new church life: march/april 2016
could not be avoided, for it was His
purpose and intent to face the hells in
the natural world, the only arena where
they could be permitted to approach
closely enough to Him actually to have
some effect. As we read in our lesson,
it is a matter of the uni versal Christian
faith that “the Lord from eternity, who
is Jehovah, came into the world to
subjugate the hells and to glorify His
Human; and without this no mortal
could have been saved.” (Faith 34)
In other words, it was the Lord’s
Divine Purpose from the very
beginning that this battle should be
fought and won in the natural world,
for only by so doing could the Lord
bring the evils that men had introduced
into the world under such bonds as
to allow men to live in the world in
spiritual freedom and eventually come
to heaven.
In order to understand and
appreciate this, we also must have a
correct understanding of who Jesus really was, and why it was necessary for
Him to come into the world. The heavenly doctrines of the New Church give
us five key thoughts to lead us into a true understanding of the real meaning of
the miracle of Easter morning.
First, we are told that it is a universal of faith that “God is one in Person
and in Essence in whom there is a Trinity, and that the Lord is that God.” (Faith
35) This idea is basic to our whole understanding of the nature of God, for it is
essential that we know that Jesus Christ, the Teacher who walked on earth and
was crucified, was in fact the Jehovah God of the Old Testament.
This is clearly what He Himself taught, and what was the faith of the
Christian Church for more than 300 years, until the leaders of the Christian
Church invented the doctrine of the trinity of persons and voted to adopt it in
order to end a long-standing doctrinal argument.
The second article of faith is that “no mortal could have been saved unless
the Lord had come into the world.” (Ibid.) Until the Lord revealed the spiritual
history of the world through the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, no one
could have known the full meaning of this statement. No one could have
It was the Lord’s Divine
Purpose from the very
beginning that this
battle should be fought
and won in the natural
world, for only by so
doing could the Lord
bring the evils that men
had introduced into the
world under such bonds
as to allow men to live
in the world in spiritual
freedom and eventually
come to heaven.
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