| |
|
|
On the day of the Ascension, the Apostles ask the Savior:
Is it not at this time, O Lord, that You restore the kingdom to Israel
(Acts 1:6).
The meaning of the question: Will not the promise, repeated three times in the seventh chapter of the prophet Daniel, be fulfilled in Your first coming:
But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom,
and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever
(Dan 7:18).
Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High;
and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom
(Dan 7:22).
In verse 27, this promise sounds like this (at the end of the hard times of the “half week of times”, with the coming of the Ancient of Days):
But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever
(Dan 7:27).
Moreover, not a thousand-year, but
an eternal kingdom.
The people of the saints of the Most High is the Israel of God
(Gal 6:16),
for the Apostles these are synonyms, but we, of course, refer this name to New Israel, New Testament, i.e. to the “historical Church of Christ”.
Note that in His answer to the Apostles' question:
It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power
(Acts 1:7),
the Savior in no way condemns their faith in Daniel's promise. On the contrary, since the time they asked about refers to those “times and seasons” set by the authority of the Father, it will certainly come.
But for the identification of this time, the Church is not given the “horizontal” — from the Apostles coming tradition. And the “vertical” tradition can only be received from the Mother of the Lord, who from the day of the birth of the Church becomes the Wife of the Lamb
(Psa 45:10)
by virtue of uniting with Him
“unto the Lord is one Spirit.”
In Her Person the Church co-reigns with the Lord forever. It will lead the people of God to this eternal co-reigning. Her participation in earthly life and the struggle of the People of God in the Apocalypse
(chapter 21)
is contemplated as a “descent” (καταβάσια — movement from Above downwards and from the Center to the periphery). The enemy of the Lamb's Wife is the ancient serpent: and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed;
it will strike you in the head, and you will sting it in the heel
(Genesis 3:15),
works to dispel the ecclesiological self-consciousness of the People of God, to make it paracentric. The “descent” of the Woman restores the original Trinity-like polyunity: many hearts unite into one Heart of the Wife of the Lamb
(Acts 4:32).
Thus, the People of God begin to gain eternal co-reigning with the Heavenly Man and Bridegroom of the Church. The path to this goal requires the restoration of “Mariocentrism” in the ecclesiological self-awareness of the People of God. It (self-consciousness)
must be “Mario-centric” to the extent that the ecclesiological self-consciousness of the Biblical prophets is “Jerusalem-centric”.
At the end of the difficult hard times of the “half-week of times”, the people of God suffer defeat, oppression, and by the end of this hard times — extreme exhaustion, exhaustion:
I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them
(Dan 7:21);
And he shall speak
great
words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time
(Dan 7:25);
And I heard the man clothed in linen, which
was
upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever that
it shall be
for a time, times, and an half;
and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these
things
shall be finished
(Dan 12:7).
With the coming of the Ancient of Days, the People of God will have a kingdom that is not limited by time or space. And all this is happening in a world that has not yet been transformed by the Second Coming of Christ. The timing of the fulfillment of this promise in Daniel's text is:
As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time
(Dan 7:12);
and
Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High;
and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom
(Dan 7:22).
This tense is conveyed by the noun
zman
(Aramaic
zmano), which means destined. The one-root verb
zimen
in relation to time means — to appoint. But after the end of
zman,
another
idon
follows
(Dan 7:12),
translated into Russian as a “term”, in which the three beasts, deprived of power, still keep their lives.
The Apocalypse of John contains a promise parallel to Daniel's. Here, the receipt of the kingdom, not limited by time or space, is predicted as the reign of the participants in the “first resurrection” with (ever-reigning)
Christ, as union with Christ in the sacrament of the Lamb Marriage:
Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready
(Rev 19:7).
And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and
I saw
the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received
his
mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands;
and they lived and reigned
(begin to co-reign
— for a more accurate translation)
with Christ a thousand years
(Rev 20:4).
The Apostle Paul conveys this connection with the verb σιμβασιλεύσομεν
(2 Tim 2:12)
— begin to co-reign, and explains the essence of the Lamb Marriage as a union with the Lord into His one Spirit:
But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit
(1 Cor 6:17).
Thus, the “feminine” side of this marriage union is made up of those who have acquired the Spirit of God.
The apostles on the day of the Ascension understood this promise in the spirit of Jewish religious materialism, to which no one forces us. And nothing can justify not believing in this Daniel and Apocalyptic promise. This unbelief reigned as a result of the defeat of the entire People of God in the war with the seed of the father of lies, which in the Apocalypse is contemplated in the form of the beast 666, and in the book of the prophet Daniel in the form of the small horn of the fourth beast (apparently, this is the geopolitical incarnation of the beast 666).
One of the ancient interpretations of the name 666 (English saint of the 7th century Beda Venerabilis)
is a threefold denial of the promise of the Apocalyptic “millennium”
(Rev 20:2-6).
Saint Irenaeus of Lyon interpreted this promise as “the sanctified Seventh Day”, the rest, the Sabbath of the righteous. The Apostle Paul foretold this promise as the “Sabbath Day” of the People of God:
For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day. There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God
(Heb 4:8-9).
This is the time when the deceitful energy of the devil is completely paralyzed, when he does not deceive the nations:
And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him,
that he should deceive the nations no more,
till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season
(Rev 20:3).
Meanwhile, in previous times,
“he deceives the whole universe”:
And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,
which deceiveth the whole world:
he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him
(Rev 12:9).
And two questions arise:
1. Is it permissible to propagate disbelief in the promise of the prophet Daniel
(Dan 7:18,21,27)?
2. Is it permissible to announce (following St. Augustine and Seraphim Rose)
that in the centuries from the First Coming of Christ to the time of the Antichrist, that the devil does not deceive the nations?
See also
-
Sergij Bulgakov,
The Apocalypse of John
-
Hippolytus of Rome,
TREATISE ON CHRIST AND ANTICHRIST
-
Ιωάννης Χρυσόστομος,
Λόγοι Κατά Ιουδαίων/5
-
Saint John Chrysostom,
HOMILIES ON FIRST THESSALONIANS
[pdf]
-
Saint John Chrysostom,
Adversos Judaeos
[pdf]
-
Серафим (Роуз),
Православие и религия будущего
-
Seraphim Rose,
Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future
-
Blessed Augustine,
The City of God
-
Irenaeus of Lyons,
Against Heresies
-
Metropolitan Macarius,
Orthodox Dogmatic Theology
-
Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky,
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
-
"Vladimir Lossky"
on
Google Books
-
Early Church Fathers
|
