new church life: november/december 2017
When he read the story in Genesis, for instance, he could not understand why
Abram – “a great man of God” – would tell his beautiful wife, Sarai, to lie to the
Pharaoh and say she was his sister. The only other resident of the hotel was a
Danish lawyer who knew Swedenborg and gave Bigelow a copy of the Arcana
– with the passage explaining the spiritual meaning of this troubling story.
Bigelow was intrigued but skeptical. He pored over every book of the
Writings that he could get his hands on – in Haiti and when he returned to
the States. He was sure he would discover the flaw that would expose all this
as a grand hoax, but the more he read the more he became convinced that this
simply had to be direct revelation from God. He records all of this in his classic
book, The Bible That Was Lost and Is Found. It is a treasure.
Bigelow confessed how fruitless had been his previous search for answers
in the Bible: “This taste for hunting and running down what seemed to me to
be incongruous, inconsistent or inconsequential passages of the letter of the
Word grew by what it fed on, and it is mortifying and painful for me now to
think how blind and stupid I was all this time.”
It is like the story in Mark 9 of the man whose son was cured by Jesus
and cried out: “Lord, I believe. Help Thou mine unbelief.” Bigelow might have
cried: “Lord, I see. Help Thou my blindness.” And He did – because Bigelow
was willing and eager to see what was revealed.
He was living testament to what is said in Apocalypse Revealed 224: “Read
the Word and believe in the Lord, and you will see the truths which should
constitute your faith and life. Everyone whose soul desires it is capable of
seeing the truths of the Word in light.”
(BMH)
a gift to be used
In his fascinating article, The 500 th Anniversary of the Reformation: Martin
Luther, the Last Judgment and the New Church, (page 503), the Rev. Dr.
Andrew Dibb notes that part of the immediate fallout from Luther’s 95 Theses
was making the Bible more accessible to the people.
Not only had the common folk been denied the opportunity to read or
even hear the Bible read in anything but Vulgate Latin, but those who dared
to try to make it accessible were openly persecuted. The King James Version,
produced in 1611 by the dedicated labor of 47 of the most learned men of
England over seven years, was revolutionary.
Dr. Rainolds, the man whose suggestion led to the translation of this
Authorized Version of the Bible, offered a timeless message in a letter to a
friend – and really to all of us:
"Divinity, the knowledge of God, is the water of life. God forbid that you
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