He Came as a Thief in the Night

The living joy like music that loved me and everyone made it clear to me that it was God, Jesus, the God of the Bible. It is recognizably one intricately, oceanically intelligent and loving being perfectly identical with the risen Jesus Christ. It is the "joy unspeakable and full of glory" of which Peter speaks. And the recognizable characteristic of that glory is its inseparability from divine truth and from being taught by divine truth. It is this glory which one found in the Writings and knew on sight to be authentic concerning the Presence. After learning that Jesus, God, the God of the Bible was real, I read the Bible fully for the first time; and I found that verse of Peter's about "joy unspeakable and full of glory" and knew it to be authentic material about the presence of the Lord. It is the same voice which I recognize. His sheep hear His voice. There is a particular humiliation in the presence of the Lord that is uplifting rather than disheartening; t...

Just as it is easier to swallow bread with wine or some other beverage, so is it easier to make love of God and the neighbor (bread) part of oneself if instructed in the spiritual truth which teaches that love (wine). We learn truth about love rather earlier than we particularly practice that love, because our fallen natures, the old man, are reluctant to give way to the new creation in Christ, the new man. This is why light was created long before the Sun and Moon: because spiritual enlightenment precedes particularly noteworthy, actual expression of love and wisdom in a ripening believer's life.  Gradually we go further and further within as though we were gradually removing layers from the rotten onion of self love. The person who ceases to boast on the outside may, as it were, still have to confront the 'big bosses' of ever more interior expressions of that particular sin.  The person who boasts on the outside may, as it were, boast on the inside; and ever more inside. ...

 In Arcana Coelestia we read:  "The ancients divided the neighbour into different categories, giving each category one of the names that describe those in the world who are plainly in the greatest need of help. They also taught how charity should be exercised towards those belonging to one category and towards those belonging to another. In this way they organized their teachings; and they regulated their lives in accordance with those teachings" (AC6705). If we are to take the Lord's advice to cast our nets to the right side of the boat, which means evangelizing and proselytizing charitably, then we will surely want an appropriate way to evangelize to, for instance, Muslims or Buddhists. One has a developed system of tools for New Church evangelization to Muslims -- here and elsewhere --which spring from a desire to engage in positive, sharing, mutually-enriching evangelization. It is how one conceives of bringing the religions of the world to sit at the Divine Human...

Episodic characterization differs enormously from novelistic characterization, a common expectation modern people project on the Word of God. Episodic characterization involves things like the stories of Ananzi in Africa, where he will face first one challenge then another; but not really 'remember what he did last Friday'. Or again, it involves things like Archie Comics or X-Men or Donald Duck: do these characters 'remember what they did last Friday'?  Or do they more seem to have the memories of goldfish and live for the first time in each story about them? This sense that the character has the memory of a goldfish is one of the defining features of episodic characterization, which typically uses characters to express a definite moral or spiritual message; not to worry about character consistency between different stories, especially not as much. For sometimes there will be traces of both characterological consistency and memories of goldfish in the exact same text.  ...

 As a preacher I will not tell you whom you should vote for. But I will tell you that the 2 Minutes Hate mentioned in Orwell's 1984 happens all around you recurrently. You are regularly invited to hate particular public figures. Be alert for the temptation to hate and thus to break the commandment "Thou shalt not kill"; because this has consequences in relation to your forever home and your forever neighborhood.  When we arrive at forks in the road in which we get angry at first one person or group than another, we must be alert. For the hells will certainly offer us the poison chalice of hatred, or that of contempt, or that of depreciation, or that of inner false witness which sees only the faults of others the better to dismiss them utterly. We will be invited by society to hate each President in turn, in one's native land; so that we had or have an Orange Man Bad campaign and a Let's Go Brandon campaign. In each of these cases, we have panderers to the sin of h...

If you understand why I have paired these two passages, then you are in a position to understand how the 2nd Coming happened and how each Testament of the Threefold Word happened. Here is the first passage, from when King Jehoiakim burns up Jeremiah's scroll in the fire: "Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words" (Jeremiah 36:27). This occurs in the winter house of King Jehoiakim because winter is the final phase of the four-quarter prophetic cycle of the Church in seasonal form. If the Lord wishes to express the same fourth stage in the Church's decline as to charity and wisdom in terms of the quarters of a day, then He calls this fourth phase night. The fire is love of self and the world growing in the Church in four distinct phases; and as it g...