new church life: jan uary / february 201 4
in the intellect is united with the will to live according to it. Whenever this
happens, an internal marriage occurs. In the language of Sacred Scripture this
miraculous moment is represented by the simple words, “Then God blessed
them.”
It is noteworthy that this is the first blessing in the Word, and it is upon
a marriage. Similarly, in the New Testament, the Lord’s first miracle is at a
wedding. (John 2:1-11) He turns the water of natural life into the wine of
spiritual life. In both cases, whether at a wedding in Cana, or in the story of
creation, the Lord’s blessing upon marriage represents the miraculous way in
which He brings about a spiritual marriage within each of us.
Once it is blessed, this internal marriage of will and intellect, goodness
and truth, leads to new offspring. New life is generated, new thoughts and
affections arise, new uses are imagined, and wonderful deeds are accomplished.
No wonder this first blessing was immediately followed by the words, “be
fruitful and multiply.”
As it is expressed in the Writings, “The most ancient people called the
conjunction of intellect and will (or faith and love) a marriage.” Everything of
good produced by that marriage they called “being fruitful – or fructifying,”
and everything of truth, they called “multiplying.” (Arcana Coelestia 55)
Whenever this takes place in our mind – striving to unite the truth we have
received in the intellect with the good we have received in our will – we will
experience a great blessing. We will experience a greater influx of God’s glory
and power, causing us to be fruitful in the good that we do and enabling us to
multiply the truths that we understand. In that day, we shall surely exclaim, “It
is very good!”
Let us re turn, then, to our initial question: What does it mean to be a
human being? As we have seen, it means to make full use of our two most
precious gifts: intellect and will. We could also say that it consists in using
human reason (our intellect) and human freedom (our will) to make choices
that are consistent with the Lord’s plan of creation. By doing so we gradually
grow from being merely human to becoming truly human.
But there is more. Did you notice that the first time God spoke of making
man He said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness”?
How could this be? People often take this to mean that God was speaking
with the angels before people were created, enlisting their support for this new
project. The Writings of the New Church teach, however: “In all of heaven
there is not a single angel who was created as such from the beginning. . .
Rather, all angels in heaven are from the human race; they were people who,
while on earth, lived in heavenly love and faith.” (Heaven and Hell 311)
So who was God speaking with? It could not have been with the angels,
since they had not yet been created. Nor could it have been with the “Son” and
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