Christ Is Risen!
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Acts XII, 3 — ‘ημεραι’ - ‘emerai’ - ‘days’.
Acts XII, 6 — ‘ημελλεν’ - ‘emellen’ - ‘was about to’ - from ‘μέλλω’ - ‘to be about’.
For more information about the reading from the Apostle, please refer to the link:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/commentaries/13052023.html
John VIII, 39 — ‘ημων’ - ‘emon’ - ‘us’ (our).
John VIII, 40 — ‘παρα του θεου’ - ‘para tou theou’ - ‘from God (near God; from beside, from the nearness of God)’. Jesus speaks here as a human being, by His human nature. Before that, He had motivated the Jews and all the people listening and reading with words about truth and freedom, and here He is speaking as a human being, but a human being from God, close to God, righteous (as Abraham himself was to a great but imperfect extent). Therefore, we can think that His words and the specific phrasing here mean that He heard them in prayer to the Father as a human being. With these words of God, the Lord wants to motivate us all to seek the truth and God, Both of Whom give us freedom. If we compare this with the words about the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter, which have almost the same literal meaning and are identical in meaning, then it is clear that Christ as a human being has the entirety of the Holy Spirit, and is truly the Anointed One of God in the fullest sense. See more about this in the piece at the link at the end:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/PowerOfHuman.html
John VIII, 41 — ‘ημεις εκ πορνειας ουκ εγεννηθημεν’ - ‘emeis ek porneias ouk egennethemen’ - ‘we were not born (do not come from) fornication (adultery)’. Here another preposition is used that directly indicates the source of origin - ‘εκ’. The Son of God, the Second Hypostasis of the Holy Trinity, is ‘’begotten of the Father‘’ - ‘εκ του πατρος’. The Jews do not distinguish between these two prepositions - in vain, they need to - but the Lord Jesus Christ does. Although He is the Creator of people, including these Jews, their deeds do not come from Him, they come from the devil. Evil has no source other than the devil in its own sense. God did not create evil, the father of evil is the devil. That is why we are talking about the works of people, not about them themselves, but people loved their works more than they loved God, so they rejected Christ. This is what the Lord warns us against here. Also, the Jews' use of a different preposition indicates their mistaken exaggeration of the role of sin in the origin of sinners - a person cannot in the proper Biblical sense be εκ πορνειας
because they have the image of God, even if they were conceived in fornication or even rape. A person comes as a creature from God the Creator, but their actions and thoughts and words can come from the devil. Christ, speaking further of the Jews' origin from the devil, refers to their deeds and plans, thoughts of the heart, and the like, see above.
For more information about the Gospel reading, please refer to the following link:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/commentaries/13052023.html
To the Reverend Agapitus of Kyiv-Pechersk, a gratuitous physician, in the Near Caves:
For more information about these frequent readings to the saints, see the following links:
https://www.facebook.com/Oleksandr.S.Zhabenko/posts
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/commentaries/22052023.html
Glory be to Thee, our God, glory be to Thee!