The second part is devoted to how Christians understand God. They believe that God, as revealed in Jesus' life, called Israel to mediate and carry out God's plan for the deliverance and reconstruction of His creation. Therefore, one chapter (chapter 6) will be devoted to the history and hopes of ancient Israel, then two chapters to Jesus, and two to the Holy Spirit. Gradually, as we read this part, we will see that the voice we listened to in the first part becomes recognizable when we think of God the Creator wanting to bring order to his world, the man named Jesus who heralded the coming of God's kingdom, died on the cross, and rose from the dead, and the Spirit who, like a mighty wind, permeates this world and the lives of individuals.

This naturally brings us to the third part, where I want to show what the life of a disciple of Jesus is like, filled with the power of the Spirit and, above all, participating in the realization of the plan of this Creator God. The themes of worship, prayer, and Scripture will lead us to the question of the "church," in which we see not a building, much less an organization, but a union of all those who believe in the God revealed by Jesus and who seek to follow that God.

In particular, I intend to talk about what the church is for. People don't follow Jesus just to be guaranteed to go to a better world after they die. Our future after death is extremely important, but the nature of Christian hope is such that it directly affects our present life. This allows us to look with new eyes at various things, in particular at prayer and the behavior of a Christian. And this, in turn, makes it possible at the end of the book to recall again the "echoes of the voice" of the first part, where it will no longer sound as an indirect testimony to God, whom we can try to know, but as an essential element of the Christian vocation to work for the Kingdom in our world.

I worked with great enthusiasm on this book, and this is largely due to the fact that it directly affects my life – this can be said about every page of it. All my life I have been a Christian who participates in worship, prays, and reads the Bible (although I often misunderstood or misunderstood it, but nevertheless held on to it), so in fact I began to live with the third part of this book. My professional life has been largely devoted to the historical and theological study of Jesus, but I have tried to follow him in my personal life, so this multifaceted search is reflected in the second part. But at the same time, I became more and more aware of the importance and interest of the topics of the first part: for example, if you will allow me to give you the most obvious example, the more you know about Jesus, the more you understand God's fervent desire to correct our world. And at some point, I realized that the things that my study of the life of Jesus had pointed out to me—what I call "echoes of the voice" in Part I—were also questions that our postmodern post-Christian world, which is now becoming more and more of a post-secular world, cannot dismiss. For our world, these "echoes" are a strange indication of what stands beyond the horizon of modern culture and what it does not know.

I have tried not to distinguish between the diverse Christian traditions, but rather to say that they are all united. It is not an "Anglican" or "Catholic" or "Orthodox" book, but I hope it is simply Christian. I also tried to speak as directly and clearly as possible, so that the reader who first encountered these topics would not get lost in the jungle of technical terms. Being a Christian in the modern world is, of course, not easy at all. But there are times when it is necessary to try to say the essence of Christianity in the simplest words, and I believe that now is exactly the moment. Between the creation of the first draft of the book and its preparation for publication, I was lucky enough to experience a joyful moment: I had my first two grandchildren. I dedicate this book to Joseph and Ella-Ruth in the hope (for which I pray) that their generation will hear the voice whose echoes we will speak of in Part One, recognize Jesus, to whom Part II is dedicated, and begin to live for the new creation that we will discuss in Part III.

Part I

Echoes of the voice

1. The desire to make the world right

Recently, at night, I had a vivid and exciting dream. But what depresses me, I cannot remember its contents. When I woke up, I felt a glimpse of it, so I could realize how unusual and meaningful this dream was, and then everything went away. Thus, to paraphrase T. Eliot, I got the meaning, but I missed the experience.

This is somewhat reminiscent of our desire for justice. We dream of a just peace. For a moment, we may have an image of a single world where truth reigns, where problems are solved, where healthy human communities live, where we not only know how to act, but also act in this way. And then we wake up and come back to reality. But what do we hear when we see such a dream?

It seems as if we hear not the voice itself, but the echo of the voice – this voice is full of calm and endowed with healing power, and it speaks of justice, of the correction of people's lives, of peace, hope and prosperity for all. And this voice continues to sound in our imagination, in our subconscious. We would like to go back and listen to it again, but we are already awake and cannot fall asleep. Someone will tell us that this is just a fantasy, and we ourselves may believe it, realizing that this is how we turn into cynics.