Read the canonical biblical books and don't stray from them because there are 2000 years of confirmation for truth but that's in the Orthodox Church. The Protestant church (which comes from the word "protest") eliminated 10 books because they didn't like what they said.
The Septuagint books are all canon because the Jews created the Septuagint in Greek. At that time, the Jews didn't even understand Hebrew because Alexander the Great conquered the world and the Jews all spoke Greek for so long that they didn't know Hebrew. When Christianity came around, the Greeks used the Septuagint to prove that Jesus was the Messiah. The Jews didn't like it so they consider the Septuagint inferior and came out with the Masoretic texts, but the Dead Sea Scrolls proved that the Septuagint was more accurate than their Masoretic texts which were written 1200 years after the Septuagint. The pseudepigrapha was all in separate scrolls, so just because they were found in the same location, it doesn't mean that they're part of "official scripture."
The Christian Bible, New Testament, has similar books to the Book of Judas… which was written 200 years after the Resurrection. They are all called Apocrypha but there are two types of Apocrypha: the kind that is false and fiction that are not included in the Orthodox Bible. Then there are protestant Apocrypha which was eliminated because Protestants didn't like what they said and confirmed orthodoxy, even though they were canon for 1500 years. 2 Maccabees 12:43-45 actually talks about praying for the Dead because the dead cannot pray for themselves. By praying for the dead, you lift them up which is why in the Orthodox Church we have memorials so we can pray to God to forgive the Sin of the reposed so that they may enter the kingdom of heaven
speaking prophetically, about the
special mission of Matrona to the Russian people and in the later years of the
persecutions that she saw coming...
He predicted the German invasion of
Russia, but he also spoke of another, later war, which will kill millions of
people in one night...
At a young age he predicted the
revolution of 1917 which happened years later, saying.
"They will rob and destroy the Churches,
they will seize the lands and greedily divide them among themselves,
persecuting everyone without exception..."
She once asked her mother for a
large feather. She plucked it, and showing it to her mother, said to her,
"Do you see, mom, this little
feather?
And what shall I see, my child,
after you have plucked it?
That way, mother, they will soon
pluck our father, the Tsar, too..."
Her mother was afraid, but in a
short time the prophecy came true and the Tsar was led to execution...
Dozens of patients passed by her
house every day and most of them, having faith, got well...
When she moved to Moscow in 1925
without even a passport or residence permit, the Soviet regime repeatedly tried
to arrest her. She eluded them at the last moment, warned by God in various
ways. As soon as she was leaving, the NKVD agents arrived, but it was too
late...
Anna Vibornova remembers the
following incident.
"Once a policeman came to
arrest Matrona and she tells him
"Leave, leave quickly, you have
calamity in your house. The blind does not leave you, I am sitting here on the
bed, I am not going anywhere..."
The policeman heard her, went home
and found his wife burnt by the gas stove. He caught up and took her to the
hospital.
When he came to work the next day,
they asked him,
"Did you catch the blind
one?"
"The blind woman, he told them,
I will never conceive. Thanks to the blind woman I managed to take my wife to
the hospital, if she hadn't told me I would have lost her..."
Students politically excluded by the
regime at the time tell how with the prayers of this blind woman they overcame
the obstacles to obtaining a degree. Even officials of the regime, in a
paradoxical way, helped those for whom Saint Matrona prayed.
But also people who suffered from
witchcraft or psychological problems found their cure in this...
He advised us to make our cross
correctly and to cross everything around us, even our food...
Zenaida Zhdanova once asked her,
"Why did God allow so many Churches
to be closed and demolished?"
and answered with the following
words,
"This was the will of God. The
people are as if hypnotized and a terrible demonic power has come into action.
It is in the air, and it permeates everywhere.
In the past, this demonic force
lived in the swamps and dense forests, because people regularly went to church,
wore and honored the cross. Their houses were protected by the images, the
candles they burned, the sanctification they did...
The demons flew away and were afraid
to come near...
Today, however, these houses and the
people themselves have become abode of demons for their unbelief and their
distance from Christ.
He also said,
"When I die few will come to my
grave. But after years the world will know me, and people afflicted by sorrows
will beg me to pray for them... I will listen to them all and I will help them
all...
Come to me and tell me as if I were
alive, your sorrows and your problems and I will listen to them all and I will
help them all..."
He still remembers Mr. Zhdanova,
architect engineer,
"I was asking her about the
course of Russia during the Revolution, and she was telling me,
First they will take out Stalin. After
him, the rulers will alternate and one will be worse than the other....They
will seize Russia...
After the war, the
"comrades" will return abroad, they will see how foreigners live,
they will become corrupt and finally break their faces.
At that time, Michael will appear...
(S.S. from the following, it seems
that he is probably talking about Mikhail Gorbachev. But time will tell... )
"He will want to help, change
everything, turn everything upside down...
But if he knew he was going to fail
and be killed, well, then he wouldn't have started in any way...
There will be riots, disputes,
massacres... One party will fight the other. Then there will be some
improvement, but it will take some time. You will take a breath, you will have
everything, you will even be able to do the Prayer in Red Square but also the
memorial services for the massacred Tsar...
But then the old ones will return to
Russia... and the situation will become worse than it was before...
Oh, how I pity you all! Until the
end of time, (because from then on), this is how you will live..."
Or Anna Vibornova remembers,
"I visited Matrona during the
days of Great Lent (1952), shortly before she died.
Don't be afraid, he tells me, there
won't be another war soon. We'll lie down like this and get up like that"
"How else?" I ask her.
" Well, - he tells me -, we'll
go back to the "wooden" one...
"Matuska, I say to her, what
does "wooden" mean? "
"Wooden plow, he tells me,
that's what we'll work with then..."
"And where will the tractors we
now have go?..."
Oh, - he says -, leave the tractors...
Then the wooden plow will work, and life will be good. However, we have not yet
reached those times. But you will not die until then and you will see all
this...
