||    Pope Shenouda    ||    Father Matta    ||    Bishop Mattaous    ||    Fr. Tadros Malaty    ||    Bishop Moussa    ||    Bishop Alexander    ||    Habib Gerguis    ||    Bishop Angealos    ||    Metropolitan Bishoy    ||

 

 “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead

and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places.”

Ephesians 1:18-20

 

Father Matta El-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor)


 

THE APOSTLE PAUL is a man whose eyes were opened when he was taken to the third heaven. It is not his physical eyes that were opened but the eyes of his understanding, which is a mystical expression because it means a revelation of the essence of the truth; when a man of prayer is given to enter the external circle of mental knowledge with the fundamentals of truth and their divine essence exposed to him.

At this point he faces the sphere of the highest call to revelation, and thus the power of the promised hope for man is revealed before him as well as the mystery of the abundance of the Son which the saints received and in which they lived. The person who is both selected and fortunate then gets to know the greatness of God’s exceeding power in His dealings with the saints without hindrance, as He outpours on to those who believe in Him the strength of His power with which He raised Christ from among the dead, nay, showing the depth of equality between the Father and the Son by seating the Son, resurrected from among the dead, rising to Him, on His right hand insisting on revealing to us the power of equality that exists between the Father and the Son. With this He also gave a true image of what our end will be, as God will seat us on His right hand because we live in Christ and Christ lives in us.

Here is a clear allusion to the strength of the power of God in resurrecting Jesus Christ from among the dead while bearing in His body all the renewed bodies of the spiritual creation of all believers.

Of course Jesus Christ’s resurrection from among the dead and with Him the believers in Him of humankind is an indescribable deed. It is the first and last of its kind, of all renewed mankind resurrecting in Christ, with Christ as its head, and we counted as members of His body, sanctified, justified and raised in glory.

If we measure the stature of all the heavenly beings, the angels, heads of angels, and heavenly hosts including the cherubim and seraphim, the kind of renewed man stands as the only creation in the image of His creator in glory. Thus Man will have received a fellowship in the highest glory of the Son, that is God.

The Apostle Paul, who was entrusted with the revelation of truth in heaven, summarizes it by mentioning that the stature of the new man will be in Christ, who was given a name above all names mentioned in heaven and on earth, not only in the present but also in the future  (Phil 2:8; Eph 1:21).  

sealed with faith (through eternity). We can sum it up according to the actual present and what it will be: the new creation, in Christ, will be among the noted heavenly beings, even the highest.

These words are the gospel, the word of God that shakes heaven and earth. No one deserves it except him who believes them.

Prayer

We aspire to You, O Lord, who have realized all this to give it to us,

Your truthful and honest promises must inevitably become our share, as we ask You,

Our hope in You, O God, is a living hope, strengthened by the promise of Christ,

Our main hope is that You give us the knowledge of the revelation,

With which we see the truth and believe in it, becoming stronger with it.

The knowledge is available to every man, but the revelation is the hopeful truth,

We joy in the revelation because it will strengthen our faith in You.

The revelation, in its simplest image, is a feeling of the truth

along with holding onto it till death,

Christ in front of Pilate did not state anything other than saying that He is the truth,

You told us that we would know the truth, and the truth itself would make us free.

July 11, 2005

 

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