The holiest and highest death of man is his death to evil, to sin. Death for death itself... A person dies in order not to die anymore... He who is resurrected in Christ is a man who died to evil. Death in the world was the result of man's falling away from God, a consequence of sin. And when sin is destroyed, in genuine repentance, and in God's forgiveness of man, then the sting is also taken out of death... That is why St. John Chrysostom exclaims so solemnly and joyfully in his famous Paschal Sermon: "Death, where is thy sting? Hell, where is your victory?!"

The "sting" was taken out of human death by the resurrection of Christ. And all those who are faithful to Christ, all who live with Him and in Him, are sons of the resurrection.

Human Weakness and Strength

The Apostle James addressed people who were too self-confident in their human plans:

"Now listen to you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and dwell there one year, and we will trade and make a profit'; you who do not know what will happen tomorrow: for what is your life? A vapor that appears for a short time, and then disappears. Instead of saying to you: "If the Lord wills, and we live, we will do this or that," you, in your arrogance, are vain: all such vanity is evil" (James 4:13-16).

It would seem that this is an absolutely indisputable truth, verified by the experience of every person and every day: life on earth is "vapor that appears for a short time." Is it possible to build a life on this "couple" too prudently? Steam does not last long, just like earthly life. However, human calculations are usually carried out in this way. In the firm conviction of his strength and steadfastness, man builds his life, struggles, plans, not seeing all his precariousness in the world, dependence on unforeseen circumstances, and behind them, always and in everything, from God. God is the master of visible and invisible being, present and future (which is already the invisible world for us). We humans are so often "vain" in our plans and intentions! And instead of saying, as the Apostle advises: "If it pleases the Lord, and we are alive, we will do this or that," we immediately, peremptorily and self-confidently say that we will definitely do this, that we will build and accomplish, that we will certainly conquer and overcome...

"All such vanity is evil"; for by it we seek to remove the Lord God from the world; and since the Lord God is the true Master of all things, we deprive ourselves of his help and blessing. Yes, too often people express this unfounded idea that their lives, success, and fortune depend only on themselves; And many in the world even boast about it. But such views are constantly crumbling before the eyes of the whole world: "unexpected" diseases are attacking people; natural disasters, earthquakes, wars, from which everyone suffers; the rapid destruction of seemingly well-established families and entire societies, proud ruling parties and powerful states; "premature" (as people say) deaths, come upon humanity, regardless of the age of people, and a stream of people pours over the edge of this world into eternity. Generation after generation disappears, and the history of past centuries remains like a dream, sometimes like the nightmare of humanity; old and young people go into the unknown distance, leave unexpectedly for others, among their plans and begun affairs... The logic of human calculations is collapsing all the time. And there are no calculations by means of which it would be possible to foresee the future hour and day of each person. The life of all is preserved only in the Providence of the Creator, and the limits of each are determined only by Him.

But man keeps flippantly repeating his old delusion, which was noticed and so well expressed almost 20 centuries ago: "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and live there for one year"... The immutability of everyday logic! The constancy of the physical phenomena of the alternation of day and night, the ebb and flow of the tide, the constant hotness of fire and the coldness of ice, draws man's superficial thought to the conclusion that both his "tomorrow" and the "day after tomorrow" follow with the certainty and logic of physical laws from his "today"... This unfounded thought and false faith in the permanence and durability of earthly values and phenomena must be replaced by the true belief that people always and in everything depend first of all on the decisions of the holy and great will of God. "If it pleases the Lord, and we live, we will do this or that," is the infallible formula that applies to our future, not only personal, but all of humanity. If we repress, even a little, from our consciousness this unnatural attitude to life, which stems only from our self-conceit and self-confidence, we will immediately see all the impossibility and irrationality of building our future only on such sand, or rather on such a pair, as is our human will and our physical life: "For what is your life? A vapor that appears for a short time, and then disappears..."

But here's what is surprising: for all his weakness and mortality, man is, at the same time, an amazing strength. Not physical, not material, but spiritual: a huge spiritual-creative or a huge spiritual-destructive force. Man conquers mountains and oceans, rules in the bowels of the earth, asserts his power over the air, builds quickly and just as quickly destroys many things. Being physically weaker, shorter-lived, and in many ways imperfect than animals and even plants, he dominates them. Where does a person get such power over the world? Where did he get such power over the elements, among all the cobwebs of his life? There is only one answer: from the spirit, from the spiritual essence invisible to its eyes, from the precious seal of the higher world on it. However, the very energy and force of this negation in the materialists comes not from matter, but from their spirit, even if it is blind and sick, but the spirit that bears the seal of the higher world.

Man is not alone in the world

The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, says: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 1:1), that is, God created the heavens, the world of spiritual beings, and the earth, the world of physical phenomena. God is the Spirit who penetrates all things, creates all things, and protects them. To believe in God is to live and be in His spirit and truth. To the realm of the invisible world belongs by his spiritual nature every man with all the people who have died since the beginning of time; All generations that have left the Earth live in another world, in a different plane of the universe, in a different dimension of existence. "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, with Him all are alive," says the Holy Scriptures. "

After the destruction of our fragile, so fragile earthly body, we, people (whether we like it or not) will pass into the mysterious realm of the spirit and discover to the end the essence of our character and the moral potential of our personality... Our thoughts, feelings, and desires, especially the inclinations to good and the repulsion from evil, do not even now belong to the material world; but spiritual. Although the material world influences us from different sides, our personality always remains free to make or not to make this or that moral decision, to relate in one way or another to any physical phenomenon...

Human life is deep, the human personality is great in its capabilities; as in a mirror it is able to reflect God's perfection. The truth about God the Creator is not only told by religion; it is proclaimed by all nature, all life and the essence of things. World... created according to the Divine plan by the power of the great creative will of God. Just as an insect does not understand the plans of man, so man is unable to comprehend all the mysteries of the Divine world; he comprehends only what God Himself reveals to him. The essence of even the smallest blade of grass in the world is as mysterious as the existence of the greatest starry worlds.

In her book "Man Is Not Alone", the former president of the New York Academy of Sciences, Cressie Morrison, says that people are now at the dawn of the scientific era, and each new discovery reveals to them with greater force and brightness the work of the all-wise Creator... "As for me," says Morrison, "I have seven reasons for faith. First of all, based on the inviolable laws of mathematics, it can be proven that our universe was conceived and created by a great constructive Mind. The presence of living organisms on our planet presupposes such an incredible number of all kinds of conditions for their existence that the coincidence of all these conditions cannot be a matter of chance. The earth, for example, rotates on its axis at a speed of only a thousand miles per hour. If it were spinning at the speed of a hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times longer, and the sun would burn our plants during that day, while on that long night even the very small shoots that could have appeared during the day would freeze. Further, the earth is removed from the sun at exactly the distance at which the fire of the sun warms us sufficiently, but not too much. If it only sent us 50 degrees less or more heat, we would either freeze or die from the heat.