And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shown around them, and they were filled with fear. -Luke 2:9 Have you ever thought about the word glory? Have you ever wondered what “the glory of the Lord” might look like? In Exodus 33: 18-23, God shows His glory to Moses: Moses said, “I pray Thee, show me Thy glory.” And He [God] said, “I will make all my
By Nabil Semaan THE FALL OF ANGELS (16) First of all, this event happened before the fall of man. The cause of the fall of some angels is that they rebelled against God. Their leader was one of the most beautiful Cherubim; he was gifted much more than the others in divine grace, according to the prophet Isaiah: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down
The knowledge of Christ is another expression for contemplation. Without gentleness there is no true contemplation. To Rufinus Evagrius writes: “For I am convinced that your gentleness has become a cause of great knowledge. No single virtue produces wisdom as gentleness does, for whose sake even Moses was praised as gentler than all other men. And I too beg to become and be called a disciple of the Gentle one.” Thus gentleness is a sign
Gentleness as a Sign of the Spiritual Person The goal of the spiritual path is not the great ascetic, not the indefatigable faster, not the consistent person, but the meek and gentle one. Evagrius continually mentions gentleness as a sign of spirituality. He challenges us to be like Moses, of whom Scripture says: “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all the men that were on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3).
Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko In the Old Testament, Pentecost was the feast which occurred fifty days after Passover. As the passover feast celebrated the exodus of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt, so Pentecost celebrated God’s gift of the ten commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. In the new covenant of the Messiah, the Passover event takes on its new meaning as the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, the “exodus” of men from this
By Father Thomas Hopko He came to them, but we must remember that those who were literally dead were also still somehow alive in the hands of God, even before the Messiah came. When, for example, the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of Christ, tried to catch Him in his words by saying that according to the Levite law of Moses, if a man had a wife, and he died, his brother
By Father Thomas Hopko We Christians believe, Orthodox Christians believe, that Christ is that Messianic King who frees us, and He frees us by dying. He liberates us. He ransoms us by the power of hell. He gave Himself, a ransom, to death, by which we were held captive, in order to release us, and that is what trampling down death by death means. So the icon of the so-called Descent into Sheol shows that
By Father Thomas Hopko Even on the Russian Orthodox crosses, by the way, there is a little inscription at the foot of Jesus’ feet on the cross, in four Slavonic letters, M, L, R, and B, in Slavonic, which translated means, “The place of the skull (or Golgotha) has become Paradise.” So the bosom of Abraham had to be transformed into Paradise, into a living reality again, with interrelationship with all of creation—the sun, the
By Father Thomas Hopko So you have this kind of symbolical way of speaking about the condition of being dead. And so it can sound somehow like a place, like heaven would be a place, Sheol would be a place. But all the holy fathers, and many of the modern writers, for example Hierotheos Vlachos, the Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, a very famous, well-known writer of Orthodoxy, today many of his books are translated into English,
By Hieromonk Damascene The Consequences of the Fall, Part II We are all the inheritors of the death and corruption that entered into man’s nature at the Fall. St. Gregory Palamas says that, through Adam’s one spiritual death, both spiritual and physical death were passed onto all men. [10] This is because human nature is one: we are all of the family of Adam. Orthodoxy does not accept the idea that we are guilty of
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