But no less important, prophecy did not stop when the last book of the Old Testament was put to an end. The New Testament is also full of prophecies belonging to the same tradition as the prophecies of the Old Testament, and they are already being fulfilled in our lives. This is another reason why it is impossible to understand and appreciate the New Testament correctly if you do not know the Old. Maybe we are simply confused by the Slavic word ("we do not accept old and torn banknotes")? In fact, this covenant is not old, it is old, ancient, the first. He is the foundation; You don't live in the foundation, but without it, the walls can't stand.

The tradition of Bible prophecy has never been interrupted in the Church. We see it in the decisive opposition of the saints to the powers that be, and in the feat of foolishness, and in many other things. Of course, it was not without unhealthy mysticism and profanation, but, as you know, the existing fakes only prove that the original exists. Perhaps it was this prophetic spirit, which never faded away either in Old Testament Israel or in the New Testament Church, that did not allow it to degenerate into a self-sufficient spiritual department with its own routine and once and for all established answers to all questions.

By the way, prophets can be true and false, as well as interpretations of prophecies, as well as almost everything in this world. Therefore, in order to understand prophecies, we need not so much facts and theories as a special, prayerful and thoughtful attitude. And Grits gradually tries to bring the reader into this state; after all, the book was born not from scientific studies and not from church sermons, but from the experience of prayerful reading of the Scriptures and reflection on them. Such reading is still not widespread in Russia, but I would like to believe that it has a great future.

Grits writes about the upbringing of the prophet: "The main thing in this school was not memorizing the commandments, but gaining experience and the skill of constantly fulfilling them." In fact, this is why this book was published.

Andrey Desnitsky

1. Introduction

The revival of church life taking place in our time is interconnected with the growing interest and attention of believers in the reading of the Holy Scriptures and, in particular, the prophetic books. However, it is very difficult for modern people to enter the world of these books. The real world surrounding our contemporaries is so far from the era of the ancient prophets that in order to understand the context of the prophetic books, special knowledge is needed, introducing the reader to the historical, cultural, stylistic and lexical space of the prophetic books. Without such knowledge, the reader either has an inadequate understanding of the prophetic word, or a feeling of fear arises and, accordingly, an unwillingness to continue reading at all.

Fear of reading the prophetic books of the Old Testament is a long-standing and enduring "tradition" of the Orthodox Church. It is not difficult to notice it and it is quite easy to give it a negative assessment. It is much more difficult to determine the causes of such a phenomenon. In our opinion, they are not at all hidden in the illiteracy of the church people and the insufficient training of the clergy, although these phenomena are often encountered. The source of this kind of fear lies much deeper: in the loss, or, to put it more cautiously, in the significant weakening of the prophetic tradition itself, which is always the "nervous system" of the ecclesiastical organism.

The prophetic word, the most important in the life of the early Christian Church, ceased to play a decisive role in the ecclesiastical consciousness of the following centuries. Moreover, in modern church life, the attitude towards the prophetic word is often suspicious, it is perceived as something not quite Orthodox. The consequence (and probably one of the reasons for this) is often a misunderstanding of the books of the Old Testament prophets and their falling out of modern church life. This applies not only to the Old Testament, but, to a certain extent, to the New. As an example, we can point to the rather negative attitude of church people to the study of the Revelation of John the Theologian. For many centuries now, this unique prophetic book in the entire corpus of the New Testament has been excluded from the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church.

On the other hand, sometimes even Christian believers who reverently treat the Holy Scriptures, in particular, the prophetic books of the Old Testament, are full of doubts about the admissibility of analyzing their text, about the spiritual possibility of conducting the study itself.

The inspiring basis for this kind of inquiry is the words of the Lord Jesus Himself, which sound like a command addressed to all His disciples, and, therefore, to us: "Search the Scriptures, for you think by them to have eternal life; but they bear witness of Me" (John 5:39). Of course, the word "Scriptures" at that time meant the entire corpus of the Old Testament books.

Quite rarely is this famous Gospel verse perceived as a New Testament commandment coming from the Son of God Himself. In reality, it is a commandment given to all of us.

The author's many years of experience in teaching the course "Introduction to the Old Testament" in various biblical and theological educational institutions shows that immersion in the subject and spirit of the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament occurs with great difficulty. On the one hand, students do not have any particular problems with understanding the structure, content, main themes of the books of the Old Testament and their connection with the New Testament. On the other hand, without special training, it is very difficult to understand the language and basic concepts of the Old Testament, to understand the purpose and correlation of its individual parts: the Law, the Prophets and the Scriptures. And the main thing is to understand their spirit and meaning.

This work is aimed at helping everyone who wants to fulfill the commandment of the Lord, to instill the skill of meaningful and thoughtful reading of the prophetic books. The main goal of this work is the desire to help the reader fall in love with these books. For "reading without love," in the words of the famous Swiss writer Hermann Hesse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, "is one of the gravest sins against reason."