new church life: march/april 2017
This is said of the state of heaven and of the Church after the Lord’s coming into the
world. Again, in the Apocalypse:
The countenance of the Son of Man was as the sun shines in its strength. Revelation
1:16, and elsewhere as in Isaiah 60:20; 2 Samuel 23:3, 4; Matthew 17:1, 2.
Here we see that the influence of the Lord’s life on earth spread throughout
the spiritual world – there being no limitations of time or space in that
world to prevent it – and that the effects were so profound that good spirits
everywhere were able to breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Ahhh, Now I see! Now
I understand,” while the deceivers who had justified their personal ambitions
with quotations from the Word and so remained untouchable, were finally
removed from their positions of authority and cast down into hell.
Note, by the way, that “the natural” referred to in this and other passages
of the Writings does not refer to the physical substance of the earth but to the
lowest levels of the mind, where we receive and interpret the things drawn
in through the senses. (New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 46) This
“natural” continues to be the basis of our spiritual lives after the death of the
physical body and consists for the most part of thoughts and affections based
on our memories.
No doubt one reason why the Lord’s teaching could enlighten those
who had no previous memories of His natural life is that they did know the
prophecies which were in the literal sense of the Word and which He fulfilled
and explained during His life – as in Luke 24 on the walk to Emmaus.
Redemption, Part 3
The third main thing the Lord accomplished through His life in the world
was the establishment of the church, meaning the Christian Church. This is
interesting because it is very clear from the Gospel stories and the Acts and
Epistles that this church was established primarily through the use of miracles,
and yet the Writings are clear that miracles never really convince people of
anything spiritually, since they take away the focus on rational thought and
understanding, interfering therefore with truly human freedom.
What we have to keep in mind is that the people who became the Lord’s
disciples, and then His apostles, were for the most part very simple, naturally-
minded men and women. In fact, the whole “business” of the Advent was
to reach down to the lowest natural level of the mind and provide a sensory
experience of the Humanity of God – because that was all people could really
appreciate at that time.
So the Lord provided that the church at first be based on natural evidence,
the evidence of the natural senses that demonstrated the Lord’s power through
physical healing, physical release from prisons, physical feeding and other
dramatic events. In fact, the Lord didn’t expect them to understand very much,
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