But in order for man to truly become a man from God and truly become a member of the eternal kingdom of God, he must not only recognize God as his God, but also place in God the truly eternal goal of his life, because all the temporal goals of life characterize only temporal life and, therefore, do not in the least require that man exist eternally. Therefore, if a person thinks about eternal life, and at the same time pursues only temporary goals of life, then he cannot in any way receive eternal life for himself, precisely because in this case he actually stands outside of eternal life and works only for death. Eternal life is divine life, and therefore the only eternal goal of human life can obviously be only the moral perfection of man in the eternal image of the perfect Father (Matt. 5:48), since for the attainment of this goal it is really not enough for man to have many ages. Consequently, having set himself this infinite goal, man, by virtue of setting it alone, obviously takes the path of eternal life; But in this case, in order to really have eternal life, he must not deviate from the only path of this life, and he must not pass from it to the path of temporal life, because to follow two opposite paths at the same time is, of course, absolutely impossible. By virtue of this, even the most necessary needs, such as the need for food or clothing, can obviously concern the heir of eternal life only as urgent needs of the present day (Matt. 6:25, 34), since man's desire to ensure the possible satisfaction of these needs for tomorrow is equivalent to setting a temporary goal for life, i.e. is equivalent to his transition to the path of inevitable death. For if man really cares about tomorrow today and tomorrow will care about a new tomorrow, then it is self-evident that in reality he will live only for the short days of his material cares, and in that case he will not do anything that would undoubtedly belong to eternity. Thus, the path of eternal life necessarily requires physical deprivation from man. In addition to the fact that material goods have only a conditional value and cannot be carried away by a person into eternal life, they can also positively hinder the achievement of the eternal goal of human life, because they can bind a person to themselves and can appear to him much more valuable than the true values of moral perfection. In view of this, the change of the old man first of all and necessarily requires of him a change in his false relations to the material goods of temporal life. Man must understand that it is absolutely of no use to him to gain even the whole world, and to destroy himself (Luke 9:25). He must understand that the soul of man, not only for himself, but also without relation, i.e. in its own unconditional value, is immeasurably higher than the whole world (Matt. 16:26, Mark 8:37); for only by man can God's name be sanctified in the world, and in him the kingdom of God can be revealed, and through him God's will can become on earth the same real law of life as it is now only in heaven (Matt. 6:9-10, cf. Lk. 11:2). Of course, the conviction of this truth in itself cannot yet regenerate a person and cannot make him a true man from God; but it can still make him look upon his desires for material goods as temptations for him, and consequently it can at least make him condemn himself in condemning his irrational desires. Whoever has risen to this condemnation of himself, in the depths of his conscience, of course, cannot but agree that if the eye, for example, tempts him, then the eye is not the whole man, and therefore it is better to pluck it out and throw it away than to submit to the temptations of sight and destroy himself; and in the same way, if the hand, for example, offends him, then the hand does not constitute the whole person, and therefore it is better to cut it off and throw it away than to have a healthy hand and use it to commit crimes (Matt. 5:29-30, cf. 18:8-9, cf. Mark 9:43, 45, 47). Whoever has reached this consciousness of the moral necessity of subordinating his physical life to the spiritual law of true life cannot but compel himself to a moral struggle with himself, in order to lead himself by the power of his own will to the path to the kingdom of heaven; because, because of human sinfulness, this kingdom is now taken only by force, and only those who make efforts take it away (Matt. 11:12; Lk. 16:16).

With this great teaching about the kingdom of God, Christ addressed people, and people did not understand the truth of His preaching. In His parable of the sower (Matt. 13:3-8, 18-23, Mark 4:3-8, 15-20, Luke 8:5-8, 11-15), He Himself speaks of how His tireless preaching influenced people. Some listened to the word about the kingdom of God, not understanding it at all; others understood him, but, overwhelmed by the seduction of wealth and worldly pleasures and all sorts of cares, they were completely indifferent to him; still others gladly accepted it, but only as a theoretical teaching, since they were not able to live by it and suffer for it; and only a certain part of people heard and understood it and subsequently put it into practice. There were many reasons for this mental blindness and moral bankruptcy of people, but the main one, according to the Saviour, undoubtedly consisted in the insufficient strength of human faith in God (Mark I, 23-24, cf. Luke 17:5-6). The fact is that people are accustomed to turning to God with all sorts of requests for their imaginary needs, and they know from old experience that God does not always help them. and from this it was extremely difficult for them to reconcile themselves to the fact that they did not need to lay up for themselves the treasures of the earth. They knew, of course, those examples from the life of nature, with which Christ convinced them of the truth of God's providence for the world, that the birds of the air do not sow, do not reap, and they have neither storehouses nor granaries, and, nevertheless, God nourishes them, and not one of them is forgotten by God (Luke 12:24, 29); and that the lilies of the field do not work, do not spin, and yet God clothes them in such a way that even Solomon in all his glory did not dress with such luxury (Matt. 6:28-29). But, not being able to distinguish between their real and imaginary needs, they did not at all think of themselves that God knew their real needs and that He could always provide them with everything they needed for life. On the contrary, considering themselves more valuable and closer to God than birds and wild flowers, they, however, in relation to themselves least of all believed in the reality of God's providence, and therefore they naturally developed such a position that man could not do without superfluous supplies for many years. By virtue of this, even those few people who were really captured by the inner power of Christ's preaching were not able to free themselves from anxious fears for their present life and had to ask their Teacher: "Increase faith in us" (Luke 17:5). The majority of Jesus' listeners laughed at Him (Luke 16:14) and in response to His call to repentance, at least in the initial period of His preaching activity, they thought only of the popular proverb: "Physician! heal thyself" (Luke 4:23), i.e. try to live as You teach us to live, and then it will be clear to You that people do not live in the Kingdom of God, but in a land remote from God. But the life of Jesus Christ was the most decisive refutation of this untruth and the most decisive proof of the truth of his unearthly teaching.

The Gospel tells about one remarkable event from the childhood life of Jesus Christ. According to the Evangelist Luke (2:41-50), the young Jesus, when He was twelve years old, came to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover and, unnoticed by His mother, remained in Jerusalem when His mother left the city with Joseph and went home. On the way to Nazareth, the travelers grabbed the lost Child and first searched for Him among relatives and friends, and then they had to return to Jerusalem and there they searched for Him for three whole days with great sorrow, and finally, to their surprise, they found Him where, apparently, they did not even think of looking for Him at all – in the Jerusalem Temple. He sat in the midst of the teachers, listened and questioned them, and gave them such answers as astonished His hearers. He felt Himself in the Jerusalem temple as in the home of His Father, and He looked upon His religious conversation with the Jewish teachers precisely as one of the deeds of His own Father. Therefore, to the natural reproach of maternal solicitude that He had forced Joseph and his mother to spend several painful days because of Him, He quite calmly answered: "Why did you seek Me? or did you not know that I must be in the things that belong to my Father? According to the Evangelist, neither Joseph nor the mother of Christ understood this answer, but only remembered it. But the answer affirmatively assures that they did not have to worry about the missing child because they should have known where they should have looked for him. Hence, even in the early years of His childhood, Christ showed exceptional sensitivity to the higher questions of religious life, and in those same early years He evidently recognized His relationship to God in a special and exclusive way, namely, as the relationship of the Son to the Father. He undoubtedly spoke about this to His mother and to all His household, and they all undoubtedly knew that He considers God to be His Father and considers God's work to be His personal matter. But probably none of them, not even his mother, attached serious importance to the childish speeches of the extraordinary Child, and for this reason it happened that for three days they searched for Him with great sorrow through the streets of the city and did not think to look into the courtyard of the temple in Jerusalem, apparently not expecting to find Him there at all.

This remarkable event so vividly illuminates the real foundations of Christ's Gospel that when it is illuminated we can sufficiently understand both the miracle of the moral personality of Jesus Christ and the miracle of His extraordinary life. And even more, of course, it is impossible to think of him so that he could compose his own theological doctrine and be able to surprise people with the originality of his theological considerations. If the twelve-year-old Jesus, conversing with the Jewish teachers in the Jerusalem Temple, surprised them with his questions and answers, then there is no doubt that He surprised them in the same way that He subsequently surprised His listeners, with which He continues to amaze the great mass of people who read the Gospel proclaimed by Him. He surprised and amazes people not with some learned words of rational considerations, but with the deep vital truth of every word He spoke, precisely with the purity and depth of His religious inspiration, by virtue of which the bookish teachings, known to one and all only in the logical system of certain ideas and concepts of the mind, are spiritualized and revived in His consciousness and embodied in the real facts of His own life. He lived by what He said to people, and therefore all His teachings are invariably full of spirit and life. It was this fullness of living power in His words, during the period of His public ministry, that made Him a teacher with the authority to teach people (Matt. 7:29; Map. 1, 22). And this same fullness of a living attitude to religious questions of their understanding of life evidently astonished His listeners during His Paschal conversation with the Jewish teachers, when He was only twelve years old. He did not learn from bookish people, but He seems to have been deeply interested in religious matters from an early age, and He knew well what the "books" said about them, and He knew even more – He knew what books should be asked about and what they really tell people. Such an attitude to the questions of religious life, and especially such an understanding of the bookish teachings about it in a twelve-year-old child, is undoubtedly amazing, because it undoubtedly surpasses any possible level of child development. But what is even more amazing is that for Christ Himself this extraordinary understanding was a completely ordinary matter, because it served only as a simple exposition of His own inner life. From the answer which He gave to His mother, we see quite clearly that from the early years of His childhood He not only lived in the thought of God in the consciousness of His human duties to God, but also lived in the creative thought and active will of God Himself in the consciousness of His filial relationship to God. This exceptional self-consciousness of Jesus Christ first of all explains the entire content of His "Gospel". My teaching is not mine, – He says to the Jews, – but Him who sent Me (John 7:16); what I have heard from Him, that I say to the world (8:26). On the basis of His close, precisely filial relationship with God, He knew and proclaimed to the world the good news of God's love for people. He said that God is good and that in all existence He is, in fact, only good (Matt. 19:17), that He is good even to the ungrateful and evil (Luke 6:35) and that His will is not for the destruction of people (Matt. 18:14), that, on the contrary, He awaits the conversion of the human race to Him in order to receive it into the communion of His love. as soon as a loving father can take back his prodigal but repentant son (Luke 15:11-32). Communicating this news of the Father's love, Christ pointed to the experience of religious and moral life accessible to every person, as the only proof of the truth of His message: whoever wants to do His will (i.e. the will of the Father) will know about this teaching, whether it is from God, or whether I speak of myself (John 7:17). Consequently, the real source from which Christ received this news was His own experience of the divine life, and consequently this news could not be evaluated by any considerations of external wisdom, but only by the spiritual experience of real life in God. Meanwhile, blind people, led by blind leaders, have departed so far from the path of true life that they have completely lost in themselves the feeling of living love for God (John 5:42) and have replaced this feeling with external service to God for the sake of the vain attainment of external righteousness (Matthew 23:13-28). It goes without saying that such people could not understand the truth of Christ's Gospel, and this is the motive of the preaching ministry of Jesus Christ, – simultaneously serving God by doing His work in the world and serving people by converting them to the path of true life.

Christ considered this service to be the only goal of His life. He Himself said of Himself that He was born to bear witness to the truth (John 18:37), and that He then came into the world to seek and save that which was lost (Matt. 18:11). The thought of fulfilling God's will in the accomplishment of God's work in the world, in the words of Jesus Christ, was His food. My food, – He said to His disciples, – is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work (John 4:34). For the sake of accomplishing God's work, He voluntarily took upon Himself the labors and deprivations of a wandering life (Matt. 8:20), went from city to city and village, and everywhere He proclaimed to people the good will of His Father, and everywhere He called people to repentance (Matt. 9:35; 4:17). And depending on how people treated His preaching, so did He treat people. He did not look at people's faces, did not distinguish them by social status or property status; all people were divided in His eyes only into those who were saved or those who perished. Whoever believed in the truth of His words and turned to the Father in His name with faith was dear to Him, and even if he was a hateful publican or a contemptible harlot, he still became dear to Him. Whoever does the will of My Father in heaven, – He once said to the people, – is My brother, and sister, and mother (Matt. 12:50, cf. Luke 8:21). By this alignment of people, He often offended sinful human self-love and often aroused a hostile attitude towards Himself, but He never judged anyone with the judgment of human truth, but always judged everyone only with the judgment of God's love. God is one for all, and He treats everyone equally. This means that before God no man has any advantage over another man, and therefore the very last of men, according to the judgment of man, can be more worthy of the kingdom of God than some powerful ruler of earthly greatness. Therefore, the moral teaching of Jesus Christ, based on the relationship of people to God and God to people, was naturally a teaching about the universal brotherhood of man (Matt. 23:8, 9). Whoever truly desires to be a member of the kingdom of God, let him, according to His instruction, be a servant to all (Luke 22:25-26); and even if the enemy of his tribe begins to need his services, let him not think of refusing, but let him certainly help him (Luke 10:30-37); and even if someone has personal enemies, let him think not about revenge, but about God's love for people, both good and evil, and therefore let him even treat his personal enemy as a brother – pray for him and favor him, love and bless him (Matt. 5:43-45, Luke 6, Lk. 6, 35-36). Such a teaching, of course, undoubtedly contradicts the egoistic foundations of human life, and therefore self-loving people not only did not understand the living example of Jesus Christ, but even found in His life even direct grounds for pitiful accusations of Him of imaginary impiety. All the hypocrites and hypocrites of the Jewish intelligentsia were outright indignant that He was the friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matt. 11:19, cf. Lk. 15:1-2); and He not only conversed with the unworthy children of Abraham, but openly did good also to the Gentiles (Matt. 8:5-13, 15, 22-28) and openly went with the preaching of the Gospel truth even to the cities and villages of the Samaritans (John 4:39-40; Luke 9:52-56). The Jews could not understand this indifference to human titles and conditions, and they could not reconcile themselves to the fact that all good people from all the peoples of the earth could become members of the kingdom of God. Therefore, they responded to the deep all-encompassing love of Jesus Christ only with coarse abuse: He is mad (Mark 3:21, John 10:20), He is possessed (Mark 3:30), He is a Samaritan (John 8:48), He is pagan (7:35) – these are the usual sentences of the Jewish opinion about the great teaching of Christ.

How much moral suffering these sentences brought to Jesus Christ – only He knows about this, because the Evangelists did not find it possible to depict to us His spiritual anguish because of the Jewish mockery of the sanctity of the truth preached by Him. But the blinded Jews did not understand the truth of His teaching and did not feel the moral loftiness of His preaching, even in the extraordinary greatness of His terrible death on the shameful cross. During His preaching ministry, amidst gentle exhortations and truthful rebukes, they heard from Him the astounding word of His love for them: "If any man hear My words, and believe not, I will not judge him, for I have not come to judge the world, but to save the world" (John 12:47). And faithful to this word, during His agonizing sufferings on the Cross, He gathered His fading strength to offer His dying prayer to the Father for the forgiveness of His tormentors: Father! forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). However, neither His self-sacrificing life, wholly dedicated by Him to the fulfillment of God's will in people, nor His holy death, innocently accepted by Him as a single act of His unselfish love for God and for people, said absolutely nothing either to the mind or to the heart of His cruel tormentors. Just as during His life they tried to convince themselves and others that He was not of God, that He was a sinner (John 9:16, 24), so after His death they tried to convince Pilate that He was a deceiver (Matt. 27:63). In fact, according to His own expression, He was only a man not of this world, and this world rejected and hated Him, because by all His teaching, and especially by His blameless life, He irrefutably proved to the world that His works were evil (John 7:7).

In the awareness of the moral purity of His motives and actions, Christ could calmly give His life even to the judgment of His open enemies, and they, with all their desire to humiliate and insult Him, could, however, answer His question only with forced silence: "Which of you shall convict Me of unrighteousness" (John 8:46)? Obviously, in His life they did not know a single fact that would contradict His moral teaching; otherwise, of course, they would have taken advantage of the fact and would undoubtedly have denounced the hated man that he only deceives the ignorant crowd of the people for the sake of the empty glory of his fruitless teaching. But they remained silent, although at that very time they were intensely looking for plausible reasons to condemn Christ to death, and the very question of Jesus Christ was precisely a calm answer to these searches of theirs. Obviously, they could not accuse Him of anything, and therefore their silence, in essence, speaks of the same thing, as Christ's disciples testify, that He did not commit any sin (1 Peter 2:22) and that therefore there is no sin in Him (1 John 3:5). Of course, this absence of sin, from the time of the first fall of people, has been and remains an unusual phenomenon for man; for even the greatest righteous in the human race can be righteous, in fact, not by the moral purity of their lives, but only by their moral consciousness and their condemnation of their sinfulness (1 John 1:8-10). But in the person of Jesus Christ, in the world of unrighteousness, a righteous man in the proper sense of the word really appeared, because, never following the promptings of human flesh and blood, Christ really rose above all the temptations of evil and truly revealed in His human life such a fullness of moral perfection that is possible only in the life of a true man from God. He did not seek His own will, but only wanted what His heavenly Father wanted, and He did not have His own work on earth, but only did the eternal work of His Father. Therefore, His life on earth in the likeness of the flesh of sin was not only the morally perfect life of sinless man, but it was the perfect embodiment of the thought and life of His heavenly Father Himself, so that He had every reason to say of Himself: "He who sees Me sees Him who sent Me" (John 12:45), and He who has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14:9).

In the fullness of this exceptional revelation of the divine life, Christ appeared and remains the first and only of men who truly conquered the evil of world existence and fully realized God's thought about existence. Precisely because in His human life God was actually manifested in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit, and shown to the angels (1 Tim. 3:16), the world of transgression, so far removed from God that its inhabitants can seriously doubt even whether God exists above them, has again appeared as a real revelation of God. The fact of the holy life of Jesus Christ is a fact of world history, it cannot be said that it does not have universal significance; for as long as the world exists, the Gospel news of the divine life of Christ will also exist in it, and as long as this news is transmitted, until then, in the light of the moral person of Christ, the eternal image of God will shine for all morally sensitive people, never before seen by anyone and previously unknown to anyone in the living fullness of his divine being (John 1:11). 18; 17, 25-26). Consequently, by the very fact that Christ lived in the world, He fully justified God's work of creating the world, because this justification requires only that the world should correspond to the pre-eternal purpose of its existence, i.e. that it serve as the actual revelation of God.

It goes without saying that this justification of the meaning of the world's existence does not in the least destroy evil in the world and does not save the world from evil. In fact, of course, people can contemplate in Christ the living image of God and still submit to evil and perish in their sins. Therefore, the holy human life of Jesus Christ, in fact, speaks only of the fact that, despite the evil existing in the world, the world nevertheless realizes the divine idea of being. This means that by the fact of His blameless life Christ revealed only the justification of God in His creative activity, and not the justification of people before God in their deviation from God's law of life. On the contrary, if His whole work consisted only in the perfect realization of the moral law of true life, then He would bring with Him only eternal condemnation to people.

Man cannot completely submit himself to the spiritual law of moral life and cannot completely free himself from sin. Therefore, during the period of the preaching activity of Jesus Christ, even the best of people, who were able and able to deeply feel the truth of the Gospel preaching, in reality could only be confused by this truth, unexpected for them. They keenly felt their moral inadequacy, they clearly saw that it was as impossible for them to be morally reborn as it was impossible for an old man to enter into his mother's womb and be born again for the second time (John 3:1-4); and therefore, agreeing with the truth of Christ's preaching, they naturally had to be tormented by the inevitable question: Is it possible that God, wishing to save people, really demands of them such a perfect life, which is undoubtedly beyond their strength and the demand for which, therefore, inevitably condemns them to undoubted destruction? In essence the moral teaching of Jesus Christ as a teaching about the way of the cross of people to the Kingdom of God, they fully understood that the religious task of human life cannot be reduced to a simple opportunity for a person to be justified before God in all the unrighteousness of life; for any excuse for unrighteousness comes only from the moral bankruptcy of man and is only a direct affirmation of his unrighteousness. Meanwhile, man has no means to destroy all unrighteousness in himself and to save himself by actually entering the kingdom of God, and Christ Himself positively confirmed that this is impossible for men (Mark 10:27). This means that by accepting the truth of Christ's teaching about the kingdom of God, people can really find in this truth only judgment and condemnation. But the work of Jesus Christ was not a matter of judgment, but a matter of saving the world from evil. He not only communicated to people the eternal law of true life and not only showed them the real way of this life, but also gave them a real justification before God without any excuse for their sins, and created new conditions for them to live without any change in the conditions of their existing existence.

2.

The death of Jesus Christ on the Cross as a redemptive sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

Sin can never and in no case be forgiven to man, because any excuse for sin, in essence, can only be reconciliation with it, and not at all liberation from it. In order for a person to be truly free from sin, he must necessarily destroy it in himself, i.e. he must make sin an event in his life that could exist and really was, but which no longer exists and can no longer exist. In this case, undoubtedly guilty before God of his former service to sin, man, however, would appear and undoubtedly worthy before God in his victory over sin and in the destruction of his sinfulness; For his former service to sin, as if it were only the same, would not express the actual content of his present life, but only his simple remembrance of his past life, and therefore any of his guilt in sin in relation to his present life would obviously be only his former guilt in the destroyed sin. Therefore, in this case, the former sinner would in reality turn out to be only a perfect righteous man. This means that in the event of a real victory over sin, man would undoubtedly rise from the state of fall and would undoubtedly save himself from inevitable destruction. But is this salvific case possible for man?