new church life: september/october 2017
From Arcana Coelestia 3642:
“But good and truth, as these existed
with the angels, underwent with
those in hell an amazing conversion
into evil and falsity, a conversion that
took place by degrees as the good and
truth flowed downward where hell
was acting as one by means of false
persuasions and evil desires. . . . In
this way they are made, so to speak,
into a single entity and thereby kept
in order according to which they are
associated with one another.”
And from Divine Love and
Wisdom 348: “I have heard that goods
and truths have been sent down
through the heavens by the Lord,
to the hells, and that these same,
received by degrees to the lowest
deep were there turned into evils and
falsities which are the opposite of the goods and truths sent down. . . . From all
this it can be seen that even evil uses are from the spiritual sun, but that good
uses are turned into evil uses in hell. It is evident that the Lord has not created
and does not create any except good uses, but that hell produces evil uses.”
(See also Arcana Coelestia 9498, Divine Love and Wisdom 336, 338, and True
Christian Religion 624.)
What comes from the
Lord into heaven then
flows on down and into
hell, but just like rain
falling onto a street
or parking lot doesn’t
remain clean as it collects
and runs on downhill, so
the flow outward from
the Lord gets dirtier as it
flows down through hell.
Outline
Okay, here are four well-documented positions that I would like to see put into
a common understanding because I am convinced that all four are from the
Word and that fully understood they all agree. The Lord created many kinds
of animals to live on the earth, long before men were created. All of them were
good in the sense that they filled uses that were required in the overall pattern
that the Lord foresaw as necessary to create a habitat for the mankind to come.
It seems to me apparent that when He created forms to hold life, that He
came up with marvelous mechanisms for variability that could serve for the
simplest of creatures many millions of years ago and that still serve the same
purposes now, even if one of today’s creatures has had spiritual life added to
them on top of the natural life that had existed in the world for so long.
Once the bacteria and algae had done their work to bring about an
atmosphere, then more complex creatures were created, and even from that
first appearance of creeping things in the shallow seas of the Cambrian age,
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