He Came as a Thief in the Night

One wanted to explain the teaching method employed in this ministry out of transparency; and because the teachings taught to people here are not toys but can have a powerful and mind-altering effect. See ch. 7 of Romans for the Apostolic equivalent of what one now expresses in contemporary language. If the Word be taken seriously, for instance, then a switch flicks; and at that point, very strange and trying experiences may test people in a way that genuinely disturbs them.  These are temptations: opportunities to grow in love of God and the neighbor that afford us an accelerated course in identifying internal and external sins and errors and ceasing to feed them; opportunities, but they also suck. We teach that not everyone can presently be allowed by Providence to enter such states, because only people sufficiently committed to overcoming can do so safely while they are alive.  So this means that a given reader of these lectures may not experience the "sin becoming exceeding...

  People sometimes find it wacky that the Latin Word mentions aliens on other planets, even those of our solar system. But the point of the beasts with four faces in Ezekiel is not to convey a naturalistic anatomy; and the point of Earths in the Universe is not to provide us with an anthropology of alien civilizations. The very title, in its inclusion of "Earths", will immediately strike one instructed in correspondences as potentially having to do with Churches; whence one can pretty much expect to encounter spiritual meanings akin to those of the 7 angels of the 7 Churches. For the correspondence of "Earth" is with Church.  In Earths in the Universe we read of certain spirits from Mercury interacting with a man named Christian Wolf the following: "[They then desisted from asking him further questions, inquiring only, how this is called, and how that; and because he answered these inquiries also by material ideas, and by no spiritual ones, they retired from hi...

Thinking about the role of suffering in the overall production line whereby we regenerate and come to practice the love of God and in the neighbor in truth, one came to a parable of the Lord's which has not much been under our crosshairs here: Matthew 13:44-46 - King James Version (KJV) <44> Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. <45> Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: <46> Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. Arcana Coelestia says of this passage the following: "'The kingdom of heaven' stands for the good and truth present with a person, and so for heaven present with him. 'Field' stands for good and 'pearl' for truth, while 'buying' stands for acquiring these and making them ...

  Part 1 One would like to begin this lecture with an apology for its shortcomings, because of all the lectures in this course this one, perhaps, has been the most challenging to think about and otherwise prepare. Nonetheless, one hopes that this effort, despite its shortcomings, will help you to see the inspired architecture of the world's religions; and to see the ways in which these sit at the Divine Human's feet and either eat His bread and drink His wine or perish.  Last year, marveling at what the Latin Word says about Islam and world religions in their relation to the Lord, one felt an inner push to read the Quran for oneself accompanied with the assurance that one would find what one sought. Well, one read their Book and found what one sought, a foundation for accepting our Muslim neighbors and teaching acceptance of the same. People in the West and in historically Christians lands are, of course, troubled by the mass immigration by other peoples and strange religions ...

One has off and on mentioned that the horse represents the understanding, and especially the spiritual understanding and that of the Word, so today we will take a closer look at that noble animal and the paraphernalia attached to it, being of course the chariot and the horseman. In brief, the horse represents understanding, the chariot doctrine, and the horseman intelligence; hence the numerous references to these three things. We are even to eat them, along with various captains and men of war, in the supper of the great God! This of course means making spiritual understanding, intelligence, and doctrine a part of our theory and practice and thus of our spiritual bodies. In Hosea the Word promises, "I will make Ephraim to ride" (10:11) -- that is, will teach Ephraim how to ride a horse -- which has been thus stated on account of what we have already covered, Ephraim as the intellectual faculty in the believer and the Church as a whole; vs Manasseh as the will faculty of the ...

The Church quintessentially involves the liberation of oneself and others from spiritual slavery and darkness with the application of the truths of faith to evils and excuses to commit them. But the worm of self-love ever gnaws at the vitals of anything remotely good, and that includes the Church, so that self-love and excuses for that love grow like mildew, mold, or other rot on or in the body of the Church. It is this process over time which has been dramatized in the siege of Jerusalem and the carrying away into captivity of its inhabitants to Babylon.  Broadly speaking, Babylon involves all inversion of religion which proceeds from the love of self and the world and aims at the domination of people with the writings and credit of the Church. Obviously, it helps along the domination of other people greatly if you manage to enslave and dumb them down, so this sort of spiritual totalitarianism inevitably involves both enslavement and endarkening. The End Times industry tends to in...