Notes for  19 June 2026

Changing oneself and one's life is extremely difficult. Therefore, when calling us to renewal, the apostle speaks these astonishing words. This thought became one of the most important in Christian understanding of life and death. The apostle explains that death frees us from the obligations and ties accumulated in the course of life, first of all because we lose the ability to practice those ties. That is why physical death, depriving us of the ability to commit sin, allows us to detach ourselves from it. And the apostle's words give us grounds to say that Christians begin a new life, free from sin, already here and now.

This is important because we often think that Christians are waiting for recompense beyond the grave, or we make use of unbiblical ideas about hell and paradise, with frying pans and streams of nectar respectively. No, Christians, unlike the followers of all other religions, are waiting for nothing. They become citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven already now, according to this word of the apostle.

"...Even the hairs of your head are all numbered..." What does this mean? No one dies apart from the Father's will, but does this mean that those who die die by His will? This is a very difficult question, and the abyss of unbelief lies very close here. But it can be avoided if we trust our heart and the Word of God.

Priest Georgy Chistyakov writes in his work "Martyrdom as a Phenomenon":

"To endure September 11, the almost daily explosions in Israel, and other horrors. Or does He behave the way a strict teacher sometimes does? No, that too is impossible! If God is merciless, then Job's wife is indeed right when she advises him to curse God and die. How can one not remember Voltaire here? 'How could God create this terrible cesspool of misfortunes and crimes? It is supposed,' says Voltaire, 'that God is powerful, just, and good, while we see madness, injustice, and malice on every side. Therefore people prefer denying God to cursing Him.' At the same time Voltaire himself believed in God, although he said that he preferred to believe in a God who was not almighty and was limited in His possibilities, but good. [...]

Yet despite everything, and above all despite what is obvious, we somehow feel God's presence in the world. [...] We feel this precisely, not knowing it, and understand not with the mind but with the heart, that the Lord shares with us every misfortune of ours in all its fullness. He is with us where things are bad. And this is the main thing. Descending with us as if into hell, into the depths of our misery and despair, He also leads us out of those depths, giving us wisdom and patience. As this is depicted on the Paschal icon 'The Savior's Descent into Hades'..."

"If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness?" the Lord says to us today. How can this be - how can light be darkness? Here is one possible interpretation: the question is what serves as light for us, what we choose in that capacity. If we consider a cozy half-light, or even darkness, to be light, then what is darkness? If we do not step out into the light of Christ's commandments, but prefer to be satisfied with the local lighting of selected rules, what are our chances of seeing anything beyond our own nose? What, then, is light for us? The light of Christ, which enlightens all people and all things, or something else?

Faced with a military threat, Judah found itself before a political choice: either to make an alliance with Syria and Samaria against Assyria, or the reverse. Having sided with the Assyrians, King Ahaz awaits an attack from the north. But the prophet reminds him that the Lord is the true ruler of history, and that it is with Him that an alliance must be made.

And we too, when we find ourselves in a difficult situation, often do not know whom to turn to for help. But if we have already made a covenant with God, should we not turn to Him first of all?

The answer received by Habakkuk can be applied not only to the events of his own days, but also to all those times when people will try to repeat the same thing. Then it was the Chaldeans, expanding the borders of their possessions by arms, but a little later the same thing happened to them that they had brought to others; and afterward, one after another, empires founded on violence and conquest changed and collapsed. So it has been until now, and so it will be until attempts to create and expand such empires cease.

But does not the evil rooted in the heart of the "peaceful" ordinary person continue in the deeds of conquerors? How different is the desire to conquer one more country from, say, the desire to grab one more room from a neighbor? Arguments of the sort "we are little people, this is not about us" should not calm us. For sin remains sin, however much we may want to divide it into "big" and "not so big."

And now, amid the triumph of lawlessness, when the law loses its force, the Lord reveals new depths of His Revelation. The words "the righteous shall live by his faith," proclaiming the primacy of faith over law, open to humanity the possibility of qualitatively new steps on the spiritual path. If we compare how many times the word "faith" is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, we will see that the New speaks of faith much more. But the two Testaments are interconnected, and it is important to understand that the gospel proclamation did not sound in a vacuum: it was prepared even in Old Testament times.

Among the denunciations of lawlessness, a prophecy of retribution unexpectedly sounds "for the destruction of frightened animals." When after the flood the Lord gave the animal world to human beings for food (Gen 9:2-4), He proclaimed that every living thing should fear the human being placed over nature. But it was not enough for the crown of creation to inspire fear; he began to destroy all living things in quantities immeasurably beyond what was necessary to sustain his life. In Habakkuk's time, not everyone could easily have understood the meaning of this prophecy. For us, however, contemporaries of the ecological crisis and witnesses to the destruction of whole species, this prophecy sounds especially threatening.

Weak faith is often our main obstacle on the path to God. And the matter is not even a simple confidence in God's existence or in His help, but rather that God is holy. That means that to believe in Him and love Him, we are required to have a likeness to His holiness, a striving to belong wholly to Him regardless of the opinion of those around us.

Moses, the greatest of the prophets, who spoke with God face to face, doubted at the decisive moment and was judged. But who are we compared with Moses? We have only one advantage: we have been given the law of the Spirit in Christ, the love that is greater than the law.