If to proceed from, how much is opened variously and widely to people God's lovingkindness and how God opened a lot to us about Him (indeed, in Christ is manifested all the plenitude of the Divinity bodily), then is imperative the conclusion that with the birth of the Church, the religious history of humanity has ended. Properly, it is like that: in fact, what can God give us again, having given His Son for our sake? God’s gift in Christ is so immense that we need centuries to realize and contain it. The possibility to find a genuine life in the Church is so real that nothing more is required indeed. But it is only a part of the affair: Divine’s.

If we read attentively what God said about the New Testament in the Bible, especially the above mentioned words by the prophet Jeremiah, or the words of the prophet Ezekiel pronounced a few years later (Ezekiel 36:26-27), becomes quite evident the rightness of one modern saint, who said that Christianity is only beginning. The prophets speak about such a deep transformation of people, when the fulfillment of the will of the Creator will be for us an internal necessity, and not an external. The action of the Holy Spirit on the participants of the New Testament is called, as it seems to fill us such that the realization of human freedom should be not sin, but unity with God so that the fulfillment of our destination could become our free choice.

A great dream since the antiquity has inflamed the spirits and hearts of the best of people: to do that sin does not reign in us. For that were created religious systems and philosophic doctrines, but mostly for that people tried to create a perfect society. Those who grew upon the Bolsheviks, will remember here of their promise that in communism work will become a voluntary need of all the members of the society. In fact, they were very unoriginal, simply did as monkeys. Then it turned out that to do such thing, without violating the freedom of the person is impossible. And only God fulfilling all His promises, says through the prophets that it will be like that, because it is our freedom to be holy, paid by the Blood of His Son. It is clear that the fulfillment of this promise in us hasn’t yet come true, but it already depends on ourselves. Among other things, we therefore received a mighty perspective – if not the whole humanity, then every person.

The thought of a soul that must be hated may seem strange and even absurd. Why, indeed, should a person hate the most precious thing he possesses, the very thing that makes him himself? For the sake of precision, however, it must be noted that the subject here is not the soul in the sense in which we use the word today, but simply life. Yet even with this understanding the question remains: why should a person hate his own life, given to him by God?

The simplest answer might be to refer to the Fall, which distorted this very life and turned it into a pitiful likeness of what it was meant to be according to God's plan. Such an answer, however, would be more characteristic of a Pythagorean or a Platonist than of a believer in Yahweh. In the pagan world, the idea that earthly life was an improper state for a human being was fairly widespread, among philosophers, mystics, and ascetics, of course. They saw the life of fallen humanity in all its ugliness and could imagine no other way out than rejecting it, a rejection which they thought freed a person from the power of the evil in which the world lies and in which the life of everyone who inhabits it unfolds. The Bible, however, nowhere speaks of rejecting life as a way of escaping evil; the spiritualism of the Platonists or Pythagoreans is alien to it. And Jesus' words about hating one's own life can hardly be understood in a spiritualist sense, whether that spiritualism is of the Greek or the Indian kind.

One Indian parallel, however, might be relevant here: the parallel with Buddhism and with the concept of nirvana that is central to Buddhism. Contrary to the widespread view, this is not a departure into non-being, but rather an experience of being, a being that is revealed only when a person distances himself from illusory, imaginary, inauthentic being, which he usually regards as real life. The Buddha suddenly realized that authentic being and true life are not at all where most people see them. That is why he came to hate life in an almost Gospel sense, not with the hatred that desires the destruction of what is hated, but with hatred in the biblical sense of the word, when a person distances himself completely from what is hated and excludes it from his life. To exclude illusion for the sake of reality: such was the Buddha's experience.

Christ Himself is this reality. He bears the fullness of the Kingdom within Himself, and everyone who comes to Him faces a choice: whether to remain with his own life, which sooner or later will run dry, or to renounce his own separate existence, giving his life to Christ and allowing Him to dispose of it. This is somewhat reminiscent of Buddhism, with the difference, however, that Buddhism is apophatic, while Christianity is cataphatic. With Christ and in Christ, the authentic being and true life that the Buddha sensed at the moment of his enlightenment entered the world. And to find them requires the same renunciation of what is one's own, separate, finite, and therefore inauthentic. Without such a renunciation, reality cannot be attained, whether it is the enlightenment of the Buddhists or the fullness of Christ's Kingdom.

The promise given from above through the prophet is unshakable: life will surely be reborn. But then, to our surprise, we discover that after all the cataclysms it must be built on entirely new foundations. It would appear that after the people failed to remain at the level set in the time of Moses, even a simple return to the original degree of walking before God would already have been an important achievement. Yet the Lord leads those who trust Him farther and farther, opening new horizons.

Now we hear words about personal responsibility replacing collective responsibility. This means that responsibility before the Lord is no longer mutual liability: each person must answer for his own deeds personally, and responsibility will not even be shifted onto descendants. The prophecy proclaims a radical shift in the understanding of the value and uniqueness of each person, helping humanity as a whole to mature.

But even this is not enough: these words serve only as a preface to the promise of a new covenant. The former covenant was broken unilaterally by people, but it was not canceled by the Lord Himself. Therefore the new covenant is not simply the abolition of the Old; it means that the proclaimed commandments will be inseparably inscribed into the very essence of the human being.

Can we say that we who live in the time of the New Covenant are already what we ought to be according to the prophecy? Such a claim would sound strange. But we are called to become exactly that, for the Lord gives each of us the chance to go to Him.