Main news for 30 April 2025

The apostle Paul tells us today that in Christ we have been enriched in everything. Not in "something," but precisely in everything: "in every word and every knowledge." In other words, God has given us all the knowledge of Him that is necessary, precisely necessary, because to know Him in fullness, as He is, is impossible for a creature, at least in this world. He has given us every word, and if He calls us to bear witness to Him, then we cannot say that we do not know how to preach. He has given us the ability to proclaim the gospel. And we "lack no gift," that is, all the gifts that can be needed, meaning that He will need us to use them, He has already given us.

This does not mean that we do not need to ask for anything, because the fact that He has given something does not mean that we have received it. But it is important that He has already done everything. We have been given everything that is needed. Let us be grateful.

In his letter to the Corinthian Christians, Paul writes words that at first seem strange: he speaks of the testimony that was confirmed among them, or strengthened in them, if translated literally. What does he mean? The apostle also mentions the word and knowledge received by those who heard the testimony. It may appear that he is speaking of the new teaching Paul brought to the Corinthians and that they received.

But Christianity cannot be reduced to teaching alone. Of course, Jesus said many things to His disciples during His earthly ministry, yet He did not come in order to create a new teaching. He came to give the world the Kingdom. Christianity is not a new teaching, but a new life, life in that very Kingdom. This is life that must be received and must be established, strengthened in a person, and made his own, becoming an inseparable part of his existence.

Such life cannot be conveyed by words alone. What is needed here is testimony: the testimony of a person who himself lives the life of the Kingdom and can show visibly, by his own example, what that life is and how it is lived. This is exactly the kind of testimony Paul bore. In fact, this was his apostleship: an apostle is always a messenger who goes to testify to what he was sent to testify about.

He says nothing from himself; he is not a teacher or mentor, but only a witness to what he was commissioned to report. But if the matter is the life of the Kingdom, then to report it means to bring others into it, because no stories about the Kingdom are worth anything without participation in its life. Without such participation, all of them would mean no more than stories about a joyful life in a faraway beautiful country that the hearer will never see. Yet participation in the life of the Kingdom alone is still not enough.

One must live in the Kingdom, and in order to live its life, a person must change, spiritually and even physically, if participation in the Kingdom in all its fullness is in view. This is not a one-time act; it is a process, and a process that will be completed only with Christ's return in glory. Then what was only partly opened to those seeking the Kingdom at the beginning of the path will be revealed to them in all its fullness. And the path will end in meeting face to face with the One who brought the Kingdom into the world.

Beginning his letter to the Christians in Corinth, Paul notes a very important feature of the process that the Bible calls salvation. He says of the Corinthian Christians that they have already received the testimony about Christ and that its fruits are clearly visible (vv. 4-6), while at the same time emphasizing that only the Savior Himself can finally establish the faithful in the Kingdom when He returns at the end of time (vv. 7-9). It is evident that, for the apostle, the destiny of a specific person in the Kingdom is inseparable from the history of the Kingdom itself, which, having entered the world, is revealed more and more, transforming it. And the life of those who share in the Kingdom is connected with the process of its becoming, which will be completed only with the Savior's return to the world at the end of time. With this approach there is no history of the salvation of an individual person as such at all; there is only the history of the Kingdom, in which each Christian takes part from the moment of being joined to it until the end of time.

This is no surprise if we remember that the Bible says nothing, or almost nothing, about the eternal destiny of an individual person. Neither in the Old nor in the New Testament will we find clear and unambiguous ideas about the afterlife or the immortality of the soul, just as we will find nothing resembling the traditional ideas of heaven and hell that took shape in Christian circles in the Middle Ages. The biblical books mention Sheol, the world of shadows prepared for every dead person, but this idea can hardly be called properly biblical, since virtually all the peoples of antiquity spoke of something similar. In this case the authors of the biblical books were simply following the ideas traditional for their era. But the prophets spoke a great deal about the coming of the Messiah, the general resurrection, and the Kingdom; this was the properly biblical teaching about the destiny of the human person in eternity. It is no wonder that for Paul too it is inseparable from Christ and from the Kingdom that entered the world together with Him. For it is precisely with Christ and with the Kingdom that the fullness of the life God originally intended for every person is connected. Therefore it can be received only through Christ and in the Kingdom, and only when the Kingdom is finally revealed to the world in all its fullness.