And then he gave even more joy to the devil by sacrificing to the idols. His neighbour continued to beg his forgiveness, even in the place where Saprikios was about to be martyred, but the latter refused and therefore didn’t have the strength to confess Christ. He was arrested by the pagans, since he was a Christian, but he still couldn’t find the strength to overcome the devil, who remained at his side, waiting for him to betray his faith and make sacrifice to the idols. How can we say to God ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’? Wouldn’t we be lying to God? And worse than that, we’d become a plaything of the demons.Ī glaring example of this is Saprikios, who, although his neighbour begged his forgiveness for some misdeed he’d perpetrated against him, Saprikios refused to countenance it. We should know, though, that if we retain enmity towards our neighbour, in word or deed, then we can’t say even the Lord’s Prayer to God. In fact, there are some people who are so deluded that they boast about this animosity. The temptation towards hatred is very great and we often give in to it when it concerns our neighbour. But as we well know, we can’t declare hostilities and war against the evil one when, simultaneously, we harbour hatred towards our neighbour. In no way is it in his interest for Christians to forgive one another and, at the same time to consider him an enemy. This is the point at which the whole secret lies, because it’s not in his interest for people, particularly Orthodox Christians, to turn against him. And the main thing is that he does everything in his power to stop us discovering that we should hate the devil and all his works and not our neighbour. He brings disasters, but does so in such a way that people blame their neighbour for what’s happened to them, rather than condemning the evil one. People have been experiencing and feeling this hatred on the part of the devil for centuries, but his great secret is that he carefully hides his animosity, so that we can’t see it. As a result of this behaviour, the devil swore an oath, as the god he believed himself to be, that he would engage in hostilities with the Holy, Triune God and also with people, who were made ‘in His image and likeness’. Lucifer dared to think and imagine himself as god, and once he’d really come to believe this inside himself, he fell, like lightning, from heavenly Paradise, dragging with him a host of other angels, who all became dark demons. Terrible things happened, my friends, which are beyond the understanding of mere mortals. Lucifer refused to render veneration and worship to his Creator, the Holy, Triune God, and in place of this he set himself up as god. To put it more simply, pride was discovered and invented by the devil. According to Saint John of the Ladder, pride means: ‘Denial of God, an invention of the demons’.
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