Protopresbyter Georgios Dorbarakis
The consistency of the pattern in Christ’s life is a challenge for the rational thinking of people in the world and a reversal of everything they hold to be a constant. Why? Because, having expunged God from their life, they seek comfort, complete acceptance by others, the power of wealth, and domination, all of which constitute sin itself and subjugation to the Evil One.
What’s worse is that this sinful state is expanding without let or hindrance, because, according to Saint Paul, ‘wicked people and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived’ [2 Tim. 3, 13]. No Messianism- as the expectation of any improvement in the state of the world- is acceptable to us. The world is bad and it’s getting worse.
So Christians are living in a world subject to its ruler, the devil, and it’s a world in which they seem to have no place. But this is where things are turned upside down. The world of sin wishes to annihilate Christians, but it can’t manage to do so. He who determines the finest details of the universe is the Lord, our Almighty God: ‘He who is, was, and is coming’. Speaking of his personal experience, Saint Paul says: ‘What persecutions I endured; yet the Lord rescued me from all of them’. So here we have the reality of the depth of our faith: when it seems that we Christians are being defeated and are losing to the forces of darkness, that’s precisely when the light of God’s almighty power arises- our participation in Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection. Did Christ not seem weak and defeated on the Cross? But that’s where his almighty power was made manifest: he rose on the third day. ‘Our faith is the triumph which overcomes the world’.
Source: pemptousia.com
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