Human nature is contradictory. And the point here is not only the features of human thinking or human feelings. The point is above all the weakness of the human will. What is a human being? God's "breath of life," giving life to nature and turning it into that flow of human existence which the Bible calls a "living soul." The "breath of life," God's presence in us, makes us human beings, possessing will and self-awareness.

But God is unobtrusive; He will let us forget His presence altogether if that is what we want. And then He will cease to be the master of our life. We ourselves become the masters of our life, and the flow of life overwhelms us. Nature becomes self-sufficient, beginning to determine our life, if not completely, then predominantly. That is what happened at the fall into sin, and now we, fallen human beings, submit to our nature. Our will has grown weak; it is no longer able to stand against that natural flow which was given to us by God as the environment and building material for our life, but which for us after the fall became an irresistible force, often dragging us where we do not want to go at all. This weak will became the main obstacle to full spiritual life.

That is why, when making decisions vital for us and making a decisive spiritual choice, we make it with reservations. Our "yes" is always accompanied by one "but" or another. And there is an objective reason for this: in our present state we really cannot vouch for ourselves, more precisely, for our human nature, which can fail us at the most unsuitable moment. Nature in the fallen world is often not subject to the spirit, not because of the properties God placed in it, but because of the abnormal position in which it found itself after the fall. In the fall, the human being freed both his own nature and, at least in part, nature as a whole from the authority of the One who alone can govern it, and he himself took hold of controls that he proved unable to manage.

In the Kingdom of God it is not so. There everything is in order with governance. Normal human nature, unspoiled by sin, is completely subject to the spirit; therefore the Savior has only "yes" for His Heavenly Father. And in everyone who has shared in the life of the Kingdom, human nature becomes obedient to the human spirit to the extent that the person's life becomes part of the life of the Kingdom. Therefore such a person also has nothing for God except "yes." For "no" to God in any case means a break in relations with Him. And therefore this "no" becomes at the same time "no" to Christ and to the Kingdom.

The image of the two ways of which the apostle speaks, the way of salvation and the way of destruction, has roots that go deep into the Yahwist and then Jewish tradition. The way of righteousness, both in the Torah and in other biblical books, is regarded as the way of salvation, and the way of sin as the way of ruin. And yet the picture turns out not to be so simple.

Already in the pre-Christian and even pre-biblical period, many wondered why the righteous person suffers from the evil in which the world lies, and why his righteousness is not rewarded according to its merits. This theme sounds especially sharply in the biblical books, which is not surprising: the God of the Bible is a good God, who gave His people the Torah and calls them to the path of righteousness. Why then does He so often leave His people at the mercy of the evil with which the world is full?

The Savior's death on the Cross is the answer to this question. Of course, for fallen man with the best intentions it would be simpler to imagine an ideal world where righteousness would be immediately rewarded and evil just as immediately punished. But in such a world no one would have any chance of salvation, for there are no sinless people on earth. Jesus could have entered the world as a triumphant victor, but then He would have had to remain alone in the Kingdom. And His Father's will was not for this. Such a triumph of the Kingdom would not have left the slightest chance to any human being. The will of the Father, expressed through one of the prophets several centuries before Christ's coming into the world, is that the sinner should not die, but turn and remain alive.

That is precisely why the Kingdom enters the world as if unnoticed, not imposing itself on anyone by force and not hanging over anyone as a threat of immediate punishment for the slightest sin. That is why all attempts to create on earth a kingdom of universal justice, whether on a religious or anti-religious basis, have always ended in grand bloodshed having nothing to do with any justice. And Paul points to the way of the Kingdom as the only way on which the triumph of righteousness is possible. A triumph leading not to destruction, but to salvation.

In every age and among every people, an oath bound the person who had to fulfill it, otherwise consequences would fall on his head that he would have cause to regret. It is no accident that the ancients, including adherents of Yahwism, swore by the names of their gods. In Yahwism too it was customary to swear by the name of God, the name of Yahweh. In this way a person called as witnesses and guarantors of what had been promised those whom it was either simply impossible, or at least mortally dangerous, to deceive.

At the same time, however, a natural question arose: did every promise please those who, according to the intention of the one swearing, were supposed to guarantee its fulfillment? Take Herod's oath, for example. Most likely, he too swore by the name of Yahweh, in whom perhaps he did not truly believe. But does this mean that Yahweh really became the guarantor of Herod's oath? The question is rhetorical: an oath by the name of any god, not to mention the One God, presupposed involvement in deep relations with the one by whose name you swear. This cannot be said of Herod and Yahweh: their relations were the most superficial kind, if they existed at all.

But there was something else: false pride, which at times makes a person, out of a desire to appear "tough," do something he will most likely regret deeply afterward. That is what happened with Herod. He hated and feared John, and at the same time involuntarily respected him, so much that, while holding him in prison for especially dangerous criminals, Herod nevertheless came more than once to speak with him. He hardly wanted John's death. He only wanted John to be silent, so that his denunciations of Herod's sins and crimes would not sound publicly.

Things happened differently, however: a rash oath and the unwillingness to "lose face" in the eyes of those around him made Herod a murderer. Of course, this murder was not the first in his life and not the last, but here it was the murder of a prophet, a man of God, whom Herod moreover had not wanted to kill. So pride and false ideas of honor take a person captive, forcing him to do what otherwise he would never have done. It is a terrible case, but for the fallen world, alas, entirely characteristic.