How often we catch ourselves thinking, when something happens that we, to put it mildly, do not like: 'Why is this happening to me?' Why did the Lord arrange everything this way, and if He did not arrange it, why did He allow it to happen? What did I do that now this has happened? And so on... But if we are to seek an answer to such a question, it should be formulated differently - beginning with the question 'For what purpose?' And then the answer is not far away: 'We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose' (Rom 8:28).

In addition, the apostle Paul directly warns Timothy in today's passage: 'All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted' (2 Tim 3:12). So it would seem that everything is sealed... But people believe and strive toward Christ not in order to be persecuted. People seek God and find communion with Him, and this becomes far more important than any surrounding problems. Persecutions, in Paul's words, are only a consequence of the desire for a godly life in Jesus. For as long as the whole world has not received the message about our Lord and the Lord Himself, there will remain people who do not acknowledge Him. And accordingly, they will not acknowledge those who follow Him.

What follows? What is alien is rejected, especially what 'condemns' us. But this 'condemnation' is of a different kind from the one we are used to. 'And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil; for everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, so that his deeds may not be exposed' (John 3:19-20).

In the days leading up to the beginning of Great Lent, we read passages from the apostles' letters that make us think about our spiritual and inner state. The Church prepares us for the daily reading of the prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, which wonderfully leads us through Lent along the path of confession and repentance. Almost every day we read a text of self-condemnation and a call to withdraw, step back, be watchful, and not fall into the nets of sin. As in the text of the Cherubic Hymn: "let us lay aside all earthly cares." So before Lent we too must somehow slow the pace of our life, pay proper attention to our condition and to what we are like as we stand before God. It is as if we were checking ourselves against what Christ and the Church call us to, and against what we are each day in our cares, desires, and thoughts.

Describing the people of the last times, Paul may appear to be overstating things somewhat. Yet even in his own time everything he said was characteristic of the society in which he had to live, to one degree or another. And people of other eras who read Paul's letters surely thought that the last times had already come: they recognized their own contemporaries in the apostle's description. And, it must be admitted, they were not far from the truth.

The fact is that Paul may well have regarded, if not his own age, then at least the age that began soon after his martyrdom, after A.D. 70, when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed and Judea ceased to exist as a Jewish autonomy within the Roman Empire, as the last times. This is exactly how the Savior Himself described the last times, mentioning the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Judea as essentially the final historical event after which, in His own words, "the end" would come.

This, of course, does not mean that He would return on the very day the Temple was destroyed, as third- and perhaps fourth-generation Christians thought when they became contemporaries of the events Jesus had foretold. But all subsequent human history unfolds within a different historical logic, one that can be called eschatological. And within that logic, one must first speak about the spiritual polarization of humanity, and all the processes taking place within it increasingly point precisely to the polarization mentioned by both Paul and John in his Book of Revelation. All who seek a godly life in Christ are persecuted, while those who do evil prosper. This is no surprise: the fallen world lies in evil, and the only question is how much that evil is visible in it and how much is hidden.

At times it looks as though there have been bright intervals in human history, as though not everything in it is so dark, and as though customs in some places were not at all like those described by the apostle. Indeed, a patriarchal, traditional society, at first glance, does not look as corrupt as the Hellenistic society described in the letter. Unfortunately, however, this is only a question of time: every society sooner or later stops being patriarchal and traditional and comes to resemble the one Paul described. But that is not the only point.

One can certainly lament the corruption of morals and the destruction of the good old patriarchal foundations, but they are not destroyed by accident. They are destroyed because the evil of the fallen world is present in them too; it is simply less visible. And when a world that seemed good and moral collapses under the pressure of alien morals and customs, it collapses not because it is being "destroyed" or "eroded," but because evil exists in it too, only before it was not so visible. Now what was hidden has become manifest, and events have begun to unfold in their own course. The logic of the eschatological age is universal, and the only question is where the polarization mentioned by the apostle will appear earlier and where later. But Paul has no doubt that it will happen.