Matthew Wolfe | The Atavist Magazine | August 2026 | 2,275 words (8 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 179, “The Bleeding Hearts.”
On the evening of December 22, 2013, an armored van packed with cash made its rounds through the regal streets of Vienna. The city’s elegant Baroque buildings were trimmed with glinting strings of lights; Christmas markets sold spiced glühwein on cobbled squares. A little after midnight, as the festivities quieted, the van, operated by the security company Loomis, stopped at a walk-up ATM on a desolate stretch of storefronts. Two guards stepped out, entered a room-size vestibule behind the machine, and commenced replenishing the ATM with cash. A minute later, two figures wearing black balaclavas and carrying handguns emerged from the shadows and followed the guards inside.
The pair ordered the guards onto the ground and handcuffed them. After snatching the keys to the armored van, one of them unlocked the vehicle and began stuffing crisp bank notes into black duffel bags. The thieves then checked the street for witnesses and disappeared into the night with nearly three million euros.
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It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed, revealing intimate knowledge of Loomis’s anti-theft procedures—perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street whenever it was being restocked. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman.
They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee, Tamara S., who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. On the morning of January 10, 2014, federal police raided Tamara’s apartment and arrested her. Initially she denied any involvement in the robbery, but eventually she confessed. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice. The man she claimed had masterminded the job was one of their own: Gabriel E., a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT.
The next day, a team that included some of Gabriel’s former colleagues raided his upscale apartment and placed him under arrest. Unlike Tamara, Gabriel confessed right away. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there.
It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth.
“Wouldn’t it be right,” Gabriel asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?”
Austrians have a reputation, even among themselves, as scrupulous rule followers. In Vienna it’s rare to glimpse people jaywalking, and the city’s subway runs on an honor system. An Austrian friend suggested that this predilection had its roots in the country’s imperial past. From its power center in Austria, the Hapsburg monarchy ruled enormous portions of Europe for six centuries with the help of a dizzyingly complex bureaucracy. The compulsion to follow rules even a hundred years after the Hapsburgs lost power, my friend explained, was like the twitching of empire’s phantom limb. (Austria is also a very private country; the media don’t report the full names of people involved in criminal cases, a practice I’m abiding by too.)
As a police officer, Gabriel had been an enforcer of rules in a rule-bound society, making his crime all the more perplexing. His family told me that he was staunchly law-abiding, and had never incurred so much as a speeding ticket. In retrospect, however, they realized that there had been hints of where he was headed. He always loved to give things: presents to his three children, donations to charity, food to people begging in the street. After leaving the police force and starting a private-security business, he became wealthy, only to grow conspicuously ascetic, donating increasingly large amounts of money and possessions. By the time he was arrested, he’d sold his Audi and his Rolex, and he was down to almost his last suit. When police raided his home, they found bags filled with clothes purchased from H&M that Gabriel planned to give away.
*The Atavist is using pseudonyms for Gabriel’s family members.
Gabriel’s son Florian* recalled that the summer before the Loomis heist, his father had posed a curious hypothetical. “Wouldn’t it be right,” he asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?” Florian, who was studying to become a police officer himself, disagreed, and his father dropped the issue.
Still, to idly philosophize about such a crime was one thing. To actually do it—to fashion oneself into a twenty-first-century Robin Hood—was another.
After his arrest, Gabriel was remanded to Vienna’s largest and most forbidding jail, Josefstadt. When I visited him there in 2014, I expected to encounter someone solemn and morally serious—a grim-faced saint. But when Gabriel entered the room, he radiated the warm excitement of a Labrador retriever. A tall, fit man of 50 with fetching salt-and-pepper stubble, Gabriel was wearing a cerulean-blue hoodie, clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, and a beaded necklace. He looked less like a former law enforcement officer than a hip Los Angeles dad. We sat down, and without hesitation Gabriel, still the inveterate benefactor, offered me exactly what I wanted: an explanation of how he’d gotten into this mess.
Gabriel’s childhood, he told me, had been shaped by “gruesomeness.” He was raised in Tyrol, Austria’s bucolic eastern province, by an alcoholic father given to punching his two sons. Gabriel and his elder brother eventually came under the care of their grandmother, who as punishment would regularly lock them in a darkened closet. “I had a very fucking childhood,” he told me in emphatic, accented English, omitting an adjective but still making the point. (After our first encounter, I would meet with Gabriel several times in the ensuing decade and communicate with him by letter, phone, and email.)
The two siblings both went into law enforcement, Gabriel in Vienna, where he hoped to help others in desperate situations, and his brother in the state police. Athletic and competitive, Gabriel quickly made the famed Wiener Einsatzgruppe Alarmabteilung (WEGA), the Vienna police department’s most expertly trained unit. Despite his severe upbringing, Gabriel was by nature cheerful. Every WEGA operation, as he saw it, was a new problem to be solved through hard work and an upbeat attitude.
One afternoon in 1994, Gabriel told me, his WEGA squad was tasked with busting up a drug deal in Vienna’s Fifteenth District, which at the time was the city’s seediest neighborhood. When the team moved to make an arrest, the seller, an African immigrant, bolted. Gabriel pursued him, shouting for the man to stop and firing his pistol in the air. As he closed in, the suspect turned and pulled out his own handgun. The two men exchanged fire, hitting each other in the thigh. Gabriel tackled the dealer and, following a short, bloody wrestling match, overpowered him. The pair shared an awkward ambulance ride to the hospital.
The shooting put Gabriel’s relentless positivity to the test. He endured months of physical therapy to regain the use of his leg. When he returned to work, he transitioned out of WEGA. After a brief, unhappy stint as a traffic cop, he left the force entirely. In 2001, he started his own private-security company, specializing in investigations of corporate theft. He gave it an English name: Service of Secrecy. The early years were lean as Gabriel struggled against larger competitors, but as word of his talents spread, the business thrived.
Gabriel occasionally found himself thinking about the man who’d shot him. He saw him only one additional time, in court, and knew little of his past—not even which country he was from. But at some point, Gabriel learned that the man was an asylum-seeker, as were so many African immigrants in Austria. They’d begun arriving in the country in the 1990s, fleeing civil wars and ailing economies. Gabriel wondered what the man’s life had been like back home, what he was running from.
In 2006, Gabriel told me, he had an opportunity to visit Africa himself; a client had recommended him to authorities in the Central African nation of Gabon, which was interested in creating its own version of WEGA. He told me he flew down for an interview with the defense minister, Ali Bongo, the son of the country’s notoriously corrupt authoritarian president, Omar Bongo, and was offered a lucrative multiyear consulting contract. Gabriel didn’t love the idea of working for a despot, but he had a family to support. And at the end of the day, someone was going to train the country’s police. Why not him? Gabriel accepted the job.
He commuted between Gabon and Austria every few weeks. During his trips to Gabon, he told me, he spent much of his time touring the countryside, where Bongo wanted to establish an array of military bases. The poverty Gabriel witnessed shocked him. By African standards Gabon was wealthy, mainly due to its coastal oil reserves. In the capital, Libreville, a former French colonial port, supermarkets stocked expensive Bordeaux and Roquefort cheese. But the wealth was unequally distributed. “People lived in huts without ANYTHING,” Gabriel wrote to me in 2015. “Yet merely one hundred meters further I could see pompous buildings with inconceivable luxury.” The experience, he added, “completely overwhelmed me.”
Gabriel began to feel guilty about the money he made, which had bought him a posh apartment and car. He responded to his unease with an energetic program of handouts. Gabriel had been raised Catholic and later joined a Pentecostal church. He told me that charity was an important part of his faith. He decided to give money to destitute Gabonese. There was no formal plan; when he encountered someone in need—particularly single mothers and people requiring medical care they couldn’t afford—he gave them whatever cash he had.
Back in Vienna, Gabriel’s family was growing. Following an amicable divorce, he had remained close with his first wife, Sabine, with whom he had two children, Julia and Florian. He remarried a woman who taught French—helpful for his work in Gabon, where French is the official language—and, in 2012, she gave birth to his third child. Domestic life was good. But the feeling that plagued Gabriel abroad persisted at home. Soon he began filling the trunk of his car with clothes, toys, appliances, and other items, then driving east to Romania, where he’d stop in poor villages and give it all away. Sometimes he took his two elder children, who by then were teenagers and growing concerned about Gabriel’s haphazard giving. (So was their mother.) But the donations, and the astonished smiles of the people who received them, never failed to make Gabriel happy. It felt more than good, he told me once. Then he paused, searching for the correct English word. “It was,” he said, “mandatory. My duty. My obligation.”
In 2009, Omar Bongo died, and his son left the ministry of defense to run for president. The new defense minister, Gabriel told me, declined to renew his contract. Although the lost income was regrettable, Gabriel was by then so consumed by his mission to help Gabon’s people that he didn’t mind. While making his ad hoc contributions to everyday Gabonese, Gabriel had begun to dream of something bigger—something that, to his mind, would be truly consequential.
His difficult upbringing had made him empathetic toward children in dire circumstances, particularly those without parents. He wanted to instill in a frightened child a durable sense of safety and security—a feeling that, growing up, he had been denied. Before leaving Gabon at the end of his consultancy, Gabriel began drawing up plans to build an orphanage there. It was to be a whole complex, in fact, where every child would have their own lodgings, painted in bright colors, and where all their needs would be met. He named the imagined community Blue Sky Village.
Back in Vienna, Gabriel began soliciting donations to make Blue Sky Village a reality. He estimated that he’d need nearly a million euros to begin the project, and he wrote dozens of letters to aid organizations and philanthropists requesting help in financing the plan. Soliciting charity, Gabriel found, was much tougher than handing it out. He received few responses. The people who did reply politely suggested that, given his lack of experience in the aid space, he donate to existing groups. But investigating corporate theft hadn’t done much for his faith in how companies managed their money. What’s more, Gabriel thought that a lot of groups wasted money on lavish fundraisers—the Viennese have a long tradition of philanthropic balls—rather than spending it on people in need. He grew angry when he thought about money being used for frivolities when children were starving and scared. “This makes me so… hateful,” he told me. The only way to know that orphans in Gabon were being saved, he thought, was to save them himself.
As he struggled to get his project off the ground, Gabriel received a call from an old WEGA colleague named Heinz, who was now working in security for Loomis. The company had suffered some recent employee thefts, and Heinz wanted Gabriel to help its Austrian branch sharpen its embezzlement protocols.
In a bleak irony, Heinz had been fired from the Viennese police in 2006, after he was accused of beating a Gambian immigrant resisting deportation. Gabriel told me that he’d heard about Heinz’s case in the media. Despite what Heinz had allegedly done, Gabriel found it easy to rationalize taking the Loomis job: The more money he earned, the more he could give away to those in need. He agreed to come on as a consultant, and the two men became friendly. Soon, Heinz introduced Gabriel to a Loomis employee named Tamara.
AI keeps reshaping how people discover beauty trends.
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In the new print issue of Esses, a quarterly print magazine covering motorsports and the culture around it, Duncan Fyfe writes about the most bizarre Formula One video game ever made. Centered around Gerhard Berger, a former racing driver from Austria who competed in F1 from 1984 to 1997, Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz is a quirky video game from 1993 that raises more questions than it asks. Fyfe digs into the mystery, investigating the quiz’s grammatically awkward questions and the game’s developer, Austria Soft, whose existence is questionable. (Esses subscription may be required—consider becoming a member.)
THE REAL QUIZ, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear. This only becomes more difficult, and even sinister. Question nine: FROM WHAT COUNTRY IS JEAN ALESI REALLY? The answer is not France, where Alesi was born and grew up, and under whose flag Alesi competed for over a decade. To progress in the quiz, the game forces one to submit that Alesi was born to Italian parents, and thus is “really” from Italy.
The game’s questions all have correct answers that cannot be submitted, and yet they are less difficult to answer than these ones: Who made this game? Why? And what was Gerhard Berger thinking?
Daily habits play a major role in improving physical and mental well-being.
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Apparently, African wild dogs enjoy knocking around balls of elephant dung like a football. It’s this playfulness that has endeared them to researchers—but, as Helen Sullivan points out, they have their work cut out for them trying to protect this persecuted big predator. Sullivan follows conservationists in southern Africa who are carefully managing tiny, isolated populations and attempting to introduce genetic diversity. The story of the three sisters who are flown over from Mozambique to be introduced to Waterberg—a South African municipality three hours from Johannesburg—is heart-wrenching. Yet in such a harsh environment, individual tragedies have to be endured while staying focused on the bigger picture: the fragile recovery of the species as a whole.
As we help Greyling and Hlako lift a crate off the pickup, a dusty paw flops out of one corner, and I think of something my uncle says: “You can smell the world in a dog’s paw.” Mooney and I back away, watching from inside a container as Hlako moves the car so that the overheating dog is in the shade. Though it is late afternoon, the temperature is still around 90 degrees.
Hlako and Greyling release the dogs one at a time, opening the crate and waiting until a dog walks, then trots, out. The first is less sure on her feet, the second seems almost normal, until Mooney points out that she would have run much faster from the crate and people had she not still been a bit dozy. The sisters stand together in a grassy area, point their noses in the air, move their satellite-dish ears and lie down under a thorn tree; it has been a long day.
On 26 August, Romania received its first payment of €2.5 billion under the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defence instrument, representing 15% of its total allocation of €16.7 billion.
SAFE is a €150 billion financial instrument providing loans to member states. It primarily funds joint procurement of ammunition, missiles, air defence, and ground combat systems produced within the EU. It is part of the European Commission's ReArm Europe/Readiness 2030 plan, which aims to unlock over €800 billion in defence investment across the European Union.
The pre-financing will help Romania accelerate priority defence investments, strengthen resilience, and modernise its military capabilities in line with shared European goals. SAFE is designed to enable swift, co-ordinated action, improve the ability of European forces to work together, and strengthen Europe's defence industry, including through joint procurement and closer cross-border co-operation.
Defence and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius (pictured) said: "Today's €2.5 billion payment to Romania under SAFE is a major milestone for European defence and a more sovereign Europe. This funding will strengthen Romania's defence capabilities and industrial base, while contributing to Europe's overall security. SAFE is a clear demonstration of our strong commitment to European security, and to the resilience and to defence of our Eastern Flank."
This payment follows the completion of all required procedural steps and reflects the EU's commitment to providing timely, practical support through SAFE. Further payments will follow, as agreed milestones and implementation are met.
The SAFE instrument is financed by EU borrowing on the financial markets. This enables competitively priced and attractively structured long-duration loans to requesting Member States. The terms of the SAFE loans benefit from the EU's strong credit rating.
Showcasing stories from Andrew Fedorov, Shayla Love, Malcolm Johnston, Erin Somers, and Chris Stanton.
The house with the red-brick exterior, huge old-growth maple, and sprawling back patio on Castle Frank Crescent in Toronto’s pricy Rosedale neighborhood seemed like the perfect symbol of generational wealth and respectability. As Malcolm Johnston reports for Toronto Life, the occupants, Chakib Mansouri and Majdouline Alouah, might have appeared to be upwardly mobile, driving fancy cars and “dripping” with designer couture. In reality, they funded all their luxuries with a life of crime.
By the fall of 2023, Mansouri and Alouah were so engrossed in their lives of leisure that neither picked up on the vehicles tailing them, day after day. Nor did they notice the plainclothes officers posted up on street corners, in condo lobbies and at cafés, collecting evidence that would expose the couple’s part in an audacious scam that stole more than $185 million from victims in Toronto, across Canada and around the world.
Image source unknown. Appears to be AI generated.
by Brian Shilhavy
As we follow the story about the life of Jesus Christ in John’s gospel written in the New Testament portion of the Bible, we come to a very interesting passage in John chapter 7 which documents how the brothers of Jesus Christ turned against him, and mocked him.
To understand the events of chapter 7, however, we need to first look at what happened in chapter 6, where Jesus was addressing a huge crowd of over 5000 people, and miraculously turned “five small barley loaves and two small fish” into enough food to feed everyone, with plenty left over.
Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick.
Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Feast was near.
When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip,
“Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”
He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do. Philip answered him,
“Eight months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”
Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up,
“Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”
Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.”
There was plenty of grass in that place, and the men sat down, about five thousand of them.
Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish. When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples,
“Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.”
So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say,
“Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.”
Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself. (John 6:1-15)
As John writes at the beginning of this chapter, the news about Jesus was now starting to spread fast, because he literally healed everyone who came to him.
And now, with this miraculous way of multiplying food to feed the masses, they wanted to make him king over Israel.
But Jesus’s kingdom was not of this world. Satan offered it to him, but he refused.
So Jesus had to literally hide from the masses who actually liked him, but for selfish reasons. But Jesus’s problems with his new-found fame were only beginning.
Eventually the crowd found him, which led to Jesus’s next encounter with them later on in chapter 6. Jesus made it clear that he was not like Moses, who gave their forefathers “manna”, bread from heaven, so that the nation could live in the desert for 40 years.
Jesus tried to teach them the difference between physical food and spiritual food, while also prophesying about his own execution which would result in his body being killed, and his blood being spilled into the earth.
Once the crowd understood that there were no more free lunches coming, most of them abandoned him.
At this the Jews began to grumble about him because he said,
“I am the bread that came down from heaven.”
They said,
“Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I came down from heaven’?”
“Stop grumbling among yourselves,”
Jesus answered.
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’
Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.
I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life.
I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died.
But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.
This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves,
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Jesus said to them,
“I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.”
He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. On hearing it, many of his disciples said,
“This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them,
“Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!
The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing.
The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.”
For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him.
He went on to say,
“This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.”
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. (John 6:41-66)
Jesus’s problems were just beginning. Not only did he lose most of his disciples, the ruling Jews also saw him as a threat, probably due to the way he could draw such large crowds through his miracles, and they began to plot his murder, as chapter 7 begins.
After this, Jesus went around in Galilee, purposely staying away from Judea because the Jews there were waiting to take his life. (John 7:1)
Were members of Jesus’s family among the disciples who stopped following him and turned against him?
The text does not say, but what follows gives us some insights into his “family” who began to oppose him.
Now, as I wrote last week, the English word for “family”, which today means mostly a “nuclear family” of a father, mother, and their children, is a concept that did not exist in biblical times. See:
Jesus probably belonged to a large household that revolved around the family business as “craftsmen”, probably stone masons and carpentry.
That household probably included blood siblings of Jesus, but most likely others who were also part of the business.
So when his “brothers” oppose him in the text, it is very possible that they were more than just his biological siblings. “Brothers” was also a term that Jesus used for his disciples, none of whom were his blood relatives.
But when the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles was near, Jesus’ brothers said to him,
“You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.”
For even his own brothers did not believe in him. (John 7:2-5)
Jesus’s goal was clearly NOT to become a “public figure.” This is why he hid himself from the crowds when they tried to force him to become king.
And when he had to hide himself from the Jews who were trying to kill him, his own family criticized him for hiding.
Here is how Jesus responded to their criticisms:
Therefore Jesus told them,
“The right time for me has not yet come; for you any time is right.
The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.
You go to the Feast. I am not yet going up to this Feast, because for me the right time has not yet come.”
Having said this, he stayed in Galilee. (John 7:6-9)
Jesus explained a very important principle here for himself, and his true disciples. The world loves its own, and as long as you do the things that are approved by the world, which, by the way, includes the Christian religion today, then the world accepts you and protects you.
But if instead you expose the evil of the world, which I have done for decades now, such as exposing the pedophiles and sex traffickers within Christianity, both the pedo Priests in the Catholic Church and the pedophiles also among pastors in the non-Catholic churches (Mormons, Protestants, Evangelicals, etc.), then they will hate you and seek to destroy you.
For much of my life I have had to live in anonymity, because powerful people have wanted to destroy me, and lock me up, even in recent times.
My family thinks I am crazy for not using the same methods of communication that they do, such as cell phones, the “free” emails like Gmail, Yahoo, and others, which take all of your communications and add them into their huge databases that power their AI models.
It’s a difficult and hard life, as Christians and family members attack you and criticize you for not being part of the “community” that Christians insist everyone has to belong to.
But I take great comfort in knowing that the world treated Jesus the exact same way, because he exposed their evil deeds.
So when the right time did come, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem in secret, and confronted the crowds. He states a very important principle about those who serve Satan by bowing to the world system, and those who oppose Satan and suffer for it.
However, after his brothers had left for the Feast, he went also, not publicly, but in secret.
Now at the Feast the Jews were watching for him and asking,
“Where is that man?”
Among the crowds there was widespread whispering about him. Some said,
“He is a good man.”
Others replied,
“No, he deceives the people.”
But no one would say anything publicly about him for fear of the Jews.
Not until halfway through the Feast did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach.
The Jews were amazed and asked,
“How did this man get such learning without having studied?”
Jesus answered,
“My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me.
If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.
He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.” (John 7:10-18)
Who are the ones who are people of truth, and who are those who oppose the truth?
I highlighted the word “false” in the passage above, which is the opposite of “truth.”
The Greek word is ἀδικία (adikia), which occurs 25 times in the New Testament, with the most common translation being “unrighteousness”, at least in the older English translations, but it is also translated as “wickedness” and “injustice.”
It is primarily a legal term.
This is the entry in Thayer’s Greek Definitions:
1) injustice, of a judge
2) unrighteousness of heart and life
3) a deed violating law and justice, act of unrighteousness
Is this not exactly what we are seeing in the world today in “modern” society?
Those who, like Jesus said, are seeking “to gain honor for himself” will pervert justice to try and gain benefits for themselves.
But those who seek to honor God and expose injustice, are people of truth, who are then attacked by those whose evil deeds are being exposed by that truth.
This is the spiritual food that Jesus was talking about in John chapter 6: a hunger and thirst for righteousness, opposing injustice.
The day is coming where our hunger and thirst for justice will be fulfilled.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. (Matthew 5:6)
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This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)
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