nikeabooks.ru
What we know of God has been given to us through revelation. While remaining unfathomable to the human mind, God revealed Himself to us and gave us the fullness of the truth and the promise of eternal life through His Son, Who became the Son of Man to share our fate and save us from the power of sin and death.
The paths by which the human soul seeks after and approaches God may be many and various: They may range from a personal enlightenment, in which the shadow heretofore covering the eyes is removed, to being brought up in adherence to Christian tradition, a gradual process through which one grows into the Truth of the Gospels and makes them the core and focus of his life.
For those who come to accept Christian revelation as adults, capable of reason, the usual impetus for conversion is a sense of satisfaction with “this world,” one wracked by sin and untruth. That feeling is inextricably linked to one of dissatisfaction with oneself, with one’s humiliating, selfish existence. A Russian poet expressed this feeling in the words “How wonderful to be alive! How poorly do we live...”
Tormented man strives to open for himself, Divine existence, that treasure which soars above the world of earthly events like a tall cupola, an eternal image of a homeland not subject to the rule of time. This is what the Gospel calls the “treasure in the heavens,” or “life eternal.” Biblical Gospel revelation provides a response to this longing, and not only calls man to free himself from the power evil holds over his soul, but also grants him sight. Giving him the capacity to see what he previously could not see; it translates him into the realm of what is beyond understanding, a realm with its own laws, one in which a new reality is revealed. From that recurrent sense of trepidation before something holy, man grows into the state the Apostle Paul calls the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:13). Christ first showed Himself to His contemporaries to be one of the prophets of Israel, and only later revealed Himself to the Samaritan Woman and to His chosen disciples as the Messiah and Savior of all mankind and all creation. In an analogous manner, His Image grows in the human soul wishing to hear His voice. One who should chance to encounter Christ cannot but love His Image, if only to repeat the words of the Apostles, Lord to whom should we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life (John 6:68).
