He Came as a Thief in the Night

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). What do we want in our faces, our interiors, on an everyday basis? We want constructive thoughts about work and study of various kinds. We want rumination on the Word and application of it to our feelings and thoughts, both those that flow outward into deeds and utterances and those that remain within. And we want humility, direct reminders of our being just another dot in a big universe. And we want gratitude. We who live in the developed world are not nearly grateful enough. We do not take sufficient consciousness, as a rule, of how we have access to a quantity and quality of goods and medical and dental services that even royalty did not enjoy in most times and places of human history.  Someone who makes little more than minimum wage and works full time has access to hot showers and dental care across the developed world....

I've been reading the <<Meditations>> of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, since I love wisdom literature. And it is very wholesome for Christians. He insists on the importance of being good even in one's thoughts to the best of one's ability. And he has been a way I believe that God has gotten through to me how to apply the Lord's commandment to turn the other cheek to a situation. In the New Church we do not teach that this commandment to turn the other cheek involves literally not to defend ourselves as individuals or groups or nations; for this would result in ruin! Certainly parry that blow and if necessary neutralize that target in defense of self and loved ones and what is greater even than these.  We are not to return evil for evil. We can return defense to aggression, but we are not to hate and otherwise commit sin against the neighbor. This brings me to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius again. He insists throughout the <<Meditations>> that we are ours...

So, I've been profiting from this long break from intensive lay preaching to go deeper into the Latin Testament. The overall structure of the Third Testament is interwoven with numerous encounters with angels and devils and spirits of various kinds to mirror the God Man's gradual  glorification and our gradual regeneration. While it is certainly true that our own encounters with angels, devils and spirits of various kinds are not so visually  dramatic as those recounted by Swedenborg; yet are these occurring in the form of the fluctuations in our feelings and our thoughts. We cannot feel or think without its being in relation to other people in a community, whether visible or not. All feeling and thought involves you in relationships.  And the Latin Word contains an elegant series of expressions of these feelings, thoughts, and their interactions in a best fit taxonomy. Since we have both good and evil desires, and true and false thoughts, the Latin Word, like the Hebrew ...

I learned something of what this fun episode means last night while listening to the Word at work:  2 Kings 6:18-23 - King James Version (KJV) <18> And when they came down to him, Elisha prayed unto the LORD, and said, Smite this people, I pray thee, with blindness. And he smote them with blindness according to the word of Elisha. <19> And Elisha said unto them, This is not the way, neither is this the city: follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek. But he led them to Samaria. <20> And it came to pass, when they were come into Samaria, that Elisha said, LORD, open the eyes of these men, that they may see. And the LORD opened their eyes, and they saw; and, behold, they were in the midst of Samaria. <21> And the king of Israel said unto Elisha, when he saw them, My father, shall I smite them? shall I smite them? <22> And he answered, Thou shalt not smite them: wouldst thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive with thy sword and with th...

The closer you get to anything good, true, or beautiful in this world, the more counterfeits swarm around it in order instinctively to occlude it; & these counterfeits all pander to some yearning to commit evil or wallow in falsehood which is more attractive to enormous numbers.  It is like that proto-scifi and cosmic horror novel The Night Land, where all of surviving humanity resides in two something like geothermally-powered pyramids; and monsters abound in dense profusion around them to destroy them, like the dragon waiting to devour the child in the book of Revelation. The 2nd Coming inspired an explosion of counterfeits which in their variety pander to the various ways the masses of humanity do not want unadulterated good and truth. Rather, they want mediated good and truth which leaves more of their sin and error alone. This is for instance why Kardec's spiritualism has so many millions of followers, which contains a few correct teachings from the New Church about charit...

The Word contains many instances of fire and water in close association because purification processes of temptation/bitterness/affliction involve cleaning the will & the understanding with internal tests. Tests designed to make you a decent and loving person in God's sight. Let everyone who would be truly loving pass through fire and water; being purified as to their will & behavior, understanding & utterance as I, microcosm, also pass through fire and water. It is fire and water which cleanse the inside of the plate and the cup for His bread & wine Let everyone pass through fire and water who would end up in a wealthy place. How often hath it afflicted him? From a child. From a spiritual child. From the fire and water processes which follow our spiritual birth as a believer in the Church. Pass through the fire what is for the fire, and through the water what is for the  water. Answer the strident thoughtforms of recurrent sins and errors within us with truths from...

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...

Matthew 8:8-10 - King James Version (KJV) <8> The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. <9> For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. <10> When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. In order to answer your question one has to relate this "great faith" of which the Lord speaks here to His use of the identical expression in His exchange with the Canaanite or Syrophoenician woman (Matthew 15; Mark 7); and to His healing someone not physically present in both cases due to that "great faith". And in order to do that, one has to relate this "great faith" He sees in people outside the Jewish Church to th...