How Mercy, Charity, And Truth Are Connected To Divine Love | NCE Spotlight

Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:


3122:1


More about this truth that means charity: The very earliest
people, who were heavenly, understood the mercy and truth worked
by the Lord in them to be simply an acceptance of the love for
the Lord and the resulting charity toward others that flow into a
person. The ancients, who were spiritual, understood the mercy
and truth worked by the Lord in them to be charity and faith. The
reason for the discrepancy is that heavenly people never thought
about matters of faith, or truth, but about matters of love, or
goodness. This can be seen from previous remarks about heavenly
people, §§202, 337, 2669, 2715. And charity for their neighbor
introduced heavenly people into love for the Lord, when they were
being reformed and reborn. It is plain, then, that the mercy done
by the Lord actually means a perception of an inflowing love for
him, and that truth actually means a perception of an inflowing
charity for our neighbor that results from it.


2917


The Lord emerges from . . . night and rises again in us when we
acknowledge him. Until then, we experience nighttime, because we
cannot see him. He rises again in everyone who is reborn.


2768


To say that God tested Abraham . . . is to speak in harmony with
the literal text, which ascribes our times of trial and other
hardships to God. To speak in harmony with the inner meaning,
though, is to say that God never tests anyone. At such times he
is constantly delivering us from our struggles, so far as he can,
which is to say, so far as freeing us does no harm. At the same
time he is constantly focusing on the goodness to which he can
lead us when we are being tested. Otherwise he would never
consent to it. Although it is fair to say he allows us to be
tested, his permission does not work the way we think it
does—that when he allows something, he approves of it. Humans
find it impossible to grasp that any of us could permit what we
do not will, but it is the evil in us that causes this. It is
also the evil in us that brings on our crises, for which God is
not the least bit responsible.