Main news for 18 August 2025

Why does God need weakness and foolishness so much in order, according to the apostle's word, to shame wisdom and strength? Can weakness and foolishness really handle the tasks He has set better? Or is it important to Him that every unbiased observer understand: the point is not human strength or wisdom; neither the strength nor the wisdom of this world has anything to do with it; this is God's strength and God's wisdom?

But does it not become obvious to any unbiased observer at first glance that there are things that cannot be explained within the framework of the untransformed world and its nature, and that the greatest number of such inexplicable things are found precisely in Christian life? Or is that not the point at all? Then what is it? Perhaps it is the double nature of every human wisdom and the ambiguity of every human strength. Indeed, after the fall, human nature itself became a rather unreliable instrument, especially for serious spiritual work.

Both the psyche and the physiology of even a completely healthy person can fail him at any moment. And if physical health, even in the event of a failure, is not fundamentally capable of spoiling or distorting a person's mission (in the worst case, he may simply fail to finish on earth what was entrusted to him, and then God will have to find Himself another servant), mental health, which can also fail, and not always in ways noticeable to its possessor, can fail much more seriously. But the matter is not only in human nature damaged by sin. The matter is above all in the spiritual core of the human person, which the fall affected first of all because it began there. The author of the Prologue to Genesis described the problem briefly and powerfully when he said that "every intention of the human heart is evil from his youth." The point here, of course, is not that fallen human beings are in principle incapable of anything good.

The point is that evil is inevitably mixed into this good, becoming like a spoonful of tar in a barrel of honey. And the only way to avoid that spoonful is to minimize specifically human efforts, to make the heart of the servant, ideally, spiritually completely transparent to the action of God. Only then will it be possible to avoid the influence of fallen human nature that shows itself in every human action and intention. Or, at least, to minimize this influence so much that the quality of the intentions, thoughts, and deeds of God's servant becomes acceptable for the Kingdom.