False Gods: Mysteries of the 10 Commandments Explained
By Jonathan S. Rose, Curtis Childs
At face value, the Ten Commandments can seem intense and unforgiving. But Emanuel Swedenborg’s understanding of the internal sense of the Bible—spiritual meanings that lie beneath the literal words—can give us a new perspective on these familiar rules.
In this episode of their Swedenborg and Life web series, hosts Curtis Childs and Jonathan Rose study the inner meaning of the first commandment.
(References: Apocalypse Revealed 950; Arcana Coelestia 8864, 8865, 8868, 8869, 8875, 8878, 8879, 8880, 8881)
This video is a product of the Swedenborg Foundation. Follow these links for further information and other videos: www.youtube.com/user/offTheLeftEye and www.swedenborg.com
Arcana Coelestia #8878
8878. 'Of those who hate Me' means those who completely reject the Lord's Divinity. This is clear from the meaning of 'those who hate God' as those who are ruled by evil and therefore by falsity. For these are they who reject the Lord's Divinity; and to the extent that they are ruled by evil and therefore by falsity they not merely reject but also hate it. The reason why the Lord's Divinity is what they reject is that those ruled by evil do not see things in heavenly light, only in natural light, and eventually only in the light of sensory awareness provided by the body. In this inferior light these people cannot possibly see the Lord's Human as anything more than human. They are unable to recognize what the Divine Human is, because they have an altogether empty and meaningless notion of the Divine. If they are told that the Divine itself is Divine Love, and that Divine Love is the Essential Being (Esse) of all life; if they are told that by virtue of His conception the Lord was that Love, which was thus the Essential Being of His life, that is, was Jehovah; and if they are told that He glorified, that is, made Divine, His Human to be the likeness of Him, then those of them who are endowed with some intellectual ability may indeed be able to some extent to grasp all this. Even so, they do not believe it; for when they pass from the intellectual light in which they are then seeing things into their natural and sensory light, they sink into complete and utter darkness regarding this truth, and consequently into denial of it.
