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And so with the truths and goods of the Word with them falsified and
adulterated, they ultimately “lost” their Word, the Ancient Word, and the
church with them eventually came to consummation and a final judgment at
the time of the Lord’s first advent.
In the meantime, as we know, the Lord set about raising up a church
with the sons of Israel. No sooner have they been rescued from their captivity
in Egypt than they repeatedly failed to trust in Moses as the spokesman for
Jehovah, but to trust in Jehovah Himself.
Before Moses even was able to bring down the Ten Commandments from
Jehovah on Mount Sinai, what was to be the “first fruits” of the Word with
them, they had turned from Jehovah and His commands to the worship of
the golden calf. This was a worship that perverts the externals of the Word to
the service of “natural and sensual delight, which is the delight of pleasures, of
cupidities, and of the loves of self and the world.” (Ibid. 10407)
Their stubborn resistance to the Word of God from the outset, and their
chronic falsifications and adulterations of its truths and goods throughout their
history, meant that they could only be in pious externals without any genuine
spiritual internals – that they could serve as no more than a “representative of
a church.”
If one reads through the major and minor prophets in the light of the
summary exposition of their general internal contents, it is one horrific
account of continual falsification of the truths of the Word and adulteration
of its goods. It should come as no surprise that the Lord, while in the world,
would say to this church: “You have made My Word of none effect by your
traditions.” (Matthew 15:6, Mark 7:13)
We come then to the Christian Church. This church is barely 300 years
into its history when there is the Council of Nice. Instead of seeking to and
holding to the Scriptures – in seeking to meet perceived practical and political
threats to the church – in the equivalent of smoke-filled rooms, they hatch
out false doctrine from their own supposed intelligence. Again, it is the Word
that thenceforward in their history is taken from the people and maltreated
because the leadership did not really believe or trust in the Lord or in the
Word, but in themselves and their own senses.
That the Council of Nice was a critical turning point in the spiritual history
of the Christian Church is confirmed in numerous passages in the Heavenly
Doctrine. Rather than being led by the testimony of the Word concerning the
Lord, “the Council of Nice . . . introduced three Divine persons from eternity,
and thereby the church into a theater.” (True Christian Religion 137:3)
Then the Lord gave Swedenborg to report (Ibid. 176) that: “It is said in
heaven that when the Nicene Council had finished its work, that had come
to pass which the Lord foretold to His disciples: ‘The sun shall be darkened,
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