point we can get a very negative feeling
about Easter – that all the Lord did was
to come to repair the mistakes that we
had made.
In fact, from the very beginning,
the Lord had foreseen the need to have
a Human through which He could
communicate with the Church on
earth. Until He had His own human,
when the Lord wished to speak to
men on earth, He had to “borrow” the
spiritual body of an angel. The angel
would seem to himself to go to sleep,
and the Lord would flow in and appear
in the angel’s form. Then, when their
spiritual eyes were opened, Jehovah
God could present Himself to men
in the world. This is the way that He
spoke to Moses and the prophets.
But the Lord wished to have direct
communication instead of through representatives, and so He waited until the
human race had reached the natural degree, and then He took on that degree to
present Himself before men in the world directly. Having taken on the natural
plane – that is, a physical body – the Lord then proceeded to incorporate it
into the Divine Itself in such a way that all that was evil or corrupt was put off
and rejected, but that which could be purified was made Divine.
The result was that He rose, unlike any other man, with that which with
man rots in the grave. The Lord had acquired for Himself a spiritual body
through which He could communicate with men. He no longer needed to have
an intermediary angel to do this work for Him. Swedenborg was with some
people who had known the Lord in the world when He appeared in the sun
of heaven. They testified that the face they saw there was that of man they had
known in the world.
The fifth and final point is that all of this means nothing if we don’t use
it in our daily lives, in our day-to-day dealings with others, for “the universal
of the Christian faith on man’s part is that he should believe in the Lord. For
by believing in Him conjunction with Him is effected and this is the means of
salvation. To believe in Him is to trust that He will save: and because no one
can have such trust but he who lives a good life, therefore, this also is meant by
believing in Him.” (Ibid.) In the simplest possible terms, if we say we believe
something, but we do not live according to it, then we don’t really believe it.
Let us resolve, then, to
live according to His
principles, to be kind
toward one another,
to think about other
people’s feelings before
we act or speak, to do
everything we can to
use the things which
He has taken such great
care to provide for us.
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