new church life : march / april 2017
fact the very thing we ’ re talking about right now in the awful doctrine of the vicarious atonement and salvation by faith alone in a merciful , loving God who supposedly appeased the wrath of another , angry and judgmental God !
All this should remind us of the prophecy in Isaiah 61 , which the Lord openly applied to Himself as He taught in the synagogue at Nazareth ( Luke 4:18-19 ), saying :
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me , because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor ; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted , to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind , to set at liberty those who are oppressed ; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord .
Redemption , Part 2
Now when the Lord subjugated the hells , or perhaps as He was doing this , He also restored order to the heavens – by which apparently the whole of the spiritual world is meant ( see below ). This is the second aspect of redemption , that is , what the Lord actually accomplished by coming into the world as a Man . We read :
Prior to [ His ] Coming into the world there was among men and among spirits an influx of life from Jehovah or the Lord which came by way of the celestial kingdom , that is , through the angels who were in that kingdom . This was the source of their power at that time . But when the Lord came into the world , and by so doing made the Human within Himself Divine , He took to Himself what had rested with angels of the celestial kingdom , namely that power and control . For what flowed from God and passed through that heaven had until then been the Divine human . That influx was also the Divine Person who presented Himself , when Jehovah revealed Himself in this way . But this Divine human came to an end when the Lord made the Human within Himself Divine . ( Arcana Coelestia 6371 )
Continuing :
For when the Divine presented Himself by means of that kingdom there was no tranquility , since things in heaven and those in hell could not be brought by means of that kingdom into a state of order . This was because the Divine , as it passed through that kingdom , could not remain pure since heaven is not pure ; so neither was that kingdom strong enough to serve as the means by which all things could be preserved in a state of order . And what is more , as a consequence hellish and devilish spirits were at that time breaking out of hell and having dominion over souls who were coming from the world , as a result of which a situation was coming about in which none but the celestial ones could be saved . At length scarcely these could have been saved if the Lord had not taken on the Human and made that Human within Himself Divine . By doing this the Lord brought all things into a state of order , first those in heaven , then those in hell ; and this gave rise to peaceful tranquility . ( Ibid . 6373 )
Evidently , the problems in the spiritual world were not unlike the problems in this world at the time of the Advent , especially since the other world was being populated by those whose mixed motives and confused ideas continued to characterize their lives after death . You might think that all this confusion
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