He Came as a Thief in the Night

 How common it is for specifically materialistic Christians to believe concurrently in things like global dictatorship, bar codes on foreheads, imminent Nephilim invasions, flat earth, sky domes, and similar fantasies. All of these are materialistic! And so the pattern that the New Church claims fits the data. Once you know that pattern then you have at your fingertips a sort of medical dye to see it going through the body, where before you could kind of see it but it wasn't crystallising. Take, for instance, the way that Jesus refers to the scribes and Pharisees as being ground into powder in Matthew 21:42-45 - New King James Version (NKJV) < 42 > Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the Scriptures: 'The stone which the builders rejectedHas become the chief cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing, And it is marvelous in our eyes'? < 43 > "Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing...

Often, in Christianity and other religions, 'rewards' are mentioned. People often assume that if they live a good life, they will be rewarded for this. But this, while to an extent true - if we do not appropriate the merit as the Nicolaitans do, or commit hypocritical works -- misses the most important part: "The delight itself which is in the love of doing what is good without any recompense is the reward which remains to eternity" (New Jerusalem 155). We are even told, "Heaven is wishing better for others than for ourselves with all our heart and serving others for the sake of their own happiness, not for any selfish goal but for love" (Arcana Coelestia 452:4). There's only one problem. We don't start out like this. We are all of us naturally selfish -- what Christianity calls "the flesh", what the modern world calls "the ego", and what the New Church calls "the propium" -- but by working on ourselves and appealing t...

The New Church -- like Jesus Himself -- teaches that the Bible has not just an external meaning but also an internal one, and that the Bible -- the scroll only the Lamb was worthy to open in Revelation -- is written "inside and on the back" (Luke 24:27, Revelation 5:1). The Bible itself teaches this doctrine in multiple places, both in the Old Testament and in the New.  Jesus, for instance, says, "To you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to those who are outside, all things come in parables" (Mark 4:10-11). This same doctrine appears in the Old Testament in Nehemiah 8:8, where "they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading". Here "the book, in the Law of God" refers to the words you read directly in the Bible's pages, and the "sense" refers to the inner meaning of those words. This same doctrine appears elsewhere in...

The Lord did not simply promise to come "as a thief in the night" but also came "as a thief in the night" (Revelation 16:15, Matthew 24:43, 1 Thessalonians 5:2); and He might as easily have said "When the Son of Man comes, will there be faith on Earth?" of the First Coming as of the Second (Luke 18:8).  For in either case, and in any such case, the Lord comes quite specifically in the nick of time to a situation wherein the Church has degenerated to such a point as to compare to an absence of faith and an absence of charity within it, so that a new bottle and a new vintage must be prepared (HH119, Mark 2:22). It is written, "I was sought by those who did not ask for Me. I was found by those who did not seek Me. I said, 'Here I am, here I am' to a nation that was not called by My name" (Isaiah 65:1).  In this connexion, note the way that the Gospel was not spread by Pharisees and Sadducees in <<Acts>> but by Christians in...