On the day Jesus ascended, the disciples stood dumbfounded, like children who have lost their parents. Two angels sent to comfort them asked a rhetorical question: "Men of Galilee! why are you standing and looking at the sky?" The sky was clear and empty. And yet they stood and watched, not looking away, not knowing how to continue their work and what to do next.

The Savior left few footprints on earth. He did not write books, He was a wanderer and left no home or place that could now serve as His museum. He was not married, did not live a settled life and left no offspring. In fact, we would not have known anything about Him if it were not for the traces that He left in human souls. This was His intention. The law and the prophets focused like a beam of light on the One that was to come. And now this light, as if having passed through a prism, should scatter and shine in the spectrum of movements and shades of the human soul.

But maybe it would be better if there was no Ascension? If Jesus had remained on earth, He could have answered our questions, resolved our doubts, and mediated our ideological and political disputes. Six weeks later the disciples will understand what Jesus meant when he said, "It is better for you that I go." Blessed Augustine put it well: "You have ascended before our eyes, and we have turned away in sorrow to find You in our hearts."

The Church serves as a continuation of the Incarnation, the main way in which God manifests himself in the world. We are "Christs after Christ", the Church is the place where God lives. What Jesus brought to a few people—healing, grace, the good news of the doctrine of divine love—the Church can now communicate to everyone. This was the very challenge, that Great Mission, which the Savior gave to the disciples before disappearing from their sight. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies," He explained earlier, "one will be left; and if he dies, he will bear much fruit."

It is much easier for us to believe that God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth than that He can be incarnated in the people who go to our Church. However, this is exactly what faith requires of us; this is what life requires of us. The Savior fulfilled His mission, now it's up to us.

Ancient religions believed that the deeds of the gods in the heavens had an effect on the earth below them. If Zeus was angry, then lightning struck. "As above, so below," was the ancient wording. The Savior turned this definition upside down: "As below, so above." "The one who listens to you, listens to Me," He said to His disciples, "and the one who rejects you, rejects Me." The believer turns his prayer to heaven, and it responds to it; the sinner repents, and the angels rejoice - what we do on earth is reflected in heaven.

But how often do we forget about it! We forget how important our prayers are. How important to God is what I choose today, here and now. And my choice brings joy or sorrow to God. How often do we forget that there are those around who need our love and help. We live in the world of cars, telephones, the Internet, and the reality of this material universe suppresses our faith in God, who fills the whole world with himself.

Ascending, the Savior risked being forgotten. And He knew about it. The four parables at the end of Matthew, some of the last Jesus told, have a common theme behind them. The owner leaves his house, the departing landowner dismisses the servants; the groom arrives too late, when the guests are already tired and asleep, the owner distributes money to his servants and leaves - it all revolves around the theme of the departed God.

Indeed, the history of the world raises the fundamental question of our time: "Where is God now?" The modern answer, coming from Nietzsche, Freud, Camus and Beckett, is that the master has abandoned us, leaving us free to make our own rules of the game.

In places like Africa, Serbia, Libya, Algeria, and now Ukraine, we have seen these parables in action. If there is no God, as F. M. Dostoevsky said, then everything is allowed. But there is the most powerful and most terrible parable in the Gospel, which speaks of how God will judge the world. This is the parable of the goats and the sheep. But notice how it logically connects with the four parables that precede it.

Firstly, it shows the return of the owner on the day of the Last Judgment, when a high price will have to be paid - in the truest sense of the word. The departed will return, and this time in power and glory, to sum up all that has happened on earth.

Secondly, the parable refers to that time interval, to that centuries-old interval in which we now live, to the time when it seems that God does not exist. The answer to this most modern question is both striking in its depth and frightening. God didn't disappear at all. Rather, He put on a mask most unsuitable for Him - the mask of a stranger, a poor man, a hungry man, a prisoner, a sick man, the most outcast on earth: "Truly I say to you, because you did it to one of these least of My brothers, you did it to Me." If we cannot determine the presence of God in the world, then perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place.

Commenting on the parable of the Last Judgment, theologian Jonathan Edwards said that God defined the poor as "those who have access to Him." Since we cannot express our love by doing something that would benefit God directly, God wants us to do something useful for the poor who have been given the mission of receiving Christian love.

There is this wonderful old movie called Whistle in the Wind. Unfortunately, it is not in the Russian dubbing. In this film, two children, while playing in a village barn, come across a tramp sleeping in the straw. “Who are you?” the children asked in a demanding voice. The tramp woke up and muttered, looking at the children: "Jesus Christ!" What he said in jest, the children took for the truth. They really believed that this man was Jesus Christ and treated the tramp with horror, respect and love. They brought him food and blankets, spent time with him, talked to him and told him about their lives. Over time, their tenderness transformed the drifter, a fugitive who had never before encountered such mercy.

The director who wrote this story conceived it as an allegory of what could happen if we all took Jesus' words about the poor and needy literally. By serving them, we serve Christ.

"We are a contemplative order," Mother Teresa once told a wealthy American visitor who could not understand her reverent attitude towards Calcutta vagrants. "First we meditate on Jesus, and then we go and look for Him behind the mask."

When we think about the parable of the Last Judgment, many of our own questions to God come back to us like a boomerang. Why does God allow babies to be born in the Brooklyn ghettos and on the river of death in Rwanda? Why does God allow prisons, homeless shelters, hospitals, and refugee camps to exist? Why didn't Jesus put the world in order during the years He lived in it?

According to this parable, the Savior knew that the world He left behind would include the poor, the hungry, the prisoners, the sick. The plight of the world did not surprise Him. He made plans that included it: that's His long-term and short-term plan. The long term plan involves His return in power and glory, while the short term involves the transfer of power to those who will eventually become the heralds of the freedom of the Cosmos. He ascended so that we could take His place.

"Where is God when people suffer?" we often ask. The answer is another question: "Where is the Church when people are suffering?" "Where am I when this happens?" The Savior Ascended to Heaven to leave the Keys to the Kingdom of God in our trembling hands.

Why are we so different from the Church that Jesus described? Why does she, the Body of Christ, so little resemble Himself? I cannot give a decent answer to such questions, since I myself am part of this problem. But, if you look closely, each of us should ask this question to ourselves: “Why do I look so little like Him?” It is “I”, not “he”, not this or that priest, parishioner or someone else. Namely, "I"! Let each of us try to give ourselves an honest answer to this not simple, but the most important question of our life ...

God, choosing between manifesting Himself in "permanent miraculous intervention in human affairs" or allowing Himself to be "crucified in time" as He Himself was crucified on Earth, chooses the second option. The Savior bears the wounds of the Church, of this Body of His, just as He bore the wounds of the crucifixion. Sometimes I think about which wounds cause him more suffering?!..

Happy Ascension Day!

This holiday is so unusual, because yesterday we sang: “Christ is risen”, yesterday was Easter, and today – where did Christ ascend? Where is he?..

Probably, it was difficult for the apostles to live this moment, who were separated from their Teacher, with the life that they had tasted. And this test will always be with us, because in our little experience of spiritual life there was also the Paschal period, when we just came to the temple. We felt that God was in everything and everyone, that everything around was really saturated with the grace of God. And then there comes a moment when the Lord leaves somewhere, and we seem to be left alone... We must live this period with dignity, remembering what happened, and living it - that moment of joy and victory over death, victory over time, over earth, over everything human, over flesh and blood!

We know that ten days after the Ascension there will be a feast of the Trinity, when the Lord descends and is already united by the Holy Spirit with the apostles. They become real temples of the Divine. God already lives in them, the Holy Spirit lives ... And they go to fight with the whole world and conquer this world, conquering whole nations in the name of Christ!

We are preparing for this day... Imagine, the angelic world is a spiritual world, and Christ ascends with the flesh, the Most Pure Flesh, the same as ours, only without sin. What must have been the amazement of the angelic world — how this, man, a creature that should be on earth, human flesh, suddenly ascends and sits on the throne of God, his Divinity! This is a mystery that is incomprehensible to the human mind... But it is a reality!

And we also say that human flesh is not a piece of meat, it is a sacred thing. Even parts of the body of the saints we honor and know that through them we turn to God Himself. We treat our flesh with care, which, despite the fact that it will go into the earth, will dissolve with the earth, then it will be restored. And not only spiritually, but also physically. In the new earth, under the new heaven, we will live with the flesh. Therefore, my flesh is my friend and not my enemy. And our war is not against the flesh. For example, Hindus try to say that this flesh prevents a person from living. But it turns out it doesn't bother me.

Your flesh needs to be protected, it needs to be taken care of, it needs to be treated. It should serve a person in good, charitable deeds, in helping each other, in creation. We don't talk about this world as an illusion, we say it's a reality. And the temple is also a reality. Of course, the builder of the temple is the Lord, but He builds it with the hands of people. And you and I, united today in one being - soul and body - cannot talk casually about the body and think that it interferes with us. It is not the body that hinders us, but sin, which all the time pushes us to some extremes: either a person pleases his flesh, or he exhausts us so that he can no longer do anything. These extremes testify to our unreason, to our still childish state. I would like us to watch our flesh, so that it learns to obey the spirit and work while we have time for this.

Our task is to sanctify our flesh, to make it capable of participating in a godly life. And therefore, always at the Liturgy, we hear the call to have our hearts sorrow, to break away from the earth and taste that the Lord is good. We look at the sky and see that the Lord blesses us for good deeds today and every day. Help and save everyone, Lord. Tomorrow are two Divine Liturgies. God invites everyone to dinner.

And what does it mean? Usually we understand this in such a way that the Lord ceased to walk the earth, to appear to the disciples and left them bodily in order to send the Holy Spirit. But usually we do not understand where this Ascension is, although it is very clearly explained.

For the people of that time, it was a very clear reference in the Gospel to two angels, and in the service it is even more said about the whole biblical background of what happened, with the words of the psalm: "Take up your princes gates, and take up the eternal gates."

The Lord passes through the heavens, which are successively opened, and each heaven corresponds to the different hierarchies that are there. Something similar will happen on the Dormition of the Theotokos, when the heavens will also open.

The main case when they opened like this is the Ascension of the Lord, and in the Old Testament the main such case was when Moses ascended to Sinai. The heavens were opened to him when he stood on the top of the mountain, and through the angelic hierarchies the Law was given to him, and he saw what was happening in these heavens. And according to the model of the heavenly tabernacle, the Heavenly Temple, which he saw - and heaven is precisely the Heavenly Temple - he created the tabernacle that the Lord commanded him to create according to this pattern. This is how the Tabernacle of the Witness was created in the Old Testament.

And now the Lord also enters this Temple, which spiritually is nothing but God himself, because God is His own Temple Himself. But now, in the Flesh, He enters His own Temple and opens the Heavens so that we can see and hear, know where we too should go and, moreover, where we are.

After all, if at the time of the Ascension, what was still hidden from the disciples was that which was outside this cloud that had taken the Lord - the cloud denotes, we know, the glory of the Lord, it is the uncreated Light, but the cloud prevents the untransformed eyes from seeing the darkness - then by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the creation of the Church on earth, when all the true believers came and became the Body of Christ, then when the saints of the New Testament, including the disciples who are here, have already reached deification stood and did not see where the Lord is ascending, they themselves were able to say, as the Apostle Paul says, that "our life is hidden with Christ in God." But it is closed, of course, not from ourselves, but from those who look outside, but, perhaps, from ourselves, if we ourselves look at our life from the outside, if we ourselves are not in life, but in death.

This is what today's holiday tells us, if we look dogmatically. And if you look ascetically, then it is also clear what he is telling us about, and even much clearer. We must remember that the Lord is always present, although at some point it may seem to us that we are alone, and all these angelic hierarchies are present, in whose eyes we perform our every action, and with whom we perform an action, if it is by the will of God. And if, on the contrary, we perform some action against the will of God, it means that contrary to what they want to tell us, what all these angelic forces that are looking at us want to help with.

And so it turns out that the life of a Christian becomes completely different from the life of a normal, as they say, person. When viewed from the outside, everything seems to be the same. Here stands one Christian person, another non-Christian person - and each of them is left to himself, if you look externally, not understanding anything spiritual. Everyone somehow fights for what he wants. For what is another question.

But if a Christian, then he is no longer alone in reality. He is surrounded by innumerable angelic powers, because his life is hidden with Christ in God. Most importantly, he himself resides in the Body of Christ, which ascended into Heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father, and in which he also resides if he is a Christian. Therefore, he has completely different tasks, other ways to solve them.

A person who is a non-Christian does not know or see anything of this, but intuitively strives for this by some of his actions. One should not think that everything is bad in non-Christianity, because if it were so, then not a single person could become a Christian. Of course, the grace of God acts, and angelic forces also act on all people, striving to lead to salvation. On the other hand, other desires strive for the opposite, oppose, and the person himself does not understand why some of his life plans and attempts to do something cause such resistance, especially if he thinks that he does not want anything like bad and criminal.

What's the matter? The thing is that you need to stop and think: why am I doing this? Because everything that we do in earthly life, all the goals that we set ourselves and should set for ourselves, and there is nothing wrong with that, are all not goals, but a means. If these are goals, then these are intermediate goals. And if we think that I will do this and that, and after that I will live happily, as very often people think that they will earn a lot of money, give birth to many children, marry many times - there are different tastes - then when such goals are achieved, it turns out that everything is wrong there.

Here you have achieved, but there is no satisfaction, and you don’t know what to do with it. If this feeling does not come immediately, then soon. Many, of course, goals turn out to be unattainable for a person for objective and subjective reasons. But we must understand that all goals are only our exercise for the Kingdom of Heaven.

That is, it is necessary to look not at whether I will actually achieve the goal - in the spiritual sense it does not matter, but what I will do in the process of achieving it is important. Will it help me acquire the Kingdom of Heaven? Will it help me to sin less, to have the memory of God? Or will it get in the way? And depending on this, it is necessary to choose tactical goals, and all earthly goals are tactical, because there is only one strategic goal - the Kingdom of Heaven. And also it is necessary to choose methods that should correspond to these goals.

Therefore, today's holiday, the event remembered today, which opens the heavens for human nature, should once again remind us of what is always with us. Not about what happens to us from time to time, and from time to time is taken away, but about what exactly is always with us, if we are children of the true Church.

Bishop Gregory

portal-credo.ru

Each time the Lord talked… and at some point the apostles stopped seeing Him.

Not because it was a ghostly phenomenon and such a vision could not last long. The phenomenon was completely real. The reason is that the resurrected Body of the Lord became transfigured. The body remained tangible and yet could pass freely through the closed doors. The appearance of the come Savior was well known to the apostles, but sometimes it turned out to be unrecognizable. The Lord appeared to the apostles and was visible, tangible, and then invisible.

So the apostles met Christ several times after Easter. But on Ascension Day, things were different. Christ appeared again to talk with the disciples. He blessed them again, and then he ascended to heaven, and they stopped seeing the Teacher.

Something exceptional, something unprecedented has happened. What exactly? The apostles not only ceased to contemplate the Lord, as had happened before, but the Lord ascended from earth to heaven. How is this unearthly “sky” to be understood?

Heaven and earth

People of that time stood firmly with their feet on the ground. Earth is our common home, a place of life for all of us. We are clearly aware of this, but at that distant time people still had the concept of hell, which was etched out of the consciousness of most of our contemporaries.

The apostles knew that in the underworld, under the earth, the souls of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who have departed from us, eke out an existence. And above the earth a huge sky is stretched. It can be considered part of a vast universe. True, people do not live in the sky, but birds, for example, fly. And they do it more dexterously than we have to walk and run.

And where do the angels of heaven live, isn't it in heaven? And now we are approaching the main thing - the sky can still be perceived as the high limit of the universe. And even as something transcendent – ​​as a “place where” God lives.

Heaven and God… Look, in the Gospel there are expressions like the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven on an equal footing. Let's open the first lines of the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:3). The Evangelist Matthew promised humble people the Kingdom of Heaven. Let's re-read the same Sermon on the Mount, according to another Gospel: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for yours is the Kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20). Here the kingdom of heaven is called God's.

The word "sky" has many meanings, several semantic layers are found. And this "heavenly polysemy" appears in the Russian word "heaven" ("heaven" in the plural) and in the Hebrew word "shamaim" ("heaven" in the dual number).

Ascension and deification

Where did the Lord Jesus Christ ascend to?

- To heaven, to God.

“Wait, Christ Himself is God, isn't it?”

“So He is always present in heaven?”

- Right. As God, He is always in heaven, but He is not only God.

– Not only, He is also a Man, a God-Man…

– Christ ascended precisely as a Man – “where” he always dwelt as God.

- And what does it mean?

– That the human nature of Christ received in the Ascension the unspeakable glory that only the Divine nature has.

“Christ prayed for glory before Pascha…

- And this is directly related to our topic. Christ in Gethsemane says to God the Father: “I have glorified You on earth, I have completed the work that You instructed Me to do. And now, Father, glorify me with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world was” (John 17:4-5). From eternity, the Son of God had heavenly Divine glory, and after Pascha He receives it already as the Son of Man.

– In the Gospel, Christ prays for heavenly glory, and our Creed also confesses Christ “ascended into heaven and sitting at the right hand of the Father; and packs of the one to come with glory…” There is an “intermediate” moment between the Ascension and the Second glorious Coming of Christ. What does it mean? What is sitting at the right hand of the Father?

- Here again the language of biblical symbols sounds in full voice. Ascension to heaven, Ascension, Christ reaches heavenly glorious heights. And His graying means a constant, never-ending stay on high. Sitting on the right hand, that is, on the right hand, is a symbol that is understandable to us in our life today. The right hand of God the Father is the most honorable, glorious place next to God. One could say that this place is "on an equal footing", although…

– But what?

– We must be more careful when we talk about theological issues. There is one theological book written by Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern). With German punctuality, he cites and analyzes many patristic sayings about God and man. Among them is a very unusual quotation from St. Gregory Palamas. The quotation says this about Christ: “The glory of His divinity at the first advent was hidden under the body, which He took from us and for us; and now she is hiding in heaven with the Father with God-participating flesh ... at the second coming, He will reveal His glory.

So, the divine glory of Christ is hidden in heaven with the Father with God-participating flesh... Father Cyprian insists that the Greek word "omotheos" should be "translated into Russian only as "participating in God", but not "equally divine"... If this word were really interpreted as "equally divine," then the human nature, or the flesh of the Savior, would be consubstantial with God. For the pagans to equate the nature of man and the Divine, to mix the two natures together, is quite acceptable. For Christians, no.

What is acceptable for us?

– It is permissible to admit that in the Ascension the human nature of Christ became involved in God, in the highest degree – involved in the Divine energies. That is, there was a complete deification of human nature. To discuss what deification is, based on theological concepts of essence and energy, we will not now. This is a separate big topic. For now, let's just say: the Ascension of the Lord is the heavenly height of deification, which the human nature of the Lord Jesus Christ has reached. Here is briefly the theological meaning of the Ascension.

What happened to the Savior applies to us as well. His human nature is akin to us, we are all people. The ascended Christ also allows His faithful disciples to ascend to the heights of heavenly glory, each in his own measure.

In the middle of the temple on the day of the holiday, the icon of the Ascension is supposed to be the icon of deification.

_________________________________

1. Archim. Cyprian (Kern). Anthropology of St. Gregory Palamas. M., 1996. S. 426.
2. Ibid. pp. 426, 427.

Deacon Pavel Serzhantov

“Having said this, He ascended before their eyes, and a cloud took Him
from their sight. And as they looked up at the sky, during
Ascension, suddenly two men in white
clothes and said, Men of Galilee! What are you standing and
look at the sky? This Jesus, who was taken up from you
heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him
ascending into heaven” (Acts 1:9-11).

Here, it seems, everything is said very clearly, and this text, and its explanation, produced for two thousand years by the Church, can be said to be memorized by everyone: Christ ascended into heaven to God the Father and sat at His right hand. Everything that is above our head is called heaven, and most of all - the spiritual world, invisible to us. But no matter how you explain it, it remains incomprehensible, consider everything. The existence and essence of the Father, as well as the Son, we take on faith, not being able to know through experimental research. We also take it on faith that the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit remain incomprehensible to all creation forever. In this case, how to understand the meaning of the Ascension, promised repeatedly by Christ the Savior:

“Jesus said to them: I will not be with you for a long time, and I will go to Him who sent Me” (John 7:33).

He also said to Mary Magdalene immediately after His resurrection:

“Do not touch Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father; but go to my brethren and say to them: I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God” (John 20:17).

Like this, He said to the Jews at the trial of the high priest, who was looking for guilt against Him:

“From now on, the Son of Man will sit at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 22:69).

However, how to correlate with the indicated data the omnipresent of God and the words of the Savior: “He who sees Me sees Him who sent Me” (John 12:45)? And then He spoke. Philip:

“How long have I been with you, and you don't know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how do you say, show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me? The words that I speak to you, I do not speak of myself; The Father who is in Me, He does the works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me” (John 14:9-11).

In this case, you need to take this on faith, but not by virtue of knowledge. There is a dogma about the inseparability of the persons of the Holy Trinity, in support of which these words of the Savior follow. God the Son (God the Word) has always abode and abides in the Father, but this refers to the Divine nature in the Lord Jesus Christ, and not to the Son of Man, as the Savior called Himself, understanding in Himself human nature. Therefore, we have to admit that before the Resurrection from the dead, in the full composition of His divine-human essence, the Son of God with the assumed human nature, as it were, did not abide "with full rights" in the Holy Trinity. After His Resurrection, He, as a conqueror over the forces of evil, acquires the complete deification of His human nature, and therefore appears to God the Father in the Holy Trinity as a completely perfect God the Word with His glorified body.

But the Lord Jesus Christ ascends to the Father immediately after His resurrection from the dead, and His Ascension on the fortieth day after this is, as it were, the end of this, but is not the ascension to the Father precisely at this moment. Therefore, the act of the Ascension of Christ must be recognized as the appearance of the King into His Kingdom to all worlds and to all levels of the heavenly Angelic world, that is, to the entire created world, not only as the Creator, but also as the Almighty. Therefore, the Savior says after His Resurrection to the disciples:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18).

And even before the feat of the cross and the resurrection, the Savior had already said:

“All things have been delivered to me by my Father” (Mt. 11:27). “The Father loves the Son and has given everything into His hand” (John 3:35).

Therefore, it remained for God the Word to fulfill the will of the Father, to bring about victory over the satanic kingdom, freeing fallen man from his captivity by the feat of the Cross, and after this to take power over the Kingdom of God. And we have to take this position on faith, because we cannot know the essence of this with the mind. It seems to us that even without all these phenomena, God the Creator had unlimited power over the world He created. But the above words of the Savior speak of His receiving full power precisely after the incarnation and resurrection. Apparently, this required victory over the kingdom of evil, which came out of submission to the Creator through the revolution of Satan. And this victory is made. It remained to accept this power, appearing in all created worlds in the act of Ascension. Therefore, we can assume that Christ ascended not to God the Father, but to sit on the throne of power at the right hand of the Father already with glorified human nature, with which He conquered the kingdom of evil. Thus, in the course of less than forty years, human nature, from being cursed for the sin of apostasy from God, was exalted in Christ to the Throne of Glory. The reign over all the worlds, of which the third part became hostile through opposition to the Creator, was necessary for the final overthrow of the devil and judgment over him. And God chooses for incarnation and this victory not the nature of the highest angels, who have already overthrown Satan, but to shame the proud revolutionary, exalted by his perfection, chooses the lowest and already corrupted by him being - man. The initial election of a person as a conqueror is seen in God's permission for Satan to tempt Adam and Eve before their reproduction, for which reason their subsequent generations were spiritually mutilated. And the Creator chooses this nature of a spiritual freak as a tool to shame the rebellious, once the most perfect creatures, to judge them.

Someone can say that the Judge is again God Jesus Christ the Son of God, and what does the corrupted human nature, although sanctified in the act of perception by God's Word, have to do with it? That is why the Savior says to the Apostles about the judgment of the world:

“Truly, I say to you that you who have followed me, in life, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of His glory, you will also sit on twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt. 19:28).

And app. Paul says, obviously knowing the words of the Savior:

“Don't you know that the saints will judge the world? Don't you know that we will judge the angels?" (1 Cor. 6:2.3).

But the judgment is still far away, but for now our Lord has ascended to heaven to take legal authority over the world, which is still continuing the war with the kingdom of evil. Therefore, He comes into power over the worlds not only as the King and Judge, but as the main Commander to continue the struggle of Man with the devil. This is well outlined briefly in Psalm 109 of David and more fully in the Apocalypse.

“The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool. The Lord will send the rod of Your strength from Zion: rule among Your enemies ... the Lord is at Your right hand. He in the day of his wrath will smite the kings; He will execute judgment on the nations, fill the earth with corpses, crush the head in the vast land ”(Ps. 109:1-2.5-6).

These words can be called a "small Apocalypse", which mentions both the incarnation and the victory on the cross in Zion, and then follows the path of struggle and assistance of the Father at the right hand of the Lord. Finally, the end of the struggle is shown - Armageddon, which filled the earth with corpses and the judgment over the peoples. In the words "break the head in the vast land", of course, the final victory over the serpent - Satan. For this struggle, Christ ascended to heaven with the aim of controlling all the holy forces. According to app. John the Theologian for this struggle against the forces of evil was the incarnation of the Son of God:

“For this reason the Son of God appeared, to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).

Our Lord Jesus Christ accomplished a crushing victory over Satan and his kingdom by His feat on the Cross, resurrection and ascension above all heaven. But the judgment on the powers of darkness is left by God until the end of the world according to His consideration. The war between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan is not over, but it has taken on a kind of positional character, switching to the last step - to Earth. To continue the fight against the forces of evil, the Lord founded the Church, sending the Holy Spirit from God the Father to help and guide her upon His ascension. The Devil immediately launches a struggle against her, persecuting her from the Jews who crucified him and the pagan world, which was initially subject to him. For three hundred years the Church was persecuted by them. At the same time, Satan began to invent all sorts of lies, and introduce them into the Church in the form of heresies created by him. The Church opposed all this. Ap. Paul speaks of this struggle with the dark forces:

“Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against authorities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spirits of wickedness in high places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having overcome all, to stand” (Eph. 6:12-13).

It is known that the main purpose of the existence of man, for whom he was called during his creation, is eternal perfection in becoming like God. The second side of the meaning of existence was the struggle brought by Satan into the world as a necessity from the moment of his rebellion until the victory of the holy forces over his kingdom, and until the appearance of “ a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:13). The Church founded by Christ immediately entered the path of perfection in all virtues, but Satan immediately imposed a struggle on her, introducing all sorts of lies and tearing away many members with it. Consider that the entire earthly path of the Church consists in struggle. This struggle takes on a fierce character towards the end of time, turning into a terrible battle in the last days, about which the Lord warns us with the words spoken to the Apostles on the Mount of Olives (Matt. 24) and especially, through the Revelation of St. John.

Revelation app. John the Theologian, which he called "The Revelation of Jesus Christ", can be said to be dedicated to the terrible struggle at the end of human history. Here it is figuratively shown that the holy forces in this struggle are controlled by the Lord Jesus Christ under the image of the Rider, "sitting on a white horse." The dark forces are led by the "big red dragon", "called the devil and Satan" through his chosen rulers, called "beasts" and "the woman sitting on the scarlet beast." The images are easily understood, but due to our negligence they have not yet been fully explained to the world. My work “The Beginning and the End”, its third part, is devoted to this. Here we will touch only those places of the Apocalypse, where the struggle with the devil is indicated under the leadership of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, called the “Lamb”. These places will be cited.

“And I saw that the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as it were with a voice of thunder, Come and see. I looked, and behold, a white horse, and on it a rider who had a bow, and a crown was given to him; and he went out victorious and to conquer” (Rev. 6:1-2).

The first of the seven seals has been removed, keeping the secrets of the terrible events of the last time of mankind, placed in mysterious prophetic images. In this first seal is hidden the secret of all developing events and the meaning of allowing them. The horse here, and the subsequent exits of other horses, symbolize with their color the essence of the forces or phenomena hidden under this image, according to their essence: holy or black. The first seal opens the holy - "white" power with the holy direction of the path under the guise of a white horse. Her rider, leading her, is clearly Christ Himself. At the end of the book, He is more openly singled out under the same image of "sitting on a white horse." He has a bow - the word of God, striking in the heart and eradicating evil. Here the purpose of His appearance and actions is immediately noted: “to overcome”, and since He is “victorious”, he must receive a “crown”. The first seal opens the beginning of the history of the following days, and it is already clear what - the struggle to the end. At the end of this whole story, we again see this Rider on a white horse:

“And I saw the heavens open, and behold a white horse, and he who sits on it is called Faithful and True, who judges righteously and fights. He was dressed in clothes stained with blood. His name is "Word of God". And the armies of heaven followed Him on white horses, clothed in white and clean linen” (Rev. 19:11-13).

Further, the end of the last battle is figuratively outlined, to which all the birds are invited, as if to a feast, to devour the corpses of the warriors of evil forces and their horses. Their leaders, the beast and the false prophet, were seized and thrown into the lake of fire. . From these given prophecies, it is clear that the entire history of mankind since the Ascension of the Lord is a struggle with the devil and his kingdom. The end times are the final battle. Then comes the coming of Christ. What it will be, we can only judge by the meager data about it in the Gospel. In the Acts of the Apostles, as we see, it is said:

“This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).

But here some moment is shown, without indicating the previous and subsequent picture. The Savior himself shows this moment to the Disciples in a more detailed form, having first outlined the horrors of the last days:

“And suddenly, after the tribulation of those days, the sun will grow dark, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven; and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:29-30).

So, the Apostles saw the Ascension of Christ. Subsequent generations saw the struggle with the devil, led invisibly by Christ Himself, and the last people will have to see His second coming with the preceding horrors of being. The Lord calls us to be vigilant.

+ Archbishop Victor (Pivovarov)