Why Swedenborg Isn’t Like Other Mystics
In an earlier article, I wrote about Emanuel Swedenborg and how his writings teach about true concepts in Christianity that most Christians today either misunderstand or are unaware of.
Recently, I was inspired to write about the fact that Swedenborg was not merely another mystic, or another person with visions and spiritual experiences, but that his spiritual experiences were uniquely vivid and had a purpose of monumental importance for the world. What he wrote about has deep significance on our lives. The Lord specifically chose him to carry it out and the world has yet to fully conceptualize its meaning.
Many people today are familiar with the phenomenon of the near death experience, or NDE. People who have had near death experiences have died for a moment, entered the spirit world, and often report that they’ve interacted in some way with the spiritual environment and with beings there. After this happens, they are then brought back to life again. Amazingly, many of these people report hearing and seeing things that happened in the hospital or in the emergency room while they were being operated on, during a time when they were clinically dead or without a pulse or detectable brain activity. Later, some of them have been able to speak with doctors who were operating on them who were able to verify that what they saw happening around the operating table actually occurred. While in the world of spirits, some people report meeting deceased family members and friends, some have seen hellish places briefly, and several have seen heavenly places and a few even report having spoken with the Lord. People who have these experiences come back and report that they felt and observed many things which are ineffable and obtained a new perspective on life that taught them how to love others; an experience that has changed them forever.
Swedenborg had an experience that was similar to an NDE, but even more profound, whereby the spirit world was opened to him while he was alive in the mortal body. With Swedenborg, this experience went on for the last 27 years of his life. He described being able to see and speak with spirits and people in both the physical world and the spiritual word at the same time. This was constantly occurring for him on a level far surpassing what anyone else has experienced. He said the Lord appeared to him and granted him this special gift.
It may be true that Swedenborg was living a repentant life that allowed this to occur with him when it couldn’t occur for others (something Swedenborg would probably refute), but this, alone, wasn’t the reason his spiritual eyes were opened; it was because he had a particular mission and purpose to fulfill. The Lord needed somebody alive in the physical world with an intellect like Swedenborg’s who could carefully observe the spirit world, take notes, and report to us what he saw. He also needed somebody with the ability to write and publish books in the 18th century, in order to convey a teaching regarding the Lord which would later change the world as we know it.
So What Was This Purpose?
Although it might be difficult for many people to believe, the purpose was none other than the Lord’s Second Coming.
The second coming of the Lord is effected by means of a man before whom He has manifested Himself in Person, and whom He has filled with His Spirit to teach the doctrines of the New Church through the Word from Him.
If you’ve never heard of Swedenborg before, your first thought might be, “really?” At least, that was my first thought. Over time, however, as I studied the Word and its inner meaning, I kept coming back to his writings and taking a closer and closer look at what he had to say. Once I actually read what he had to say, particularly in his book, True Christianity, I began to see how this was the truth.
Swedenborg is not the Lord, of course, and he also spoke vehemently against anyone who would liken him to the Lord himself. Rather, Swedenborg was merely a man not unlike any other, who the Lord gave a special task of unveiling the inner meaning of the Word, and the Word itself is the Lord in essence who has been revealed through his writings. The Lord sometimes appears to people and works with them collaboratively in order to reveal himself. Swedenborg is not the only person for whom this has happened, and likely won’t be the last, but the work the Lord did through him marks a particular turning point in history.
Swedenborg explained that the Lord will not be returning to the world with his physical form. Rather, his second coming was and is being carried out via the Holy Spirit.
“The reason he will not be appearing in person is that ever since he ascended into heaven, he has been in his glorified human manifestation. In this he cannot appear before any human beings unless he has first opened the eyes of their spirit. The eyes of the spirit cannot be opened in people who are engaged in evils and falsities — in any of the goats, whom he placed on his left [Matthew 25:33]. Therefore whenever he showed himself to his disciples, he first opened their eyes. We read, “And their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he became invisible to them” (Luke 24:31). A similar thing happened with the women who were by his tomb after he had risen; this is why they were able to see angels sitting in the tomb and hear them speaking with them. No one can see angels through physical eyes.
Even before the Lord rose, it was not the apostles’ physical eyes but their spiritual eyes that saw the Lord in his glorified human manifestation; after they came out of that state, they appeared to themselves to have been asleep. This is clear from the Lord’s transfiguration in the presence of Peter, James, and John and the fact that they were then “heavy with sleep” (Luke 9:32). Therefore it is foolish to believe that the Lord is going to appear in person in a cloud of heaven; instead he is going to appear in the Word, since the Word is from him, and he is the Word.”
This is what the Lord meant when he spoke of the Comforter such as in John 16, 7:
“Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.”
The Comforter is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is the operation of the Lord through angels, good spirits, and good people, by way of the power of the inner sense of the Word. Angels, good spirits, and good people are not literally the Holy Spirit, but rather, the Holy Spirit is the Lord, those others being conduits through which he acts when he is near.
When we fear something it is often because of the unknown, or what is called the fear of the unknown, but once we learn the truth, that truth, if it comes from goodness, is comforting.
Jesus said to his disciples:
But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceeds from the Father, he shall testify of me:
And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.
When that happened, the apostles wrote down what they received into the Four Gospels and the Book of Revelation, which is why the Gospels (and other books of the Bible) are equivalent to the Word because the words therein came from the Comforter, who is the Lord.
Broadly speaking, the Word means Divine Truth, also known as the Logos, which is, in essence, the Lord himself. Speaking more specifically, the Word is composed of those books in the Bible that contain a multi-layered meaning. These three layers of meaning are:
The literal sense
The spiritual sense
The celestial sense
The literal sense is as it sounds, the literal meaning as written according to the letter. The spiritual sense has to do primarily with spiritual concepts, particularly with regard to reasoning and intelligence. The celestial sense has to do with loving concepts, which are perceived more than reasoned, and when properly applied equates to wisdom. Understanding it requires being within a state of love and intention motivated from goodwill.
Swedenborg would often use the word, “church,” but instead of a building, it meant a group of people and ideas that lead to good results.
The church takes a particular form where the Word exists and the Lord is known by means of it, and therefore where divine truths have been revealed. Still, though, this does not mean that people are part of the church by merely being born where the Word exists and the Lord is known; people are part of the church only if they are being regenerated by the Lord by means of truths from the Word — that is, they are living caring lives.
…The church, like heaven, is within us as individuals, so the church in general is made up of people who have the church within themselves. For a church to exist there needs to be a body of teaching focused on how to live, that is, on caring.
After the Lord’s resurrection and departure into heaven, the Christian church went through several stages of persecution as the powers of hell attempted everything they could to prevent its growth. Ultimately, the powers of hell failed at preventing the Christian church’s growth (today it’s one of the largest religions in the world), but they did succeed at causing numerous schisms, divisions, and false doctrines to emerge. During that time, the spiritual and celestial sense of the Word lay dormant, written into the text, but understood by very few people. The Lord was waiting until the church had reached a point in its spiritual decline whereby it required a revitalization and whereby it was time to reveal the inner sense of the Word. That time came in the 18th century and is continuing today. Prior to the work that the Lord did through Swedenborg in the 18th century, almost nobody had any idea that the Word contained any meaning beyond that of the literal sense. Today, some of these meanings have become commonplace in modern culture, but several other truths still remain in relative obscurity, as the world gradually adopts them.
Beginning with the revelations given to Swedenborg, the Lord began a church called The New Jerusalem or The New Church. With this church he began a new paradigm, one that wouldn’t decay into the false idea of exceptionalism derived from birth. The New Jerusalem exists everywhere that the Lord is worshiped as one God, which can and does include people from every religion. Within The New Jerusalem, it doesn’t matter where you were born. What makes you a part of the new church is the charitable life you live by.
What’s somewhat baffling to me is how this process has been unfolding so far. What appears to happen is that gradually the world adopts a new idea that was revealed by the Lord via Swedenborg’s writings (such as the symbolism within Bible verses) and then that idea becomes viral and is accepted as relatively commonplace; but afterwards, few people recognize that the source of it stemmed from the process that the Lord began with Swedenborg, and as a result, few people are aware of where they can look for the full insight of the idea and its surrounding wisdom. To give an example, I’ve noticed how, in our current culture, almost everyone understands the symbolism of the heart, which corresponds with love, but few people understand the symbolism of the lungs, which corresponds with wisdom. Few people know who Swedenborg was or that his writings even exist. The Lord revealed his very heart and lungs through Swedenborg’s work, and yet, few people take notice of it, which is saddening to me. It is within the spiritual and heavenly sense of the Word where the Lord is most present. What his second coming means, spiritually speaking, is the opening up of hidden meanings within the Word, which when understood and followed, has the power to revitalize the world and bring heaven down to earth. The Lord doesn’t need to be physically present in order to return again. Where his Spirit resides, he is present.
In one of Swedenborg’s books titled Apocalypse Revealed, he explained the inner meaning of every word of the Book of Revelation. One explanation that stood out to me was in Chapter 12, Verse 2 of Revelation:
And being with child, she cried, travailing, and pained to bring forth signifies the nascent doctrine of the new church, and its difficult reception on account of the resistance by those who are meant by “the dragon.”
And later, in Verse 6:
And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.
According to Swedenborg, this means, “the church being at first among few” and “the state of that church then, that in the meantime provision may be made for it to exist among more people, until it grows to its appointed state” (Apocalypse Revealed #546).
From what I see in the world around me today, it appears to me that the New Christian Church is currently in this stage.
It’s also occurred to me that the reason many people turn away from the work the Lord did through Swedenborg is not necessarily because they dislike it, but rather that they misunderstand it, or that it’s too much for them to absorb all at once, this is the “difficult reception” of it that he wrote about. It’s too overwhelming and they don’t yet recognize the value of it, nor care to search deeply. After all, Swedenborg wrote over twenty-five volumes of theological text, and many of us today aren’t able to focus long enough to watch a tick-tock video that’s over three seconds long, let alone read hundreds of pages of theology (myself included, sometimes). It’s sad, but few people have that depth of spirit about them today. What I’m hoping to accomplish with this blog is to give people some bite-sized samples of what lies deeper within the Lord’s Word, in order to help them catch on to the beauty of the ideas therein and find it more appealing.
With that said, I want to share a passage from one of Swedenborg’s books. The book is titled Conjugial Love, which has also been translated from its original Latin text as Love in Marriage. From section #81:
While we were talking in sorrow about these things, suddenly a burst of light shone about us, dazzling my eyes. I looked up, therefore, and behold, the whole sky above us appeared lit up, and we heard a glorification echoing across it in long succession from the east to the west.
Then the angel said to me, “The glorification you hear is a glorification of the Lord on account of His Advent, and it is coming from angels of the eastern and western heavens.” (From the southern and northern heavens we heard only a polite murmur.)
Moreover, since he understood it all, the angel told me, first, that glorifications and celebrations of the Lord are taken from the Word, because then they come from the Lord, inasmuch as the Lord is the Word, in the sense that He is the essential Divine truth in the Word.
Then the angel said, “Specifically now, they are glorifying and celebrating the Lord with these words which were spoken by the prophet Daniel:
You saw iron mixed with miry clay; they will mingle together through the seed of man, but they will not cohere, but the God of heaven will make to rise a kingdom which for ages shall not perish. It shall crush and consume all these kingdoms, while it shall stand for ages.”
After this I heard what seemed to be the sound of singing, and deeper in the east I saw a burst of light more brilliant than the first. And I asked the angel what they were glorifying there.
The angel said that they were glorifying the Lord with these words in Daniel:
I was seeing in the visions of night, and behold, with the clouds of heaven, was One like the Son of man, and to Him was given dominion and a kingdom, and all peoples and nations shall worship Him. His dominion is the dominion of an age, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom one which shall not perish.
In addition, the angel said, they are celebrating the Lord with these phrases taken from the book of Revelation:
To Jesus Christ be glory and might; behold, He is coming with clouds. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty. I, John heard this from the Son of Man from out of the midst of the seven lampstands.
(Revelation 1:5-7; 22:13; 1:8-13; Matthew 24:30-31)
I looked again into the eastern sky, and a light shone over to the right, whose glow extended into the southern hemisphere. Hearing as well a sweet sound, I asked the angel what aspect of the Lord they were glorifying there.
The angel said they were quoting these words in the book of Revelation:
I saw a new heaven and a new earth, and I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride for her husband. And an angel talked with me and said, “Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb's wife.” And he carried me away in the spirit on to a great and high mountain, and showed me the city, the holy Jerusalem.
Also these words:
I, Jesus am the Bright and Morning Star. And the Spirit and the bride shall say, “Come!” And He said, “I also am coming quickly.” Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22:16-17,20)
After these and other things, we heard a general glorification echoing across the sky from the east to the west and also from the south to the north, and I asked the angel, “What is happening now?”
He said they were quoting these verses from the Prophets:
Let all flesh know that I, Jehovah, am your Savior and your Redeemer.
Thus said Jehovah, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, Jehovah of Hosts: “I am the First and the Last, and beside Me there is no God.”
It will be said in that day: “Behold, this is our God, whom we have waited for to free us. This is Jehovah, whom we have waited for.”
The voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of Jehovah” Behold, the Lord Jehovih comes in strength. He will feed His flock like a shepherd.
Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given, whose name shall be Wonderful, Counselor, God, Hero, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace.
Behold, the days will come, and I will raise to David a righteous Branch, who shall reign, a King, and this is His name: Jehovah Our Righteousness.
Jehovah of Hosts is His name, and your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. He shall be called God of the whole earth.
In that day, Jehovah shall become King over all the earth. In that day there will be one Jehovah and His name will be one.
When I heard these things and understood their meaning, as a result my heart leapt, and I went home filled with joy. And there, returning from the state of my spirit into a bodily state, I wrote down what I had seen and heard. To which I now add this, that following His Advent the Lord will revive conjugial love, such as it was among ancient peoples. For conjugial love comes only from the Lord, and it is found in people who are made spiritual by Him through His Word.
The reason I’ve quoted from this book is because I wanted to talk about what is supposed to happen next. Conjugial love means more than simply marriage. Swedenborg explains that it is a type of marriage that is spiritual and begins in the heart. Within Christianity, there is symbolism between Christ, who represents a husband, and his wife, who represents the church. Christ’s second coming into the world symbolizes a wedding, whereby there is a “marriage,” or joining, between Christ and the church. This will happen once the church receives him as he truly is, his true heart as revealed in the inner sense of the Word.
What Does it Mean to Accept Christ as He Truly Is?
One of the most important examples of this is the idea that the Lord is not an angry God in the sky with lightning bolts, but that within everything he does, there is the deepest love and compassion for all of his children.
Swedenborg wrote:
The sphere of the Lord pervades the universe and everything in it. At a deep level, this sphere also governs things outside of itself to the extent that they become part of it through their own design. If things do not become part of that sphere, it still sustains them. It tries in every way to bring them back to a design in harmony with the universal design that God inhabits with his omnipotence and follows in his actions. If things against the design are not brought back into the design, they are cast out of God; but there he still sustains them from deep within.
From all this you can see that divine omnipotence cannot move outside itself into contact with any evil, nor can it move evil away from itself. Evil turns itself away, which is how it ends up being completely separated from God and thrown into hell. Between heaven, where God is, and hell, there is a huge chasm.
From these few points you can see how insane people are who think that God can condemn anyone, curse anyone, throw anyone into hell, predestine anyone’s soul to eternal death, avenge wrongs, or rage against or punish anyone. People are even more insane if they actually believe this, let alone teach it. In reality, God cannot turn away from us or even look at us with a frown. To do any such thing would be against his essence, and what is against his essence is against himself.
Note that “Divine Omnipotence” is a different element than the Lord’s Divine Human and his Divine Proceeding, although all the same person. The Divine Omnipotence is “The Father,” the Divine Human is “The Son,” and Divine Proceeding is “The Holy Spirit.”
From time to time, God is depicted in the Bible as being angry and vengeful, but Swedenborg explains that this is merely how it appears, and specifically, how it appeared to the people at the time that those books of the Bible who described him in that way were written. Rarely does the Lord get angry, and when he does, Swedenborg says this is actually something called, “zeal,” which is a temporary and merciful anger that quickly passes and is only meant as a form of loving correction, as a parent would with an unruly child. Thus, within this zeal there actually isn’t any spitefulness, only mercy and goodness, which is the essential element of The Father within him.
Even in the New Testament, when the Lord walked on the earth in his human form (called The Son) he is sometimes depicted as quite angry. However, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the Lord, even in his Divine Human, never directly punished anyone. They got a good tongue lashing, but nothing more. Instead, what he does regarding evil people is remove the good people from them. Once good people are removed from evil people then the evil people punish themselves as a result of their own karma. This is the truth element of his character in the Gospels and the rest of the Bible; because truth, as he said, is like a sword that divides the wheat from the weeds.
Swedenborg explains further:
Things that are the result of permission are for the most part of this nature — for example, besides countless others, the fact that one devil punishes and torments another. These things are from the laws of order in regard to truth separated from good, for there is no other way in which such devils could be kept under control and prevented from rushing on all the good and upright and destroying them eternally. The prevention of their doing this is the good which the Lord has in view. This is similar to what happens on earth where a benign and compassionate ruler exists who intends and does nothing but good. If he did not allow his laws to punish evil and criminal persons — though he himself punishes nobody but instead grieves that those people are such that their evils must punish them — he would leave his kingdom itself open to plunder by such people; and this would be a manifestation of a complete lack of benignity and compassion.
So, it should be noted that zeal from the Lord only happens when people are acting so wickedly and out of line that only through experiencing the Lord’s zeal — or at least the appearance of it — do they have any chance at salvation. Additionally, different cultures respond to different types of love. Some people need a harsh rebuke. Others just need a hug. Sometimes when reading the Bible, I think we as Christians forget how wicked some of the ancient people written about in it truly were (at least I did prior to reflecting more on it). For example, the Bible mentions that some of them used to burn their children alive on alters dedicated to idolatrous gods. The Lord is then written about in the Bible as zealous against them, and to us, without remembering that context, his zeal against them could make him seem mean spirited. But in reality, that is the farthest thing from the truth. In the Lord’s humility, he keeps many of his gifts to us a secret, and doesn’t often make a show of his love, because genuine charity does what it does not for itself, but for others. Within this, he is doing the most loving things to protect and bless us all constantly, most of which we may rarely see or recognize.
When people then say that the Bible is outdated or is filled with nothing more than horrific stories of abuse and destruction, they simply don’t understand the context. They haven’t studied it thoroughly under the right lens.
Once that happens — once the world accepts Christ by acknowledging him as he truly is, and once they turn away from evil — the world will be spiritually transformed into a much more peaceful place. Additionally, once people’s hearts are joined to the Lord as seen in the Word, monogamous marriages between men and women will become far more successful and will carry far more joy within them. When Swedenborg wrote that the Lord would revive conjugial love, “such as it was among the ancient peoples” — “ancient peoples” — refers to the people described in the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. Swedenborg wrote that these people lived a heavenly life whereby they enjoyed a constant connection with heaven and that their marriages were blessed because of it.
However, as we know from the story of Genesis, this blessed state didn’t last forever. Some of the decedents of the earliest people turned extremely evil, leading to them eventually dying out.
How Come the Lord Doesn’t Literally Return in the Sky?
Swedenborg wrote how in the early Christian church miracles were more common than they are today because the Lord was just beginning his work. The reason for this was so that the literal meaning of the Word would become well known first. Only once the literal meaning of the Word became embedded into common culture, as it is today, and only once the Bible was in everybody’s hands, could the inner meaning of it then be revealed. The miracles that Jesus performed were like “fireworks” to get people’s attention. They weren’t meant to convert people so much as they were meant to spread an awareness of him. However, he never did this for his own sake, instead, always for others, sometimes telling them not to share with others what he’d done to heal them, for example (Mark 1:43-44). Once the world became broadly aware of him and took notice of him, as is the case today in many nations across the world, was he then able work in their hearts, which is where true conversion takes place.
I’ve listened to stories of Christian missionaries who have seen and performed miracles even today. It’s rare, but I believe it does happen. But, I noticed a common theme: it was usually while they were out in the jungle, a distant island, a prison, or even deep within some urban center where few people were aware of who Jesus was. I think the reason miracles happen in those places today and not others is because Jesus is just making his debut in those areas like he did to the Israelites while he walked on the earth. Once people in a new location become broadly aware of him, however, the miracles cease, because beyond a certain point, and once the people have the Word in their hands, miracles lose their effectiveness. At that point, their faith needs to go deeper and come from the goodness seen within the Word itself, rather than on physical evidence.
Swedenborg wrote:
“No one is reformed by miracles and signs, because they compel. I have already explained that we have inner and outer processes of thought and that the Lord flows through our inner thought processes into the outer, this being the way he teaches and guides us. I have also explained that it is the intent of the Lord’s divine providence that we act in freedom and in accord with reason. Both of these abilities in us would be destroyed if miracles happened and we were forced into belief by them.
…This shows us that a faith caused by miracles is not real faith but only second-hand belief. It has no rational content, let alone spiritual content. It is actually an outer shell with nothing inside it. The same holds true of everything we do on the basis of this kind of second-hand faith, whether it is acknowledging God, worshiping him at home or in church, or benefiting others. When the only thing that prompts the acknowledgment, the worship, and the devotion is some miracle, then we are acting from the earthly level of our human nature and not from the spiritual level, because the miracle instills faith from the outside and not from the inside — from the world, then, and not from heaven. The Lord enters us only from the inside, that is, by means of the Word and by lessons and sermons based on the Word. Since miracles close this inner route, miracles do not happen nowadays.
We can see this characteristic of miracles very clearly in the miracles that were witnessed by the Jews and Israelites. Even though they saw so many miracles in the land of Egypt and then at the Reed Sea, and even more in the wilderness, and especially at Mount Sinai when the Law was given — all the same, after that month when Moses stayed on the mountain, they made themselves a golden calf and acknowledged it instead of Jehovah, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:4, 5, 6). We can see this also from the miracles that were done later in the land of Canaan, when the Israelites still fell away from their required worship so often. The same holds for the miracles that the Lord did in their presence when he was in the world: even so, they crucified him.
The reason these miracles were done is that the Jews and Israelites were totally focused on earthly concerns. They were brought into the land of Canaan simply to portray the church and its deeper values by means of their outward worship; and evil people can portray this just as well as good ones because these outward activities are rituals, all pointing to spiritual and heavenly realities for them. So even though Aaron had made the golden calf and commanded the people to worship it (Exodus 32:2, 3, 4, 5, 35), he could still portray the Lord and his work of salvation. Further, since they could not be led to portray these things through inner worship, they were led by miracles, actually constrained and compelled.
The reason they could not be led through internal worship is that they consistently failed to acknowledge the Lord, even though the whole Word that was present with them is about him and no one else. People who do not acknowledge the Lord are not open to any inner worship. After the Lord had made himself known, though, and had been accepted and recognized in the church as the eternal God, miracles stopped happening.
However, the effect of miracles on good people is different from their effect on evil people. Good people have no desire for miracles, but they believe the miracles in the Word. If they do hear anything about a miracle, they think of it only as a minor argument that strengthens their faith, because they base their thinking on the Word and therefore on the Lord and not on the miracle.
It is different for evil people. They can actually be constrained and compelled to faith and even to worship and devotion by miracles. This lasts only a short while, though, because their evils are pent up inside, and the compulsions and gratifications of those evils are constantly working away inside their outward worship and devotion. In the effort to let them break free of this confinement, these people think about the miracle and wind up calling it a sham, a trick, or a natural event, which enables them to return to their evil ways. People who go back to their evil ways after being worshipful profane what is good and true in worship, and the fate after death of people who profane what is holy is the worst of all. These are the people referred to in the Lord’s discourse in Matthew 12:43, 44, 45, the people whose last state is worse than the first.”
—Divine Providence #130 - 133
With this in mind, it should now make sense why the Lord’s Second Coming is made possible through books rather than through a grand miracle. Because books take effort, and within that effort, there is love and true conversion.
About the Current Age
You may have heard how the divorce rate in the United States is nearing 50% (and may actually be higher than that). To me, this is a sign that we, collectively, aren’t where the Lord needs us to be yet in order for the New Jerusalem to reach its zenith on earth, as it is in heaven, and for the Lord to fully return via the Holy Spirit. Another sign that we aren’t there yet is that there are continuing wars and violence throughout the world. Materialism is pervasive. Sexual depravity is everywhere encouraged in the media, whereby it is depicted beyond the point of understanding and mercy for others caught up in it and into the point of promotion of it. Feminism and shallow political correctness dominate our universities (Jordan Peterson, among a few others, are very saddened by this). Few people consider themselves religious today, few people read the Word often, and far fewer are aware that Swedenborg’s writings exist, let alone that they contain the key to the Lord’s second advent into the world.
However, since Swedenborg’s death, there has been great progress, albeit lots of change is still needed. Swedenborg explained that the Lord’s second coming would first take place in the spiritual world, which it did during his lifetime, and that the effects of that shift in the spiritual world would then influence and eventually transform the world on earth. Looking back on history, I think we can see evidence of this, and that he told the truth. Shortly after his death, many major shifts in the world took place. For example, it was only four years after his death (in 1772) when the United States Constitution was ratified and signed into law in 1776. A new democracy was born which allowed for religious freedom and the freedom of speech. And there have been changes far beyond what has happened in the United States. As an American, this is simply an example of an important change that I’m aware of, but there are countless others. Sweden, in particular, has become a good example of many modern reforms that are founded on charity, from which the rest of the world is adopting. Since that time, many major changes have taken place across the globe, merely within the last 250 years since Swedenborg’s work. The world population grew from somewhere around 650,000,000 people to around 8,000,000,000 today — over 12 times! Mankind learned how to harness railroads, motorized vehicles, electricity, advanced agriculture, airplanes, computers, internet, and even set foot on the moon. These are all material shockwaves that resulted from spiritual shockwaves in the other world. True ideas have the ability to change the world. If enough people embrace those true ideas, it creates a tipping point which then results in exponential human progress in many areas. All of this was able to happen because of the transformation that occurred in the spirit world during Swedenborg’s lifetime, a transformation which is entirely hidden from us visibly, and yet effects us every day in ways we don’t even realize.
How Do We Know that Swedenborg’s Writings can be Trusted?
For me, this has always been — as with any written work — whether the content within it is good. Is it loving? Is it logical?
I went through a brief moment in my life where I considered myself agnostic, that is, I neither claimed belief or disbelief in Christianity or any religion. I just decided, for the time being, my position was, “I don’t know.”
A certain idea gave me confidence in the Bible again. That idea was: What is its underlying message? If I were to sum it all up in one word, what would it be? I thought about it for some time, and I thought, Yes, there are all sorts of things within the Bible that seem ridiculous to me on the surface. However, regardless of whether it’s fiction or not, I do believe that the underlying message within it is love. What story has ever existed that has surpassed the story of Jesus Christ? And I thought, whether those events really occurred literally or not, I believe what Jesus taught and I believe that what he stood for and commanded others to do was loving. From that foundation, I decided to be a Christian again. My thought was, although there is a lot about it that doesn’t make sense to me yet, I can take that leap of faith, because I believe in what Jesus taught and because I can see the thread of truth that runs throughout the Bible, even if it seems buried in oddities and obscurities.
This idea of faith is different than what most churches throughout time have taught because it’s an idea whereby the particulars of religion don’t really matter. What matters is love in action, aka caring. The particulars only matter insomuch as they point towards caring action, and so long as caring is the intention, the particulars can, and inevitably will, be answered in time.
This attitude eventually led me to Swedenborg’s writings because he taught the exact same idea. In fact, he stresses this point more than any other and its emphasized over and over again throughout his entire work. As I’ve examined all of his writings, I’ve seen that same thread of goodness and truth running throughout them. This thread of truth is the Lord, the Logos, as explained earlier. Over the last 2 - 3 years, I’ve studied almost every idea Swedenborg taught, point by point, and found that the Lord existed within every point. A few points were difficult for me to understand at first, but as I examined them in detail, and in context, taking in the full breadth of doctrine, each point proved to be true and to align with good sense. Ultimately, this is the test of a true prophet: does everything he teach point to living a charitable life? Additionally, does it all cohere in light of moral and spiritual reason?
Keys to True Hidden Treasure
In a few others articles on this blog I wrote about Mormonism. I was raised Mormon and I became disaffiliated with the organization once I discovered a few skeletons in the closet. As I examined Joseph Smith’s doctrine, I increasingly found more problems the deeper I examined them, and I determined that not everything he taught aligned with charitable good. In my assessment, I concluded that Smith’s flaws were grave. And yet, even if I was to assumed them as minor, perhaps I could have excused a few flaws in his person, but I couldn’t continue to promote evil and false ideas; I couldn’t become a follower of his teachings if his teachings lacked deep wisdom.
Having been disillusioned with religion, my standards for joining a new church were very high, to say the least. I did not want to be fooled again. And I’m pleased to say that the New Church has been the only church that has met that standard, which is what has given me so much confidence that it truly was the Lord who founded it. A huge part of that confidence comes from the idea that what saves a person is not what they say, but what they do. Also, that it’s not as important what organization I physically affiliate with (although this is important, too), but that what is most important is who I spiritually affiliate with.
Within Mormonism there is the story of Joseph Smith finding a box full of hidden treasure, including artifacts from the ancient world as well as golden tablets. With Swedenborg, there is no hidden box with golden tablets, but rather, the gold that he found exists within the Word itself. In fact it was always there, right in front of us, it just needed to be unlocked. This is spiritual gold and treasure.
From all of this, I hope you now understand why Swedenborg wasn’t simply another mystic. He was a prophet of God. What he wrote was vitally important and worth your and my attention. The Lord used his work to transform the world and it’s still ongoing — in fact, it’s the Lord himself working through it. In my opinion, the greatest changes are yet ahead of us. Imagine how much the world could change if millions of people read his writings, opened the Word daily, and understood its inner meaning?
In Howard Storm’s book, My Descent Into Death, A Second Chance at Life, he wrote that during his near death experience, the Lord showed him a vision of what the world would be like in roughly 200 years (sometime around the year 2185). Swedenborg wrote that, generally speaking, people are not allowed to be shown the future, perhaps because knowledge of certain events would interfere with free will. In this case, I believe that it was allowed because it entailed matters regarding the spiritual direction of the whole of humanity, it was shown to Howard as a hopeful outcome but not as deterministic, and because it dealt with details written about in scripture in the Book of Revelation. In his Near Death Experience, Howard was shown a world filled with peace, where people worshipped God in goodness and truth and in harmony with themselves and with nature. There were no wars. People could move about freely anywhere they wanted, into whatever community suited their interests. They had the technology, and the power, to heal others with prayer, control the weather, and communicate across time and space. If all of this seems far-fetched, it may be easier to wrap your head around it if you’re able to consider that if you were to show an iPhone to somebody 200 years ago, they would have no idea what it was they were looking at, nor would they believe that it was even possible. Today, the rate of exponential growth in technology is only increasing. The question is not whether miracles like this will become possible in the future, the question is what will the people be like when it does? Will we be able to wield that technology with peace, love, and wisdom? Personally, I think we will, but as the Lord told Howard, the path to that future could be a difficult and hard one unless we change course now. In order to do so, we need the Lord’s Word, and not only the literal understanding of it, but especially the inner understanding of it, those elements of it which are understood as goodness and truth, love and wisdom.
These are some of the many reasons why the work the Lord did through Swedenborg is so important, and why I highly encourage you to learn all that you can about it. His work is like a key that opens the Word, and if you let it, it allows the Lord to work within you and to open the inner depths inside of you.
