How To See The Deeper Divinity of the Bible | NCE Spotlight

Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:


3474:1


A spirit came to me not long after he had left his body. (This I
could tell from the fact that he did not yet realize he was in
the other life but believed he was still living in the world.) I
sensed that he had devoted his time to intellectual pursuits,
which I discussed with him, but then to my amazement he suddenly
soared into the air. I decided he was the type of person whose
ambitions had been lofty (since people like this usually rise
into the air) or that he thought heaven was high in the sky.
(This kind of person too is usually raised aloft, in order to
learn that heaven is not up high but deep within.) I soon
perceived, though, that he had been lifted up to a group of
angelic spirits positioned a little out in front and to the
right, on the first threshold of heaven. He then spoke to me from
there, saying that he was seeing sights grander than the human
mind could ever conceive. While this was happening, I was reading
in the first chapter of Deuteronomy about the Jewish people,
specifically the ones sent to scout out the land of Canaan and
all that it held. As I was reading it, he said that he caught
none of the literal meaning but only the contents of the
spiritual meaning, which were too astounding to describe. This
occurred on the very threshold of the angelic spirits’ heaven.
What would it be like in their heaven proper, or in the heaven of
true angels?


3416


And Isaac went from there means that the Lord abandoned deeper
truth. . . .


That the Lord abandons deep truth means that he does not reveal
it to people. Inward truth is present throughout the Word, but we
do not even see it when we read the Word if we are the type that
knows religious concepts without living by them. This becomes
clear from the fact that people who consider faith the key to
salvation do not notice what the Lord repeatedly said about love
and charity. Any who do notice call [good deeds] the fruits of
faith, distinguishing and even separating them from charity,
whose nature they do not know. So they see the Word from the
back, not the front; in other words, they see its surface, not
what is inside it. To see the back, or the outside, without the
front, or the inside, is not to see anything divine in it.


That is what it means to say that the Lord abandoned deep truth,
symbolized by Isaac’s going from there. Not that the Lord
abandons it, but that people remove themselves from the Lord,
because they remove themselves from anything that affects their
life.


3305:2


Readers who stick to the literal meaning believe that when the
Word mentions Jacob, it means the whole people descended from
Jacob. In consequence, they attribute to that people everything
the Word says about Jacob, whether as narrative or as prophecy.
The Word is divine, though—mainly because everything in it
relates not to one nation or one people but to the entire human
race as it is, as it was, and as it will be.