary to explain the words immediately following this: “And the righteous to eternal life” (Matthew XXV, 46). “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the former heaven and the former earth have passed away, and the sea is no more” (Apoc. XXI, 1). This will be in the order about which, in anticipation, he already said above that he saw Him sitting on the throne, “from whose face heaven and earth fled” (Apoc. XX, 11). After the condemnation of those who are not written in the book of life, and after their casting into eternal fire (what kind of this fire and in what part of the world or universe it will be, I believe, no one knows, except perhaps the one to whom the Holy Spirit reveals), the image of this world will pass through its destruction by the world’s fires, just as the flood occurred through the inundation of the world’s waters. So, in this, as I said, world fire, those properties of the corruptible elements that corresponded to our corruptible bodies will be destroyed by fire, and the substance itself will receive such properties that, through an amazing change, will turn out to be corresponding to immortal bodies; so that the world, having been renewed for the better, will receive complete adaptation to people who have been renewed for the better in the flesh. Regarding the words: “And the sea is no more,” I find it difficult to say whether it will dry up or turn into something better. For we read that the heavens will be new and the earth will be new, but I don’t remember reading anywhere about the new sea, except for those places in the same book where it is said about “a sea of ​​glass, like crystal” (Apoc. IV, 6, XV, 2). But in those cases we are not talking about the end of the century, and it seems that the sea is being spoken of not in the proper sense of the word, but as if about the sea. However, since prophetic speech likes to mix figurative expressions with direct expressions, then in the words: “And the sea is no more” we can talk about the sea that “gave up the dead who were in it” (Apoc. XX, 13). For then this rebellious and stormy age, implied by the name of the sea, will no longer be the life of mortals. Chapter XVII. On the glorification of the Church without end after the end “And I, John, saw the holy city Jerusalem, new, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven, saying: Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them; they will be His people, and God Himself with them will be their God; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death; there will be no more crying, no crying, no sickness; for the former things have passed away. And He who sat on the throne said: Behold, I am creating everything new” (Apoc. XXI, 2-5). It is said that the city comes down from heaven, because the grace by which God creates it is heavenly. Why does He tell him through Isaiah: “I, the Lord, do this” (Isaiah 45:8). True, it descends from heaven from the very beginning, from the time when its citizens during this age, by the grace of God coming from above, grow through the font of regeneration in the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. But according to the judgment of God, which will be the last judgment through His Son - Jesus Christ, this city, by the gift of God, will appear in such great and new splendor that no traces of decay will remain; since the bodies themselves will pass from old corruption and mortality to incorruption and immortality. To attribute this to the time when he reigns with his king for a thousand years, in my opinion, would be extreme shamelessness; for he says quite clearly: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death; there will be no more crying, no crying, no sickness.” Who will be so stupid and stubborn to the point of such extravagance that he will dare to assert that, I don’t say holy people, but even one of the saints who is leading or has already led a real miserable life, knows neither tears nor sorrows; when, on the contrary, the more holy someone is, the more filled with a holy desire, the more abundant is his crying in prayer? Or is this the voice of a non-citizen of heavenly Jerusalem: “My tears were bread for me day and night” (Ps. 41:4)? And again: “Every night I wash my bed, I wet my bed with my tears” (Ps. VI, 7). Also: “My sighing is not hidden from You” (Ps. XXXVII, 10). Also: “My sorrow has increased” (Ps. XXXVIII, 3). Or (is this the voice) not of His son (that) they groan under a burden, because they do not want to be undressed, but to be clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up in life (2 Cor. V, 4)? Are we not talking about those who, having the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within themselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of their body (Rom. VIII, 23)? Or was the Apostle Paul himself not a high Jerusalemite, and was it not then that he was especially so when he endured great sorrow and constant torment of his heart for the Israelites, his brothers according to the flesh (Rom. IX, 2-3)? And when will there be no death in that city, if not at the time when it will be said: “Death! where is your sting? The sting of death is sin” (1 Cor. 15:55–56). This, of course, will not happen when the question is asked: “Where?” And at the present time, not just some very last citizen of this city, but the same John exclaims in his epistle: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John I, 8). True, in this book, called the Apocalypse, much is said in secret to give exercise to the reader’s mind, and there is little in it that, with its clarity, makes it possible to bring the rest to understanding, albeit with difficulty; if only because the book repeats the same thing in so many different ways that it seems as if it says more and more new things, while upon examination it is discovered that it says the same thing in different words. But in these words, when he says: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death; there will be no more crying, no crying, no sickness,” it says so unequivocally about the future century and about the immortality and eternity of the saints (for only then and only there will this not happen) that we should no longer look for or find anything clear in the Holy Scriptures if we consider it hidden. Chapter XVIII. What did the Apostle Peter predict about God's final judgment? Now let's see what the Apostle Peter wrote about this judgment. “Know that in the last days there will appear arrogant scoffers, walking according to their own desires, saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? for ever since the fathers began to die, from the beginning of creation, everything remains the same.” Those who think this way do not know that in the beginning, by the word of God, the heavens and the earth were made of water and by water. And the present heavens and earth, contained by the same Word, are reserved for fire for the day of judgment and destruction of wicked men. One thing should not be hidden from you, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack in fulfilling his promise, as some count slackness; but he is patient with us, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, and then the heavens will pass away with a noise, the elements, having flared up, will be destroyed, the earth and all the works on it will be burned up. If all this is destroyed in this way, then what should you be like in holy life and piety, who are expecting and desiring the coming of the day of God, in which the flaming heavens will be destroyed and the burning elements will melt? However, according to His promise, we look forward to a new heaven and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. III, 3-13). He says nothing here about the resurrection of the dead, but he says enough about the destruction of this world. By mentioning the flood that occurred before, he seems to define in some way the extent to which we should imagine the destruction of this world at the end of this century. For, according to him, even at that time the world that was then perished; not only the globe, but also the heavens, by which, of course, we mean these airy heavens, the place and space of which was covered by the rising water at that time. So, all or almost all of this wind-forming air (he calls it sky or heavens, but in the sense, of course, of these lower, and not those higher heavens in which the sun, moon and stars are located) was turned into moisture, and thus perished along with the earth, the original form of which was completely destroyed by the flood. “But the present heavens and earth,” he says, “contained by the same Word, are reserved for fire for the day of judgment and destruction of wicked men.” So, these heavens and this earth, that is, this world, restored in place of the world that was destroyed by the flood, from the same water, in turn, is reserved for fire for the day of judgment and destruction of wicked people. He does not hesitate to speak about the future destruction of people, although their nature will remain intact even in eternal torment. But perhaps someone will ask: “If at the end of the judgment this world is engulfed in flames, then before it is replaced by a new heaven and a new earth, where will the saints be during this fire, since, having bodies, they must of necessity be in some place suitable for the body?” To this we can answer that they will be in higher spaces, where the flames of that fire will no longer reach, just as the waters of the flood did not reach. For they will have such bodies that they will be wherever they want. However, having become immortal and incorruptible, they will not be afraid of fire itself; The corruptible and mortal bodies of three men were able to remain alive in the red-hot furnace (Dan. III, 24). Chapter XIX. What the Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, and about the appearance of the Antichrist, which will be followed by the day of Christ In order to be able to ever finish this book, I am forced to omit many evangelical and apostolic sayings about this last divine judgment; but in no way do I find it possible to bypass the Apostle Paul, who, addressing the Thessalonians, says: “We pray to you, brethren, regarding the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering to Him, not to rush to waver in mind and be troubled either by the spirit, or by the word, or by the message, as if sent by us, as if the day of Christ was already coming. Let no one deceive you in any way: for that day will not come, until a falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above everything that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits in the church of God as God, showing himself to be God. Don’t you remember that while I was still with you, I told you this? And now you know what prevents you from revealing yourself to him in due time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, only it will not be completed until the one who now restrains is taken out of the way - and then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the revelation of His coming, the one whose coming, according to the work of Satan, will be with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception of those who are perishing, because they did not receive the love of the truth for your salvation. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, so that they will believe a lie, so that all who did not believe the truth, but loved unrighteousness, will be condemned” (2 Thess. II, 1-12) No one doubts that the apostle said this about the Antichrist; and said that the day of judgment (for this is what he calls the day of Christ) will not come before the one whom he calls the lawless comes. If the last name is quite applicable to all the wicked, then how much more so to him? But it is unknown in which church of God he will sit: on the ruins of the church that was built by King Solomon, or in the church. For the apostle would not call the church of any idol or demon the church of God. Therefore, some want to understand in this place by Antichrist not the prince himself, but, as it were, his whole body, that is, together with the prince and the entire mass of people belonging to him; and they believe that it would be more correct to read this passage in Latin as it is read in Greek: he will sit not “in the church of God,” but “in the church of God,” as if he himself were the church of God, by which we mean the Church, as, for example, we say “sits in a friend,” i.e., as a friend, etc. Saying: “And now you know what does not allow it to be revealed to him in due time,” that is, you you know what is holding him back, what is the reason for his delay, he made it clear that they know, but he does not want to talk about it openly. Therefore, we, who do not know what they knew, with all our desire, are not able to understand for ourselves what the apostle meant; this is all the more so since his subsequent words obscure this meaning. For what does the expression mean: “The mystery of lawlessness is already in action, only it will not be completed until the one who now restrains is taken out of the way, and then the lawless one will be revealed”? I confess that I do not understand these words. However, I will not hide the human guesses that I heard or read. Some think that in this case it was a question of the Roman power and that the Apostle Paul did not want to write about it openly for fear of being persecuted due to an unkind attitude towards this power, which many considered eternal, so that when he said: “The mystery of iniquity is already at work,” he supposedly meant Nero, whose actions seemed to him the Actions of the Antichrist. Therefore, others made assumptions that Nero would rise again and be the Antichrist. Others believed that he was not killed, but rather hidden, so that he would be considered killed; and that while he is considered killed, he hides, preserving his age, and will remain hidden until, in due time, he is revealed and restored to the kingdom. But this kind of assumption seems too strange to me. As for the words of the apostle: “It will not be accomplished until the one who now restrains is taken out of the way,” then, not without reason, they see a speech about the Roman power itself, as if it had been said: “Only the one who commands now, let him command, until the one who now restrains is taken out of the way,” that is, until he leaves the environment. “And then the wicked will be revealed.” No one doubts that this name refers to the Antichrist. Others think that the words of the Apostle “The mystery of lawlessness is already in action” refer to nothing more than the evil and feigned ones who are in the Church until they increase to such a number that they will constitute a great people for the Antichrist; that this is the “secret of lawlessness”, since it seems hidden. The Apostle exhorts believers to remain firmly in the faith they hold, saying: “It will not be accomplished until the one who now holds it is taken out of the midst,” that is, until the mystery of lawlessness, which is currently hidden, comes out of the midst of the Church. It is believed that this very mystery refers to what the Evangelist John says in his letter: “Children! lately. And as you have heard that the Antichrist will come, and now many antichrists have appeared, we know from this that the time is last. They came out from us, but they were not ours; for if they were ours, they would remain with us; but they went out, and through this it was revealed that they were not all ours” (1 John II, 18–19). So, they say, just as before the end, in that hour, which John calls the last, many heretics came out from among the Church, whom he calls many antichrists, so then all those who will belong not to Christ, but to that last antichrist, will come out from there, and then he himself will appear. While the dark words of the Apostle are interpreted speculatively by some this way, by others differently, one thing is certain: Christ will come to judge the living and the dead not before His opponent, the Antichrist, comes to deceive the dead with the soul; although seduction on his part is already a matter of secret divine judgment. For his coming will be “according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception of those who perish.” Then Satan will gain freedom and through him the Antichrist will act in the most miraculous, albeit deceitful way. It is often asked whether these signs and wonders are called false, because he will deceive mortal senses with phantoms, so that he will appear to do what he does not do; or because these miracles, although true in themselves, will involve in the deception of those who, not knowing the power of the devil, will believe that they could only be performed by divine power - and this is all the more so since he will then receive such power as he never had. After all, they were not ghosts when fire fell from the sky and at the same time destroyed many servants and numerous flocks of Saint Job, but the storm that flew in and destroyed the house killed his sons; and meanwhile, these were the actions of Satan, to whom God gave similar power (Job I). Now, for which of these two reasons signs and wonders are called false, this will become clear in due time. But for whatever reason they are so called, those who deserve to be deceived “because they did not receive the love of the truth so that they could be saved” will be deceived by these signs and wonders. And then the apostle, without hesitation, adds: “And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, so that they will believe a lie.” God will send, because God will allow the devil to do this - he will allow it according to His righteous judgment, although he will do it out of unrighteous and evil intent. “Let all those who did not believe the truth, but love unrighteousness, be condemned.” Judged, they will be deceived, and, having been deceived, they will be condemned. But those judged by those judgments of God, secretly righteous and righteously secret, with which God did not cease to judge from the very beginning the sin of the rational creature, will be subject to deception; and those who are deceived will be condemned by the final and obvious judgment through Jesus Christ, the most righteous future judge, who was most unrighteously condemned. Chapter XX. What did the same apostle say about the resurrection of the dead in his first letter to the same Thessalonians? At this point the apostle remained silent about the resurrection of the dead. But in his first letter to them, he says: “I do not want to leave you, brothers, in ignorance about the dead, so that you do not grieve like others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, then God will also bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. For we say this to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not warn those who are dead; because the Lord Himself, with a proclamation, with the voice of the Archangel and the trumpet of God, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are left alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord” (1 Thess. IV, 13-17). These apostolic words most clearly point to the resurrection of the dead, which will take place when the Lord Christ comes to judge the living and the dead. But they usually ask: “Those whom Christ finds here alive, on whose behalf the apostle speaks as if on behalf of himself and his contemporaries, will they never die at all, or will they, at the very moment when, together with the risen ones, be caught up in the clouds in the air to meet Christ, will they pass with elusive speed to immortality through death?” Indeed, it cannot be said that it is not possible that they will die and come to life again during that period of time while they rise in height through the air. And the words “And so we will always be with the Lord” should not be understood in the sense that the apostle supposedly wanted to say: “We will forever remain with the Lord in the air”; He Himself will not remain there, of course, because He will pass through it while walking. They welcome someone who is walking, not someone who is staying put. But “we will always be so with the Lord,” that is, wherever we are with Him, we will be so, having eternal bodies. The Apostle himself encourages us to dwell on the thought that those whom Christ finds here alive will, in that short period of time, both suffer death and receive immortality. Having said in one place: “In Christ all will come to life” (1 Cor. XV, 22), in another, speaking about the very resurrection of bodies, he says: “What you sow will not come to life unless it dies” (1 Cor. 15:36). How would those whom He finds alive here come to life in Christ with immortality, if they had not died, when it is precisely about this that it is said: “What you sow will not come to life unless it dies”? Or if we consider as truly sown only those human bodies that through death certainly return to the earth, in accordance with the well-known divine sentence over the criminal father of the human race: “You are dust, and to dust you will return” (Gen. III, 19), then we will have to admit that those whom Christ finds at His coming have not yet left their bodies, neither the quoted words of the Apostle nor the words from the book of Genesis apply. Those who are caught up on high in the clouds, of course, will not be sown; They will not go into the earth and will not return from it (regardless of whether they do not experience any death at all, or, as it were, die in the air. But then - a new indication: the same apostle, talking with the Corinthians about the resurrection of bodies, says: “We will all rise again,” or, as it is read in other codes: “We will all fall asleep” ****************. Since there can be no resurrection unless death precedes it, and by the Dormition in this place we cannot mean anything other than death, how will everyone fall asleep or be resurrected if so many do not fall asleep and are not resurrected, whom Christ will find still in the body when He is to come? So, if we imagine that the saints, who at the coming of Christ will find themselves alive and will be raptured to meet Him, will be separated from their mortal bodies during this rapture itself and then instantly return to immortal bodies, then the words of the Apostle will not present any difficulty for us: “What you sow will not come to life unless it dies,” or when he says in another place: “We will all rise again.” For they too will return to life through immortality; one way or another, albeit for a short time, but having previously died; and therefore they will not be alien to the resurrection, which is preceded by, albeit the shortest, but still the Dormition. Why also consider it incredible that that mass of bodies will be sown in some way in the air and at the same time will come to life there immortally and incorruptibly, since we believe, when the same apostle speaks most clearly, that the resurrection is to take place in the twinkling of an eye (I Cor. XV, 52) and that the dust of the most ancient corpses will return with such ease and with such unimaginable speed to bodies that will live without end? Let us also not think that the well-known sentence: “You are dust, and to dust you will return,” spoken to man, will not apply to these saints if their bodies, when they die, do not fall to the ground, but as they die, so they will be resurrected during the rapture itself, when they are carried in the air. For “you will return to dust” means: you will return, having lost life, to what you were before you received life, that is, deprived of a soul, you will be what you were before you received the soul. Since God breathed the breath of life into the face of the earth, when man was created into the living soul, it was as if it was said to him: “You are now an animated earth, as you were not before; You will be a soulless land as you were.” What all the bodies of the dead represent before they turn to dust, so will those bodies represent if they die, wherever they die, as soon as they lose life, which they will subsequently receive again. Consequently, they will go into the earth, because from living people they will become earth, just as that which is dust goes into dust; that which is old goes into rags; What goes into clay is what happens to be a clay shard, and so on. What - how it will be - we are now building with our little minds some feasible assumptions, will then be accomplished in a way that exceeds our knowledge. If we want to be Christians, we must believe that when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead, there will follow the resurrection in the flesh of the dead. But our faith in this is not vain, even if we are not able to understand how it will be. However, in accordance with the promise we previously made, we should now indicate those predictions about this last judgment of God that were given by the ancient prophetic books; I believe that there is no need to dwell on them and interpret them for a long time if the reader tries to remember the previous one. Chapter XXI. What did the prophet Isaiah say about the resurrection of the dead and the retribution of judgment? The prophet Isaiah says: “They will rise from the dead, and those who are in their graves will rise, and all who are on earth will rejoice: for the dew from You is their healing, but the land of the wicked will fall” (Is. XXVI, 19). Everything that precedes refers to the resurrection of the blessed; and the words: “the land of the wicked will fall” are well understood in the sense that the bodies of the wicked will fall under the destruction of condemnation. Then, if we wanted to pay attention to the particulars in the expressions concerning the resurrection of the blessed, then the words: “The dead will be raised” should refer to the first resurrection, and the following: “They who are in the tombs will rise” - to the second. And if we ask ourselves the question about those saints whom the Lord will find here alive at His coming, then the addition fully applies to them: “they will rejoice; For the dew that comes from You is healing.” By healing in this place we quite correctly mean immortality. For it is complete health, which is not restored as by daily medicine, food and drink. Moreover, the same prophet speaks thus of the day of judgment, first giving hope to the good, and then frightening the evil: “Thus says the Lord: Behold, I am sending peace to him as a river, and the wealth of the nations as an overflowing stream for your enjoyment; They will carry you in their arms and caress you on their knees. As his mother comforts someone, so I will comfort you, and you will be comforted in Jerusalem. And you will see this, and your heart will rejoice, and your bones will blossom like new greenery, and the hand of the Lord will be revealed to His servants, and He will be angry with His enemies. For behold, the Lord will come with fire, and His chariots like a whirlwind, to pour out His anger with fury and His rebuke with blazing fire. For the Lord will execute judgment on all flesh with fire and His sword, and those who are slain by the Lord will be many” (Isaiah 66:12–16). Under the river of peace with the promise of blessings, we, without a doubt, must understand the abundance of that world, above which there is no other. This peace will indeed spill over us in the end; in the previous book we talked enough about him. He says that He will direct this river to those who are promised such bliss, to let us understand that in that land of happiness, which is in heaven, everyone will drink from that river. But since from there the world of incorruptibility and immortality flows into earthly bodies, He says that He will direct this river to in some way water from above what lies below, and will make people equal to the angels. Likewise, by Jerusalem we must mean not the one that is, together with her sons, under the yoke of slavery, but ours, according to the Apostle (Gal. IV, 6), our free mother, eternal in heaven. There we will be comforted after mortal disasters and worries, like little children, in her hands and knees. For inexperienced and unaccustomed, that bliss unknown to us until this time will surround us with the most affectionate help. There we will see, and our heart will rejoice. The prophet did not explain what we would see; but what if not God for the Gospel promise to be fulfilled on us: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew V, 8). We will also see everything that we do not see now, but which, in faith, we imagine, to the best of human ability, to be much smaller and inconsistent with how it really is. “And you will see this,” he says, “and your heart will rejoice.” Here you believe, there you will see. But when we hear the words: “And your heart will rejoice,” let us not think that that blessed Jerusalem will be accessible only to our spirit. “And your bones will blossom,” He says, “like young greenery.” He touched lightly on the resurrection of bodies, as if filling in the gap; because it will not be done after we see, but after it is done we will see. For he has already spoken above about a new heaven and a new earth, when he often and in various ways mentioned what was promised to the saints at the end: “I am creating a new heaven and a new earth, and the former will no longer be remembered and will not come to the heart. And ye shall rejoice and rejoice forever in the things that I do: for behold, I make Jerusalem a joy, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice over Jerusalem and be glad over My people; and the voice of weeping will no longer be heard in it” (Is. 65:17–19), and so on, which some are trying to attribute to the well-known carnal millennium. According to prophetic custom, figurative expressions are mixed in this case with their own, so that the sober mind can reach spiritual understanding through some useful and saving exercise; meanwhile, carnal laziness or stupidity of an uneducated and undeveloped mind, superficially content with the letter, does not at all consider it necessary to look for a more hidden meaning. This is enough to say about those prophetic words that precede the above passage. But let us return to the place from which we retreated. Having said: “And your bones will blossom like new greenery,” to show that although He mentions at this time the resurrection of the flesh, but the resurrection of the good, He adds: “And the hand of the Lord will be revealed to His servants.” What is this speech about, if not about the hand that distinguishes His admirers from his despisers? About the latter, moving on to what follows, He says: “But He will be angry with His enemies,” or, as we read in another translation, “with the infidels.” And He will not then limit itself to rebuke; but what is now threatened will then be fulfilled in reality. “For behold, the Lord will come with fire, and His chariots like a whirlwind, to pour out His anger with fury and His rebuke with blazing fire. For the Lord will execute judgment on all flesh with fire and His sword, and many will be slain by the Lord.” With fire, a whirlwind, a sword, he denotes punishment at trial; and when he says that the Lord will come in fire, he means like fire for those for whom His coming will be a punishment. By His chariots (since they are spoken of in the plural) we understand, not without reason, the ranks of angels. And when he says that all earth and all flesh will be judged by fire and His sword, then in this case we mean not the spiritual and saints, but the earthly and carnal, about whom it is said: “They set their minds on earthly things” (Philip. III, 19), and also: “To be carnally minded is death” (Rom. VIII, 6), and whom, as such, the Lord directly calls flesh when He says: “My Spirit will not forever be despised men, because they are flesh” (Gen. VI, 3). “Many will be slain by the Lord,” it is said here: this plague will be the second death. Sometimes fire, sword, and plague can be understood in a good way. The Lord, for example, said about Himself that He wants to “bring down fire on the earth” (Luke XII, 49). “And cloven tongues appeared to them, as if of fire,” when the Holy Spirit descended (Acts II: 3). “I did not come to bring peace,” said the Lord, “but a sword” (Matt. X, 34). And the word of God is called in the Holy Scriptures a two-edged sword (Heb. IV, 12) because of the sharpness of the two covenants. Likewise, in the Song of Songs, the holy Church says about itself that it is “wounded by love” (Song. II, 5), as if it had received a wound from an arrow shot by love. But when we read or hear that the Avenging Lord will come, it is clear in what sense these expressions should be understood. Having then mentioned those who will be destroyed by this judgment, meaning by the image of the foods prohibited by the old law, from which they did not abstain, sinners and the wicked, the prophet briefly repeats what he said about the action of the grace of the New Testament, starting with the first coming of the Savior and bringing his speech to the last judgment, the subject of our present study, on which he ends his speech. He says that the Lord said that He would come to gather all the nations, and that these nations would come and see His glory. “Because all have sinned,” says the apostle, “and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. III: 23). He also said that he would leave signs on them, so that those struck by these signs would, of course, believe in Him; that he would send those saved from them to various nations and to distant islands, who had not heard His name and had not seen His glory; that they will proclaim His glory among the nations and bring brothers to those to whom it was spoken, i.e. brothers in faith according to God the Father, the chosen Israelis; They will bring gifts to the Lord from all nations on beasts of burden and on carts (by which we mean divine help given through all kinds of service to God, whether angelic or human) to the holy city of Jerusalem, in the person of the holy faithful who are currently scattered throughout the earth. For where divine help is given, there they believe; and where they believe, there they come. At the same time, the Lord compared them with the sons of Israel, bringing their sacrifices to Him in His house with psalms - which the Church is already doing everywhere - and promised to take from them priests and Levites - which is also happening before everyone’s eyes at the present time. For we see that priests and Levites are now chosen not according to the kind of flesh and blood, as was the case at first according to the order of Aaron, but according to the faith of the merits of each, as much as the grace of God helped him in this, as it should have been in the New Testament, in which Christ is the High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek; their correspondence to their purpose is determined not by the name, which is often worn by the unworthy, but by that holiness, which is not common to good and evil. Having said that, according to the obvious and well-known mercy of God, it has already been given to the Church, the Lord also destined the outcome according to which he will carry out the separation of the good from the evil made at the last judgment. He, through the prophet, or the prophet himself on behalf of the Lord, says: “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will create, will always be before Me, says the Lord, so will your seed and your name be. Then from month to month, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh will come before Me to worship, says the Lord. And they will go out and see the corpses of the people who have departed from Me: for their worm will not die, and their fire will not be quenched; and they shall be an abomination to all flesh” (Isa. 66:22–24). The prophet concluded his book with how the age will end. Some, however, translated not “members of men,” but “corpses of men,” denoting the word “corpse” for visible corporal execution. Inanimate flesh is usually called a corpse, and those bodies will be animate, because they could not otherwise experience any torment; although, since they will be the bodies of the dead, i.e. those who fell into the second death, not without reason, perhaps, can be called corpses. Hence the well-known expression of the prophet, which I have already cited above: “The land of the wicked will fall.” Who doesn’t understand that carrion (corpse) got its name from the fall? The word “husbands” was used by those translators, obviously, instead of the word “people”. No one will argue that criminal wives will not be subjected to that punishment; under the male (sex), from which, moreover, the wife was created, of course, both sexes. But, more to the point, when, when applied to the good, it is said: “All flesh will come,” - in the sense that that people will be made up of all kinds of people, and not in the sense that all people will be there, since very many will bear punishment - when, I say, when applied to the good, the word “flesh” is used, and when applied to the evil, “members” or “corpses,” then this undoubtedly makes it clear that after the resurrection of the flesh, the certainty of which by these names of things It is fully confirmed that there will be a trial at which the good and the evil will receive a different sentence. Chapter XXII. What kind of procession will the saints be in order to see the executions of the wicked? But how will the good “come” to see the execution of the evil? Will they really leave their blissful abode with a bodily movement and go to the places of execution in order to see with their bodily eyes the torment of the evil? Without any doubt - no; but they “shall come” by knowledge. This word means that those who are tormented will be outside. Therefore, the Lord calls those places outer darkness (Matthew XXV, 30); the opposite of it is the entrance about which the good servant is told: “Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew XXV, 21). It seems that the evil ones will not enter here to make themselves known, but that the good ones will rather come out to them with knowledge in order to receive information about them, since they will learn what is outside. Those who will bear the punishment will not know what will happen within in the joy of the Lord; but those who are in this joy will know what is happening outside, in that outer darkness. That is why it is said: “they will come,” because what will happen outside of them will not be hidden from them. If the mortal prophets could know this when it had not yet happened, because God was in their minds, although He was very little; then how will the immortal saints not know this, then already truly fulfilled, when God is in everyone (1 Cor. XV, 28)? So, the seed and name of the saints will stand firm in that blessedness, then, of course, the seed about which John says: “His seed abides in him” (I John III, 9); and the name is about which it is said through the same Isaiah: “I will give them an everlasting name” (Is. 56:5). And “from month to month, and from Saturday to Saturday,” as if the moon from the moon and peace from peace, they themselves will be both when they move from these old and temporary canopies into those new and eternal luminaries. The unquenchable fire and the long-lasting worm in punishing the evil have been explained differently by different interpreters. Some attributed both. Others attributed fire to the body in a literal sense, and to the soul of a worm in a figurative sense; the latter seems more likely. But now is not the time to enter into speculation on this subject. We proposed to dedicate this book to the final judgment, at which the separation of the good and the evil will take place; rewards and punishments will be discussed in detail elsewhere. Chapter XXIII. What Daniel prophesied about the persecution of the Antichrist, about the judgment of God and the kingdom of saints Daniel, in his prophecies about this last judgment, also begins with a prediction about the coming of the Antichrist and brings his story to the eternal kingdom of the saints. In prophetic contemplation he saw four beasts, signifying the four kingdoms; I saw that the fourth kingdom would be conquered by a certain king, in whom the Antichrist would be recognized; After this he saw the kingdom of the Son of Man, by which is meant Christ, and then said: “My spirit trembled within me, Daniel, in my body, and the visions of my head troubled me. I approached one of those present and asked him about the true meaning of all this." Then, what he heard from the one who asked about all this, he conveys, as if in the words of the one who told him, as follows: “These great beasts, which are four, mean that four kings will rise from the earth. Then the saints of the Most High will receive the kingdom, and they will possess the kingdom forever and ever.” “Then I desired,” continues (Daniel), “an exact explanation about the fourth beast, which was different from all and very terrible, with teeth of iron and claws of copper, devouring and crushing, and trampling the remains with its feet, and about the ten horns that were on its head, and about the other one that came out again, in front of which three fell - about that very horn, which had eyes and a mouth that spoke arrogantly, and which in appearance he became larger than the others. I saw how this horn made war with the saints and prevailed over them, until the Ancient of Days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the Most High, and the time came for the saints to take possession of the kingdom.” Daniel says this is what he asked about. And what he received in response, he reports after this: “He said about this (that is, the one he asked answered): the fourth beast - the fourth kingdom will be on the earth, different from all the kingdoms, which will devour the whole earth, trample and crush it. And ten horns mean that ten kings will rise from this kingdom, and after them another will rise, different from the previous ones, and will destroy three kings, and will utter words against the Most High and oppress the saints of the Most High; He will even dream of abolishing their holidays and the law, and they will be delivered into his hand until a time and times and half a time. Then the judges will sit and take away from him the power to destroy and destroy to the end, but the kingdom and power and royal greatness in all the heavenly places will be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an eternal kingdom, and all rulers will serve and obey Him. This is the end of the word. I, Daniel, was greatly troubled by my thoughts, and my face changed; but I have kept the word in my heart” (Dan. VII, 15–28). Some have interpreted this to apply to the famous four kingdoms: the Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians and Romans. How successful were such applications, those who want to know, let them read the book of Presbyter Jerome on Daniel, compiled quite carefully and with knowledge of the matter. But that we are talking about the kingdom of the Antichrist, which is very cruel towards the Church, although it will not last long until the saints at God’s final judgment receive an eternal kingdom, then even those who read the above words half asleep will not doubt this. That time, times and half a time are designated by a year, two years and half a year, and, therefore, three and a half years, this is clear from the number of days given somewhat below, and is sometimes explained in the Scriptures by the number of months. In Latin, the expression “times” seems vague at this point; but it is used in the dual number, which the Latins do not have. Just as the Greeks have it, so, they say, the Jews also have it. The expression “times” is used, therefore, as if “two times” were said. But, I confess, I have a fear that we may be deceived about the ten kings, whom the Antichrist seems to be catching as ten people; it may come unexpectedly when there are not so many kings in the Roman Empire. But what if this decimal number denotes the entire total number of kings after whom he will come; just as thousandths, hundreds and various other numbers, which are now unnecessary to mention, for the most part denote the entire quantity in general. In another place the same Daniel says: “And a time of trouble will come, such as never happened since men existed until this time; But at that time all of your people who are found written in the book will be saved. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awaken, some to eternal life, others to everlasting reproach and disgrace. And those who are wise will shine like the lights in the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars, forever and ever” (Dan. XII, 1-3). Here is another passage very similar to the well-known gospel saying (John V, 28–29), as far as the resurrection of the bodies of the dead is concerned. Those who are called there “those in the graves” are here called “sleeping in the dust of the earth.” As it says there: “Those who have done good will go forth to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation,” so here: “Some for eternal life, others for eternal reproach and shame.” And the fact that it says “all”, and here the prophet says “many”, this should not be considered a contradiction. Scripture sometimes uses “many” instead of “all.” Abraham, for example, is told: “I will make you the father of many nations” (Gen. XVII, 5), and meanwhile, in another place God says to him: “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. XXII, 18). About the same resurrection and the same prophet Daniel, it is said a little lower: “And you go to your end, and you will rest, and you will rise to receive your lot at the end of days” (Dan. XII, 13). Chapter XXIV. What prophecies about the end of this age and about the final judgment of God are contained in the Psalms of David Much is said about the final judgment in the psalms, but mostly in passing and briefly. However, I cannot pass over in silence what is most clearly said about the end of the present century. “In the beginning You founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You will remain; and they will all wear out like a robe, and like a garment You will change them, and they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years will not end” (Ps. 102:26–28). What does it mean that Porphyry, praising the piety of the Jews, by which they honor the great, true and terrible God for the deities themselves, reproaches Christians, on the basis of the oracular sayings of their gods, with the greatest stupidity for claiming that this world will perish? Here in the writings of Jewish piety it is said to God, before whom, according to the great philosopher, these deities of his tremble: “Heaven is the work of Your hands. They will die." Is it really possible that when the heavens perish, the world will not perish, of which these heavens constitute the highest and safest part? If such a thought does not please Jupiter, whose oracle, as the most authoritative, as this philosopher writes, condemns it in the beliefs of Christians, then why does he not likewise condemn, as stupidity, the wisdom of the Jews, in whose religious books it is found? Then, if this wisdom, which pleases Porphyry to such an extent that he declares it through the sayings of even his gods, says that the heavens will perish; then why such an empty subterfuge: by the way, or above all else, to present as something terrible in the faith of Christians the fact that in it the world seems to be about to perish, when only with its destruction can heaven perish? Moreover, although in our own sacred Scriptures, and not in those that we have in common with the Jews, namely, in the Gospel and in the books of the apostles, it is said: “The image of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31); it says: “The world is passing away” (1 John II, 17); it says: “Heaven and earth will pass away” (Matt. XXIV, 35); - but the expressions “pass, will pass away,” in my opinion, are much softer than “perish.” Likewise, in the epistle of the Apostle Peter, when it speaks of the destruction of the world, drowned by water, as it once happened, it is quite clear both what part of the world is designated by the name of the whole, and the extent to which it is called lost, as well as what heavens are kept for the preservation of fire for the day of judgment and destruction of wicked people (2 Pet. III, 6-7). And in the words that are read a little further from him: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, and then the heavens will pass away with a noise, the elements, having flared up, will be destroyed, the earth and all the works on it will be burned up. If all this is destroyed in this way, then what should you be like in holy life and piety?” (2 Pet. III, 10-11) - by the heavens that are about to perish we can understand those that he called reserved for fire; and under the burning elements - those that are in this lowest, stormy and troubled part of the world, in which, according to him, these very heavens are contained, while those highest ones, on the firmament of which the stars are installed, will remain intact and inviolable. For the expression of Scripture that “the stars will fall from heaven” (Matt. XXIV, 29), regardless of what can more likely be understood in another sense, rather indicates that the last (highest) heavens will remain if only the stars fall from there; although it is much more likely that this expression is figurative, or that it will happen in the lower sky, but, of course, in a more amazing way than it happens now. From this sky the famous Virgilian disappeared into the forest of Ida. The passage I cited from the psalm does not seem to exclude a single heaven, about which it would not be said that it will perish. For as soon as it is said: “Heaven is the work of Your hands. They will perish,” then just as not one of them stands out from among the works of God, so not a single one stands out from among those who perish. To defend Jewish piety, approved by the oracles of their gods, they will not dare to use the image of the Apostle Peter, whom they absolutely hate; then one might believe that we are not talking about the destruction of the whole world; one might believe that in the expression “they will perish,” while only the lower heavens will perish, the whole is used to designate a part in the same way as the whole is used to designate a part in the aforementioned apostolic epistle, when it is said that the world perished from the flood, while one lower part of it with its heavens perished. But, as I said, they will not dare to do this, so as not to express approval of the thought of the Apostle Peter or not to express agreement with the thought of the final destruction of the world by fire in the same extent as we consider it destroyed by the flood; they claim that the entire human race cannot perish from any waters or from any flame. Therefore, they can only say that their gods praised Jewish wisdom because they did not read the above psalm. Even in the forty-ninth psalm it is written about God’s final judgment: “Our God is coming, and not in silence: before Him is a consuming fire, and around Him is a strong storm. He calls on heaven and earth from above to judge His people: “Gather to Me My saints, who entered into a covenant with Me by sacrifice” (Ps. 49:3–5). We mean this about our Lord Jesus Christ, whom we expect to come from heaven to judge the living and the dead. For He will come to judge the just and the unjust with righteousness. He who formerly came secretly to be unjustly condemned by the unrighteous. It is He, I say, “who does not come in silence,” that is, He will appear openly and with the voice of a judge, Who at His former hidden coming was silent before the judge, being led to the slaughter like a sheep, and being like a lamb before the shearers, silent, as it is read in the prophecy in the Gospel (Matthew XXVI, 63). Regarding fire and storm, i.e. We have already said how to understand this when we considered a similar expression in the prophecy of Isaiah. As for the expression: “Heaven calls from above,” then, since the saints and the righteous are rightly called heaven, it obviously refers to what the apostle says: “We... will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thess. IV, 17). For how, if one adheres to the letter, will heaven be called from above, when it can only be from above? The addition of “and the earth” - if we mean only “will call”, i.e. “will call the earth”, but not mean “from above” - obviously, in accordance with the right faith, has the following meaning: heaven represents those who will judge with Him, and the earth those who will be subject to judgment; so the expression “calls heaven from above” does not mean “caught up into the air,” but “seats him into the judge’s seats.” This can also be understood this way: he will convene angels in the highest heavenly spaces to descend with them to carry out judgment; will also call on the “earth,” that is, people on earth, in order, of course, to judge them. If the words “and land” include both, i.e. e., both “will call” and “from above”, so that it turns out that He will call both the heavens from above and the earth from above, then, in my opinion, it would be best to understand in this case people who will be caught up to meet Christ in the air, but the name of heaven is attributed to souls, and earth to bodies. Then, the expression “to judge His people,” what else does it mean but to separate the good from the evil, like lambs from the goats? Then the speech turns to the angels: “Gather My saints to Me.” Carrying out such a task is, of course, the responsibility of the angels. In case of the question of which righteous angels will gather for Him, he continues: “Those who entered into a covenant with Me through sacrifice.” The whole life of the righteous consists in fulfilling God’s covenant over sacrifices (super sacrificia). Does this mean that works of mercy should be placed “above sacrifices,” that is, above sacrifices, in accordance with the saying of God: “I want mercy, not sacrifice” (Hos. VI, 6), or does this expression mean “in sacrifices,” just as it is said that something is done above the earth when it is done in the earth; in any case, works of mercy are precisely those sacrifices with which God is propitiated, as I remember, I reasoned about this in the tenth book of this work. By these deeds the righteous fulfill the covenant of God, because they do them for the sake of the promises contained in His New Testament. Why, when His righteous are gathered to Him and placed at His right hand, Christ at the last judgment will say to them: “Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry, and you gave Me food...” (Matthew XXV, 34-35), and so on, which is expressed there as the final sentence of the Judge about good deeds and about eternal rewards for these deeds. Chapter XXV. About the prophecy of Malachi, which announces the final judgment of God and says that the cleansing of some must be accomplished through purifying punishments The prophet Malachi, or Malachi, called an angel, and by some recognized as the priest Ezra, who owns other writings accepted into the canon (this opinion, according to Jerome 194, is held by the Jews), prophesies about the last judgment like this: “Behold, I send My angel, and he will prepare the way before Me, and suddenly the Lord, whom you seek, and the Angel of the covenant will come to His church, which you desire; Here. He is coming, says the Lord of hosts. And who will endure the day of His coming, and who will stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner of fire and like refiner's lye, and He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and like silver, so that they may sacrifice to the Lord in righteousness. Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in the days of old and as in former years. And I will come to you for judgment and will be a speedy accuser of sorcerers and adulterers, and those who swear falsely and withhold wages from a hireling, oppress the widow and the orphan and repel the stranger, and do not fear Me, says the Lord of hosts. For I am the Lord, I will not change” (Mal. III, 1–6). Of the above words, what most attracts attention is the well-known cleansing punishments awaiting some at that judgment. For what other meaning could the words have: “And who can endure the day of His coming, and who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner of fire and like refiner’s lye, and He will sit as a refiner and purify silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them as gold and as silver?” Isaiah says something similar: “The Lord will wash away the filthiness of the daughters of Zion and cleanse the blood of Jerusalem from among her with the spirit of judgment and the spirit of fire” (Is. IV, 4). Perhaps, however, by washing from defilement and a kind of cleansing one should mean that when the condemnation to execution separates the evil from them, the separation and condemnation of the latter will be cleansing for them, because then they will no longer mingle with the evil. But when he says: “And he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them as gold and as silver, so that they may sacrifice to the Lord in righteousness. Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord,” he shows, undoubtedly, that those who will be purified will then please God with sacrifices of righteousness, and through this they themselves will be cleansed of their unrighteousness, which made them displeasing to the Lord. They themselves will be victims in truth, complete and complete, when they are cleansed. For what, besides themselves, will they bring that is more pleasing to God? However, in order to consider this issue of purifying punishments more carefully, it should be postponed until another time. By the sons of Levi, Judah, and Jerusalem, we must understand the very Church of God, made up not only of Jews, but also of other nations, and not as it is at the present time, when “if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8), but such as it will be then, purified by the final judgment, like winnowed wheat; when those for whom such purification is necessary will also be purified by fire, so that there will be absolutely no one left who would offer sacrifices for their sins. For all who offer sacrifices in this way undoubtedly remain in sins, for the remission of which they offer, in order to receive this remission when they offer and what was offered is accepted by God. Chapter XXVI. About the sacrifices that the saints will make - that they will be pleasing to God, as they were pleasing in ancient days and in former years Wanting to show that His city would not be in a similar situation at that time, God said that the sons of Levi would offer sacrifices in righteousness - not in sin, therefore, and therefore not for sin. Therefore, when he, continuing his speech, says: “Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in the days of old and as in former years,” in these words the Jews in vain see the promise to them of past times of their sacrifices according to the Old Testament law. It was not in righteousness, but in sins that they offered sacrifices when they mainly and primarily offered them for sins, so that the priest himself, whom, in any case, we should consider more righteous than all others, according to the commandment of God, first usually offered sacrifices for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people (Lev. XVI, 6; Heb. VII, 27). In view of this, we must explain how the words “as in the days of old and as in former years” should be understood. Maybe they remind us of the time when the first people lived in paradise. Pure, not defiled or stained by any sin, they offered themselves to God at that time as the purest sacrifices. But from the time when they were expelled from there for violating the commandment and in their person human nature was condemned, with the exception of one Mediator, even after the font of regeneration, even though some were still babies, “who can be born clean from an unclean? not one” (Job XIV, 4). They will say to this that about those who offer sacrifices, it can be said, not without reason, that they offer in righteousness, for “the righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17); although he would deceive himself if he said that he has no sin, but therefore he will not say that he lives by faith. But will anyone argue that the present time of faith can be compared with that end, when the fire of the last judgment will purify those who will sacrifice in righteousness? Since after such purification the righteous, as one should think, will not have any sin, then, without any doubt, this time, as regards the absence of sin, can only be compared with the time when the first people, before breaking the commandment, lived in paradise in the most innocent bliss. So, it is fair to understand that the latter is indicated in the words “as in the days of old and as in former years.” For even through Isaiah, after the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, among other detailed allegorical and mysterious descriptions of the blessedness of the saints (which the desire to avoid lengthiness does not allow us to properly state), God says: “Like the days of the tree of life, the days of my people will be” (Is. 65:22). Whoever opened the sacred books does not know where God planted the tree of life, around which, when people expelled from paradise by their own unrighteousness were excluded from eating it, a fiery and terrifying guard was placed (Gen. III, 24)? Someone will object that the days of the tree of life that Isaiah mentioned are precisely those days that the church of Christ is currently experiencing, that Christ himself is prophetically called the tree of life, because He is the Wisdom of God, about which Solomon says: “She is a tree of life for those who acquire it” (Prov. III, 18), and that those first people did not spend years in paradise, but were expelled from it so quickly that they did not give birth there not a single son, and therefore that time cannot be understood in the above words. I bypass this objection so as not to be forced (which would be too long) to dissect everything, so that the truth discovered from it all can establish something. I have a different idea and do not agree with the idea that through the prophet the ancient days and former years of carnal sacrifices were promised to us as a great gift. After all, those sacrifices of the old law were commanded to be offered from all kinds of animals, clean and without any blemish, and they designated holy people, which alone was Christ, who had no sin at all. Therefore, since after the judgment, when those who were found worthy of such purification will be purified by fire, in all the saints there will no longer be any sin at all and they will sacrifice themselves in righteousness; so that such sacrifices will be pure in all respects and without any blemish; then these sacrifices, indeed, will be like in ancient days and in previous years, when the purest sacrifices were made to transform this future. In the immortal flesh and soul of the saints there will then be that purity for which the bodies of these victims served as an image. Then, regarding those who are worthy not of purification, but of condemnation, He says: “And I will come to you for judgment and will be a swift accuser of sorcerers and adulterers, and of those who swear falsely and withhold wages from a hireling, oppress the widow and the orphan and repel the stranger, and they do not fear Me, says the Lord of hosts. For I am the Lord, I will not change." With his last words, He seems to say: “While you were changed for the worse by your guilt, and for the better by My grace, I myself do not change.” He speaks of Himself as a future witness (accuser) because at His judgment He will not need witnesses; and He calls Himself a speedy witness, either because He will come suddenly, and His judgment, which seemed extremely slow, will be accomplished very quickly with the surprise of His very coming; or because He will convict the consciences themselves without any lengthy haranguing. “In the conscience (thoughts), as the Scripture says, there will be torment of the wicked” (Wis. 1:9). And the apostle says: “The work of the law is written in their hearts, as evidenced by their conscience and their thoughts, now accusing, now justifying one another, on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secret deeds of men through Jesus Christ” (Rom. II, 15-16). And in this sense, the Lord will be a quick witness that he will immediately reproduce in memory what he will expose and punish the conscience with. Chapter XXVII. On the separation of the good from the evil as a distinctive feature of the last judgment The last judgment also includes that passage from this prophet, which I cited on another occasion in the eighteenth book. The prophet says there: “And they will be Mine, says the Lord of hosts, My property in the day that I will make it, and I will have mercy on them, as a man has mercy on his son who serves him. And then again you will see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not serve Him (Mal. III, 17-18). For behold, the day will come, burning like an oven; Then all the arrogant and those who do wickedness will be like stubble, and the coming day will burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. And for you, who revere My name, the Sun of righteousness will rise and healing in His rays, and you will go out and leap like fat calves; and you will trample the wicked, for they will be dust under the soles of your feet in the day that I will do, says the Lord of hosts” (Mal. IV, 1-3). When this difference in the form of rewards and executions, dividing the righteous from the unrighteous, imperceptible under the present sun in the bustle of real life, is revealed under that sun of righteousness with the opening of that life, then there will indeed be a judgment such as has never been. Chapter XXVIII. That the Law of Moses must be understood in a spiritual sense, so that a carnal understanding of it does not lead to condemnable murmuring The same prophet adds further: “Remember the law of Moses My servant, which I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel” (Mal. IV, 4). After pointing out the great future difference between the doers of the law and the despisers of it, he quite appropriately reminds them of commands and justifications; among other things, so that they learn to understand the law in a spiritual way and discover in this law Christ, whose judgment must make this distinction between the doers and the despisers of the law. For it is not in vain that the same Lord says to the Jews: “If you had believed Moses, you would have believed Me, because he wrote about Me” (John V, 46). Understanding the law in a carnal sense and not knowing that earthly promises are only images of heavenly things, they reached such a murmur that they dared to say: “The service of God is in vain, and what profit is it that we kept His statutes and walked in sad clothing before the Lord of hosts? And now we consider the arrogant happy: those who commit iniquity are better off, and although they tempt God, they remain unharmed” (Mal. III, 14-15). These words of theirs in some way prompted the prophet to foretell the final judgment, in which the evil will not even be supposedly blessed, but will clearly be the most unfortunate, and the good will not suffer even temporary disaster, but will enjoy a clear and eternal bliss for everyone. Above, the prophet even quoted the following words from their speech: “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delights in such people” (Mal. II, 17). I say, they came to such grumbling, understanding the law of Moses in a carnal sense. Hence, the speaker in the seventy-second psalm says that he barely kept his feet in power, barely restrained his groans, from falling, of course, because jealousy for sinners appeared in him at the sight of the lawless world; so that he even said: “How will God know? and does the Most High have knowledge?” (Ps. 73:11). He also said: “Did I not cleanse my heart in vain, and wash my hands in innocence?” (Ps. 72:13). Regarding the resolution of this most difficult question, which arises when seeing the good unhappy and the evil happy, he adds: “It was difficult in my eyes until I entered the sanctuary of God and understood their end” (Ps. 72:16-17). At the last judgment, indeed, it will not be like this: the open misfortune of the unrighteous and the open happiness of the righteous will show something far different from what it is now. Chapter XXIX. About the coming before the judgment of Elijah, whose preaching, revealing to the Jews the secrets of Scripture, will turn them to Christ After exhorting the Jews to remember the law of Moses, since he foresaw long ago that they would understand it not in a spiritual sense, the prophet immediately adds: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that when I come I will not strike the earth with a curse” (Mal. IV, 5-6). The greatest triumph on the lips and in the hearts of the faithful is that in the last time before the judgment the Jews will believe in the true Christ, that is, in our Christ, when the law of Elijah, this great and amazing prophet, is explained to them. The expectation that he will come before the coming of the Savior and Judge has its basis, because it is not for nothing that he is considered to be living at the present time. For according to the very clear testimony of Scripture, he was caught up from the circle of human life on a chariot of fire (2 Kings II, 11). So, when he comes, setting out in a spiritual sense the law, which is currently understood by the Jews in a carnal sense, he will turn “the heart of the father to the son,” that is, the fathers to the children, because the Seventy Interpreters used the singular instead of the plural here. And the meaning of this is that the children, that is, the Jews, will understand the law as the fathers, that is, the prophets, including Moses himself, understood it. Then the hearts of the fathers will turn to the children, when the understanding of the fathers comes into agreement with the understanding of the children; “and the hearts of the children to their fathers,” when what some feel, others will sympathize with. Seventy translated it this way. “And the heart of man is to his sincere”; because fathers and children are the closest to each other. However, the words of the Seventy interpreters, who translated in a prophetic spirit, may also contain another, more sublime meaning; It can be understood that Elijah will turn the heart of the Father God to the Son - not, of course, influencing the Father so that the Father loves the Son, but teaching that the Father loves the Son, so that the Jews will love the same one who is ours, Christ, Whom they previously hated. For the Jews at the present time, the heart of God is turned away from our Christ because they adhere to this way of thinking. Therefore, for them, the heart of God will then turn to the Son when they themselves, having turned in heart, learn and understand the love of the Father for the Son. The words that follow: “And the heart of man to his sincere”, i.e. that Elijah will turn the heart of man to his neighbor, what better meaning can they have than that which will turn the heart of man to the man Christ? For, being the image of God, our God took the form of a servant (Philip. II, 6-7), deigning us to become our neighbor. So, Elijah will do this, “lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” The earth is those who philosophize about earthly things; Such are the carnal Jews even today. From this imperfection arose the aforementioned murmur against God: “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He is well pleased with such.” Chapter XXX. The fact that the books of the Old Testament do not clearly indicate the face of Christ when speaking about the future judge - God; but from some testimonies where the Lord God speaks, it is clear beyond doubt that He is the Christ There are many other testimonies in the divine Scriptures about the final judgment of God; If I were to list them all, it would be too long. It is enough that we have proven that this was foretold in the sacred books of both the Old and New Testaments. But in the books of the Old Testament, the future judgment through Christ, that is, that Christ will come from heaven as a judge, is not spoken of with such clarity as in the New Testament books; when in them the Lord God says about Himself that He will come, or it simply says that the Lord God will come, Christ directly is not of course. For the Lord God is both Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. However, we must not leave this unsupported by evidence. So, let us show, firstly, that Jesus Christ speaks in the prophetic books as the Lord God, while it is absolutely clear that this is Jesus Christ; then, even in the absence of such evidence, when there is talk about the coming of the Lord God for the final judgment that is about to come, it will be possible to understand Jesus Christ. There is a passage in the prophet Isaiah that provides a clear example of what I am talking about. God says through the prophet: “Listen to Me, Jacob and Israel, My called: I am the same, I am the first and I am the last. My hand founded the earth, and My right hand stretched out the heavens; I will call them, and they will appear together. Gather together, everyone, and listen: who among them predicted this? The Lord loved him, and he will do His will over Babylon, and will show His arm over the Chaldeans. I, I spoke and called him; I have brought him, and his path will be prosperous. Come to Me, listen to this: I did not speak in secret at first; from the time this happens, I have been there; and now the Lord God and His Spirit have sent me” (Isa. 48:12–16). After all, this is the same person who spoke as the Lord God; However, it would have been impossible to recognize Jesus Christ in him if the speaker had not added: “And now the Lord God and His Spirit have sent me.” He said this in the image of a servant, using a verb in the past tense about a future event, just as we read from the same prophet: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter” (Is. 53:7). He doesn’t say “it will happen,” but instead of denoting what will happen, he uses a past tense verb. Prophecies say this all the time. There is another place in Zechariah that shows this clearly, because it represents that the Almighty (of Hosts) sent the Almighty (of Hosts): Who is Who, if not God the Father of God the Son? It says: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: For glory He sent me to the nations that robbed you; for he who touches you touches the apple of His eye. And behold, I will lift up My hand against them, and they will become the prey of their servants, and then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent Me” (Zech. II, 8-9). Your Lord Almighty says that He is sent by the Lord Almighty. Who dares to understand here anyone other than Christ, speaking, obviously, to the lost sheep of the house of Israel? In the Gospel He says: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. XV, 24). He compared these sheep here to the apple of the eye of God to denote the highest degree of feeling of love. The apostles themselves were from this kind of sheep. But after the glory of the resurrection, before which, according to the evangelist, “Jesus was not yet glorified” (John VII, 39), He was sent in the person of His apostles to all nations. And thus what is read in the psalm was fulfilled: “You delivered me from the rebellion of the people, you made me the head of the foreigners” (Ps. XVII, 44); so that those who robbed the Israelites, whom the Israelites served, being under the rule of the nations, themselves became the prey of the Israelites. This is exactly what He promised the apostles, saying: “I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew IV, 19). So, they became fishers, but for good, like stolen vessels from this “strong” one, but even more tightly bound (Matt. XII, 29). And through the same prophet the Lord says: “And it will come to pass on that day that I will destroy all the nations that attack Jerusalem. And I will pour out the spirit of grace and compunction on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and they will look at Him, whom they have pierced, and will weep for Him, as they weep for their only begotten son” (Zech. XII, 9-10). Who, if not God, will remove all the nations hostile to the holy city of Jerusalem, going against it, that is, acting hostile towards it, or, as others have translated, going against it to conquer it; or will he pour out the spirit of grace and mercy on the house of David and on the inhabitants of this city? This, of course, only suits God, and on behalf of God this is said through the prophet. And yet, this God, who performs such great and divine deeds, is Christ himself, when he adds and says: “And they will look at Me, whom they have pierced, and will weep for Him, as they weep for their only begotten son.” On that day the Jews will repent, even those who have received the spirit of grace and compunction, that they reviled Christ during His suffering, when they look at Him coming in greatness, and recognize in Him the One whom they mocked before in the person of their fathers during His humiliation; However, their fathers themselves, the perpetrators of such great wickedness, will see Him, resurrected, but this time for execution, and not for correction. Therefore, it is not them that should be understood in this place when it is said: “But on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem I will pour out the spirit of grace and compunction, and they will look...”, etc., just as we say to the Jews: you killed Christ, although their fathers did it; Likewise, they will also grieve that they themselves have done in some way what those from whose root they come from did. So, although after receiving the spirit of grace and compunction, having already become faithful, they will not be condemned along with their wicked fathers; however, they will mourn as if they themselves had done what their fathers did. They will grieve not out of consciousness of crime, but out of a sense of piety. By the way, where the Seventy Interpreters put it: “And they will look on Me, whom they have reproached,” it is translated from the Hebrew as follows: “And they will look on Me, whom they have pierced.” This word refers even more clearly to Christ crucified. But even that reproach, which the Seventy chose to mention, took place during His suffering; He was subjected to reproach when He was detained, and when He was bound, and when He stood at trial, and when He was clothed in shameful clothing in reproach, and crowned with thorns, and beaten on the head with a cane, and honored in mockery with kneeling, and carried His cross, and was already hanging on the cross. Following, therefore, not just one translation, but taking both into account, when we read both “reproached” and “pierced,” we recognize with greater completeness the event of the Lord’s suffering. So, when the Scriptures say prophetically that God is coming to carry out the final judgment, then, even if a special sign is not indicated, due to the very mention of judgment, Christ should be understood. For although the Father will judge, he will judge through the coming of the Son of Man. He Himself, through the manifestation of His presence, “does not judge anyone, but has given all judgment to the Son” (John V, 22), Who will appear as a man having to judge, as He was a man judged. For of whom else under the name of Jacob and Israel, from whose seed He took a body, does God speak in like manner through Isaiah? It reads like this: “Jacob is My servant, I will accept him, My chosen Israel, My soul will receive him. Dah My Spirit nan, the judgment of tongues will proclaim. He will not cry out, but he will weaken; below his voice will be heard outside. He will not erase broken reeds, and he will not quench smoking flax; but truly he will bring forth judgment; He will shine forth and not go out, until he brings judgment upon the earth, and in his name the nations have confidence” (Isa. XLII, 1-4). In Hebrew it does not read “Jacob and Israel,” but it reads “My servant” 195 . Seventy interpreters, obviously wanting to show in what sense the last expression should be understood, i.e. that it was used to designate the image of a slave in which the Most High appeared most humiliated, used to name Him the name of the person from whose tribe the very image of the slave was adopted. The Holy Spirit was given to Him, which, according to the testimony of the Gospel, is indicated by the appearance of a dove (Matthew III, 16). He announced judgment to the nations, for He foretold the future judgment, which was a mystery to the nations. Out of meekness He did not raise His voice; however, he did not stop preaching the truth. But His voice was not heard outside and is not heard, since those outside, cut off from His body, do not obey Him. But He did not break or extinguish His very persecutors, the Jews, who, due to the loss of truthfulness, are likened to a bruised reed and smoking flax, when there is no longer a flame in it; He spared them because he had not yet come to judge them, but to be judged by them. In fact, the judgment truly pronounced, predicting for them the time of inevitable punishment if they persisted in their malice. His face shone on the mountain, His glory was on the earth; He was not erased, not extinguished, because neither in His own person nor in the person of His church did He yield to the persecutors, He did not cease to exist. What His persecutors said and are saying has not happened and will not happen: “When will he die and his name perish?” (Ps. 40:6). “Until he establishes judgment on earth.” Here is the hidden thing that we were looking for, open. This judgment, which He will lay on earth when He Himself appears from heaven, is the last judgment. What is said about him here at the end: “And in his name the nations have confidence,” we see already fulfilled. After all, what cannot be denied also convinces of what is shamelessly denied. Who, in fact, would expect (and those who still do not want to believe in Christ already see this with them, and since they cannot deny, they gnash their teeth and are tormented with vexation) - who, I say, would think that the nations would begin to trust in the name of Christ, at the time when he was taken, bound, beaten, subjected to reproaches, nailed to the cross; when did the disciples themselves lose the hope they had begun to have in Him? What only the thief on the cross expressed hope for at that time is what peoples now hope for, widely and far-flung; and in order not to die forever, they mark themselves with the very cross on which He died. So, that there will be a final judgment through Jesus Christ in the form in which it was foretold in the sacred books, no one denies this and no one doubts it, except for the one who, I don’t know by what incredible courage or blindness, does not believe these Scriptures, which have already proven their truth to the whole world. During the judgment or before and after the judgment itself, as we found out, the following phenomena occur: the coming of Elijah, the faith of the Jews, the persecution of Antichrist, the judgment of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the separation of good and evil, the ignition of the world and its renewal. That all this will happen must be believed; but how and in what order it will be will be better shown by the events themselves; At present, human understanding is not able to rise to a complete understanding of the subject. I believe, however, that this will happen in the order in which I have outlined it. In order, with God's help, to fulfill the promises we have made, it remains for us to write two books related to the subject of this essay. One of them will be about the punishment of the wicked, the other - about the bliss of the righteous. If God willing, they will primarily refute human arguments, which, directing them against divine predictions and promises, miserable people, as it seems to them, gnaw wisely, neglecting, as false and worthy of ridicule, the nourishment provided by saving faith. For those who think according to God, everything that seems incredible to people, but which is, however, contained in the sacred Scriptures, the truth of which has already been verified in various ways, the greatest argument is the undoubted omnipotence of God. They know without a doubt that God could not speak untruths in those Scriptures, and can do what seems impossible to an unbeliever. This kind of evidence has not been preserved in the codices that have come down to us. Augustine refers to I Cor. XV, 51, where we read: “We will not all die, but we will all change” (Church Church: “for we will not all fall asleep, but we will all change”, Greek πάντες οὐ κοιμηθησόμεθα, πάντες δè ἀλλαγησόμεθα . – Editorial “The ABC of Faith”). As in Isaiah 41:8: “But you, O Israel, my servant Jacob, whom you chose, are the seed of Abraham, whom you have loved.” - Editorial “The ABCs of Faith” You might be interested in: