The modern Christian is saved through sorrows and illnesses. There is no persecution of the church - there are no experienced confessors. God leads believers through suffering into the Kingdom of Heaven. Salvation for that person from whose mouth and heart no grumbling is heard on the way of the cross.
With patience and gratitude the believing soul goes to the heavenly abodes. “I believe, Lord, that You send sorrows to save me!” — true Christians meet difficulties on their life path with joy and hope.
What is murmur
One of the main obstacles on the path to the Kingdom of Heaven is a lack of understanding of God’s providence. People are always dissatisfied with something and want more and better. They do not understand why certain troubles happen to them and not to anyone else, for which sorrows and illnesses are sent. This state of soul, expressed by dissatisfaction and reproaches to God and people, is called grumbling in Orthodox asceticism and is considered one of the most dangerous sins.
Origin of the word
The word originated in the Proto-Slavic language (ropot-).
Its roots can be found among other peoples:
- Ukr. - murmur, murmur.
- Bolg. - murmur.
- Slovenian - ropot, ropotati.
- Czech — reptat.
- Slovak — reptat.
- Polish — reptac.
It came into Russian speech from the Old Church Slavonic language. In patristic traditions and church usage this word has been preserved and is found especially often.
Meaning of the concept
Murmuring against God in Orthodoxy is one of the manifestations of pride and despondency, which is characteristic of material people or people of little faith. Its source is internal resistance to the will of God. Outwardly, this manifests itself in the form of dissatisfaction, expressed not directly or openly, but in indirect form - in quiet, muffled speech. The general meaning of the word is an unclear (soft) noise or sounds.
Now dissatisfaction has almost become the status of modern man. From all sides he is taught that he should be dissatisfied with his country, ecology, financial situation, figure, and so on. On the streets and on public transport, you can only hear someone being scolded (as a rule, politicians get the worst of it). But anger has never made anyone better.
Murmur and sadness
Sadness is a feeling that arises as a result of the appearance of any unfavorable life circumstances, obstacles, illnesses - in a word, sorrows. Everyone is used to reacting to difficulties in their own way. A good Christian will go to God with his sadness, and He will help him cope with life’s adversities. He will not complain to others about failures or difficulties that have arisen. Moreover, he will not blame anyone for what happened to him - neither God nor people.
A person of little faith will spend all his mental and physical strength worrying about existing and non-existent sorrows. Verbal indignation is an external manifestation of despondency, sadness, and its consequence. It can be heard from the lips of weak-spirited people who do not have an internal moral core. Complaining, whining, cursing and reproaching are signs of an unbelieving soul. This is disagreement with what is happening, rejection of something.
At first, a person is dissatisfied with the weather, nature, neighbors, government, time, any situation. And then it comes to the point that he sends reproaches to the Heavenly Father: “How did you allow this to happen to me?” Or in other words, but just as grumblingly.
Voice of discontent
Paul's use of the word "murmur" (and the next verse's reference to Deuteronomy 32:5) refers to events that occurred in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan. There we meet a group of experienced murmurers. What can we learn about grumbling from the forty years they spent in the wilderness?
We learn that murmur is dissatisfaction expressed out loud; it is the contempt of the heart falling from the tongue. These are the sounds we make when we become “longing” for something we don’t have and become restless (Num. 11:4; Ps. 106:14).
Moreover, the object of our passion does not have to be vicious; And indeed, often there is nothing wrong with him. For example, the Israelites sought pleasures that were completely harmless in themselves: food and water (Ex. 15:24; 16:2-3; 17:3), safe passage to the Promised Land (Num. 14:2-4 ), absence of troubles (Num. 16:41). But somehow these good desires turned into evil: they wanted to get all this before the deadlines set by God; they desired this more than God himself.
The same thing happens to us. We want to spend a quiet evening at home, but we get a call from a friend who needs help with his move. We want work that feels meaningful to us, but we get bogged down in endless papers and spreadsheets. Or, more importantly, we want the future to be the way we planned it, but we get something we didn’t want at all.
“It’s unfair,” says some voice inside us. “This is wrong,” says another. Desires turn into expectations, and expectations assert their rights. And instead of bringing our frustrations to God and allowing His Word to strengthen us, we allow unfulfilled desires to develop into dissatisfaction. We grumble.
Reasons for appearance
A significant role in the spread of despondency and discontent is played by the inculcation of the ideology of the primacy of material wealth. People's consciousness is instilled with an excessive desire for a high standard of living, without which they supposedly cannot consider themselves happy or accomplished. It has become customary to evaluate people by social status and material prosperity.
But this has never happened before in Rus', at least not in wide use. From the pages of Russian literature, many cheerful and resourceful “losers” smile warmly, who live and do not know grief. The concepts of happiness and joy have always been associated with spiritual success, with the ability to endure difficulties steadfastly and complacently, and not with the achievement of wealth.
It becomes obvious that the roots of this lie in the Orthodox faith. It doesn't matter whether a person is rich or poor. In any circumstances, you need to remain a Christian and give thanks to God for what you have. In the first case, do not become complacent and arrogant; in the second, do not lose heart.
The most common cause of dissatisfaction is not at all external unfavorable circumstances. A person with emptiness in his soul, who does not feel the meaning of life, cannot understand why he needs to endure all the difficulties and overcome them. And despondency settles inside him, resulting in dissatisfaction with everything around him.
Let's look at the basic principles of Sowing and Harvesting
First: Selection of good fertile soil. Next, you need to plow it, clearing it of stones and weeds. And this is where our work is just beginning.
Second: It is necessary to carefully select the seeds; there is always a danger that they may turn out to be unsuitable if we do not know their origin and quality. We must monitor the embryos carefully, otherwise all our hard work will be completely in vain.
Third: And after planting seeds, can anyone leave their garden without attention? And hope that without your participation, watering will be sufficient for the strong growth of young seedlings.
Fourth: Will a gardener be able to go on a long vacation without thinking about the weeds that are literally climbing from all sides, drowning out your work, destroying fragile plants?
And fifthly, and sixthly, all this... Painstaking work at all stages of the formation and existence of a garden, from finding good soil to harvesting is hard work . Tilling the land, sowing and planting, watering and care, weed removal, protection from parasites, pruning, spraying, harvesting, and much more.
This is the price we pay for a good harvest, for a beautiful fragrant garden - where the spreading aroma of flowering trees and flowers leads to delight, admiration, surprise... You want to return to such a Garden again and again.
"Take care of your garden - that's my rule." Take care of the flowers, and don’t chase the butterflies, and then the butterflies will come to you on their own. This is how life works...
(Unknown author)
Why is it a sin
The Orthodox faith says that everything is in the providence of God. Heavenly Father cares for his creation. Without His will nothing happens at all. But a proud soul resists its Creator. She has her own idea of how best to live in this world. This results in ingratitude to God for His benefits and care.
The material world loads life with ever new benefits and pleasures, which are very difficult to keep up with. This instills in the soul dissatisfaction with oneself and one's life. “Why don’t I have everything that others have that are worse than me?” - an unspiritual person asks himself a question, completely mired in bodily concerns, forgetting about God and his true purpose.
Discontent destroys a Christian as a person, makes him a pitiful, eternally whining creature, incapable of any good deed. Yes, everyone has moments when tears well up in their eyes, sadness settles in their soul, and everything is seen in black colors. And if you don’t go with your sorrow to God, then you can start wasting complaints left and right. Constantly throwing out small portions of poison from the heart, over time a person wastes his mental and physical strength, destroying himself.
Grumbling against our good
However, grumbling is more than voicing discontent. This is also the voice of disbelief. We begin to grumble when our faith in God's good plans wavers. Unwilling to believe that God is turning this disappointment for our good, we look only at the painful present.
When the people of Israel buried the last of the desert generation, Moses revealed God's plan for all their misadventures in the wilderness: "[God] brought you through the great and terrible wilderness... to humble you and to test you, so that later he could do good to you" (Deut. 8). :15-16). What a sad remark about those desert graves. On every tombstone there were carved the words: “we murmured against our own good.”
God had already told them all this after the first instance of their murmuring. He gave them a choice: they could either “listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God” (Exodus 15:26 NIV) or follow the call of the rampant mob within them. Well, this story is familiar to us. They followed the crowd.
In the same way, our grumbling is caused by judgments about God, about ourselves and about the world that are completely inconsistent with reality. (Of course, it seems to us that these judgments are just real; this always happens when the voice of the serpent sounds.) We grumble because we listened carefully to someone else’s voice, and not to the voice of our Lord God, and began to repeat after him. Instead of crying out to God: “Help me believe in Your goodness!”, we grumble, throw out our feelings and let off steam, thereby saying: “God, Your ways are bad.”
How to deal with it
To take the path of correction, you need to realize that the highest wisdom of life lies in the unity of spirit, soul and body. It is impossible to live a successful, fulfilling life with only material wealth in abundance.
The main reason for any dissatisfaction is the lack of spiritual life, inner emptiness.
The first thing you need to do is to turn to God with all your heart and repent of the fact that you tried to live on your own and in your own way, which predetermined for yourself the path of finding yourself in spiritual darkness, hopelessness, cruel despair, despondency and indignation.
Graceful changes may not happen to the soul immediately. Any passion as a medicine should be counteracted by certain virtues.
It is necessary to learn these important Christian qualities:
- patience;
- humility;
- self-reproach;
- obedience;
- trust in God's Providence.
The cause of despondency is often not the difficult circumstances of life, but the way a person relates to them. If a Christian is internally relaxed, expects only “gifts” from life, and also experiences eternal dissatisfaction from the lack of comfort and prosperity, this paralyzes his will, exhausts him, and makes him prone to despondency.
The Holy Fathers say that the most important remedy for despondency is gratitude to God. Even if it is brought with some effort and coercion, but consciously. This will be an expression of faith, and without it no spiritual life is possible. In this regard, the priests also mention the determination to firmly endure all temptations along the path of life, doing this with patience and completely trusting in the Lord. And remembering that God’s mercy turns even the most severe trials into indescribable blessings.
The Word is the Seed
A few WORDS, voiced by the enemy, who took the form of a friendly serpent, turned into seeds capable of poisoning Eve’s inner world and destroying her relationship with God. The adversary takes on various images that are acceptable in specific cases, and the most suitable for a specific person, with only one goal - without arousing suspicion, to penetrate the Soul, forcing it to listen not to the Words of God, but to the lies of the enemy.
Further we read that Adam fell into sin due to a completely different tactic of the enemy. Beloved Eve, a person dear to Adam, flesh of his flesh, handed him the forbidden fruit with a smile on her face. The unclean spirit uses Eve, whose heart is already poisoned by the presence of sin, and involves Adam, thereby the enemy leads humanity into the fall. And become the prince of this world, his goal has been achieved, now people will listen to his lies at all times.
Soil preparation
Professional farmers, gardeners and farmers begin their work by preparing the soil, and the first thing they do is remove everything unnecessary from it.
- If there are stones, they are collected and taken outside the garden.
- If unwanted trees and weeds grow, they are uprooted using various tools and equipment, sometimes even with bare hands.
- They create irrigation systems, channels for supplying life-giving water, install watering mechanisms, and strive at any cost to supply water - without which plants cannot live.
Enemy Tactics
Note the tactics of the serpent, the enemy of man and God. The enemy presents his invented words as the Words of God. Inspiring Eve that God supposedly said, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden.”
The enemy does not beat Eve, does not attack her, does not sting like a cobra, does not strangle her like a boa constrictor, but speaks WORDS .
Thus, using WORDS, the enemy sows into the Edenic Gardens of human Souls such weeds as murmur, doubt, discontent, anger, slander, and unbelief. In principle, all the vices of humanity are cultivated by the devilish false verbal flow of various information that destroys our understanding of the true structure of the universe.
It is very important to understand the fact that the ability to use various images is also one of the aggressor’s powerful tools; it does not matter to him how the poisoned seeds - POISONOUS WORDS - get into our hearts. Through a person close to you, an acquaintance, a school teacher, a respected president, from a TV screen or a smartphone, the goal is the same - to sow.
