New Church Life July/August 2015 | Page 19

  -   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, 331