The events of recent years should convince anyone that the society we live in is disintegrating through moral bankruptcy. This has come about because man has denied the true God. There are religions galore, the vast majority of people claim to believe in God, there are numerous and wealthy religious organizations; yet society, families, and individuals become worse and worse.
This has happened because what is necessary is not simply “religion” of some kind, for all religions but one contain delusion. What is necessary is the Truth, and this is what modern man rejects, believing that truth is something one manufactures for oneself. In a recent poll, a large majority of “Christians” in the
United States
, supposedly the Western world’s most “Christian” country, stated that they believed that many different religions all lead to salvation. Yet this is a denial of the Gospel itself, of Christ Himself, of the entire Christian revelation.
How have “Christians” come to this point? Of course, they have been led to this point, lied to, manipulated, brainwashed by government, by the media, by the educational establishment, by traitorous leaders of their own churches. But one can only be brainwashed if one allows oneself to be. We allow ourselves to be brainwashed, we accept lies as truth, because of the passion of pride.
Pride, the root of all the passions, is the fundamental delusion that one is one’s own master, one’s own “god.” It is the primordial blindness that entered the human heart when our First Parents listened to the lie of the tempter in
Eden
. Everyone is born with it, inherits it.
Thus the idea that one is a “god” who creates one’s own reality is a quintessentially demonic temptation that appeals to pride. The idea that one can create “one’s own path” to God is a variety of this fundamental delusion. Until we deny this delusion and seek truth as an objective reality, we are enslaved to demonic suggestion and completely vulnerable to whatever evil forces desire to lie to us and enslave us.
We Orthodox Christians are not immune from taking this delusion into our souls. Since it is all around us, and there is enormous social pressure to give in and say, “It does not matter what faith you profess,” we feel increasingly lonely for insisting that there is only one true God, the Holy Trinity, and one, true Church, the Orthodox Church. Most of the official “Orthodox” patriarchs and bishops have denied these essential teachings, yet they go on wearing their robes, performing their services, building beautiful church buildings, and drawing big salaries…why not just throw in the towel and join them?
The answer, of course, is that if we do, we could lose our souls for all eternity. My soul is the only soul I have or will ever have. If I find salvation, I will be in the company of innumerable saints and angels, and the loneliness of this short life will be as nothing. And, even in this life, though we suffer inwardly, we also experience
Paradise
in the heart through prayer and the communion of the Holy Mysteries, which is a pledge of the true and eternal life to come. May we be delivered from the blindness of pride through the grace of Christ and resolve to tread daily the lonely and thorny path through Golgotha to
Paradise
!
One, True God; One,
True
Church
Only genuine Orthodoxy as the true Body of Christ is capable of saving those who thirst for Him, thirsting out of pure love for Christ. The love of Christ is everything. For the sake of this love everything exists, and for its sake all is done in the Church. And when some contemporary sages preach the teaching of the “father of lies,” the devil, that God is one and that many different ways lead to Him as many different paths lead to the top of a mountain from different sides, it is necessary to remember that He Who offered Himself as the unique Way, the Truth and the Life, Food and Drink, is the Son of God, the God-man, who said that all the teachers who came into the world apart from Him are essentially “thieves and robbers.” (John 10:8).
There is one God glorified in the Trinity, one Lord Jesus Christ, one Church in Him, one Communion; there are no other ways or “churches” apart from the unique, genuine Orthodox Church, preserving and increasing what She received and continues to receive from Her Head, Christ, and the Holy Spirit living and working in Her.
Her members are not many in number today. But to Her apply the words of God, “Fear not, little flock,” and, “I have overcome the world.” (Luke
12:32
and John
16:33
)…
Our primary goal must be to find the Truth, to find Christ, to find His genuine Church.
- from “What is Truth?” by Archpriest Lev Lebedev
