Taking part in the family business

I. Make sure no one deceives you—The one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.

a. what is the deceit? Gnostic beliefs which make moral responsibility to be unimportant or even counter to the pursuit of “spirituality”.

b. Gnostics believed that the material world was fundamentally evil, created by a vain, malevolent demiurge who created man’s physical body in his own image to satisfy his own vanity. Human beings are essentially spiritual, created by the Archons. Each Archon created one aspect of the human psyche (soul), but realizing that man was created greater than the sum of his parts and thus more powerful than the Archons, they imprisoned mankind in the physical world, placing us in a “garden of delights (i.e. Eden)” to distract our senses with physical pleasures. The serpent was actually wisdom personified and was seeking to liberate mankind from their material prison by telling them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. therefore, the goal of this life is to escape the material world and to attain access to the celestial realms and to return to the source of life (Zoe) and to Divine Wisdom (Sophia).

c. we are not righteous because we do what is right, we are righteous and therefore, we do what is right.

II. The one who practices sin. Pres. Act. Ptcpl./Ind. denotes ongoing or continuous aspect. It is not simply the one who sins, but the one who lives to sin that is a son of the devil.