NOTES for Ti1 1:16

Paul does not rate his human qualities very highly. What is this: false modesty? An inadequate assessment? Or, on the contrary, a sober understanding of himself and of the whole situation developing around his own person? Paul clearly remembers his own spiritual biography very well. And he understands what he deserves and what he does not. When he writes that a person receives the Kingdom as an undeserved gift, he has himself in mind first of all. But he also understands something else: God is ready to wait and to show mercy; He did not send His Son into the world in order then to spoil the whole matter by His impatience. The apostle perfectly understands that the whole matter is not in the person, whether he is good or bad (no one is good enough for the Kingdom), but in the chance that God is ready to give to everyone. And this chance is absolute: there can be no sin in a person's life that, in the case of repentance, could prevent him from using this chance. Paul himself could say, and indeed often said of himself, that Christ opened the Kingdom to him even though before, while still Saul, he had been a persecutor of His Church. Of course, one could imagine cases even more serious, for Paul, despite all his errors when he was a persecutor, was nevertheless an absolutely sincere person. But the apostle himself, as we see, is absolutely convinced that although no one is fit for the Kingdom, God nevertheless wants to save everyone. Probably sometimes such witness became truly relevant: among Christians in every age there have been those whom their own sin brought to despair. Sometimes this happened because people who previously had not seriously known spiritual life were horrified when they discovered in themselves a measure of sinfulness they had never expected to find. And sometimes their own theories about a new, "sinless" life in the Kingdom played a bad joke on newly converted Christians, because it seemed to them that this life should open to them in some magical way immediately after conversion, as if conversion were not the first but the final step on their spiritual path. For just such Christians, fallen into despondency, Paul's words became spiritual support and encouragement: by his own example he let them understand that God will drive no one away, if only the person does not leave by himself. For He, in the words of the prophet, desires not the death of the sinner, but that the sinner turn from his sin and remain alive.