Here we are in the 21st century. We know that the universe is an enormous place. We're just bursting with scientific knowledge. But how are we doing with the even-bigger ideas? Our human societies seem to be erasing them, or ignoring them - maybe we think we're too busy for them.

Here on the New Christian Bible Study site, we'll buck the trend. We want to explore the big ideas that give us a framework for living better lives. Here's a start on a list of big ideas from a New Christian perspective. For each idea, there is a footnote that lists some references in Swedenborg's theological works:

1. God exists. Just one God, who created and sustains the entire universe in all its dimensions, spiritual and physical. ¹

2. God's essence is love itself. It's the force that drives everything. ²

3. God's essence comes into being, that is, it exists, in and through creation. ³

4. There are levels, or degrees, of creation - ranging from spiritual ones that we can't detect with our physical senses or sensors, to the level of the physical universe where most of our awareness is when we're alive here. ⁴

5. The created universe emanates from God, and it's sustained by God, but in an important way it is separate from God. He wants it to be separate, so that freedom can exist. ⁵

6. God operates from love through wisdom - willing good things, and understanding how to bring them about. ⁶

7. The physical level of creation exists to provide human beings with an opportunity to choose in freedom, with rationality, whether or not to acknowledge and cooperate with God. ⁷

8. God provides all people everywhere, regardless of their religion, the freedom to choose to live a life of love to God and to the neighbor. ⁸

9. God loves everyone. He knows that true happiness only comes when we're unselfish; when we're truly motivated by a love of the Lord which is grounded out in a love of the neighbor. He seeks to lead everyone, but will not force us to follow against our will. ⁹

10. God doesn't judge us. He tells us what's good, and what's evil, and flows into our minds to lead us towards good. However, we're free to reject his leading, and instead opt to love ourselves most. Day by day, we create habits of generosity or of selfishness, and live out a life in accordance with those habits. Those habits become the real "us", our ruling love. ¹⁰

11. Our physical bodies die eventually, but the spiritual part of our minds keeps going. It's been operating on a spiritual plane already, but our awareness shifts - so that we become fully aware of spiritual reality. ¹¹

Footnotes:

312. This belief among church people is also the cause of their belief that no one will arrive in heaven or hell before the time of the Last Judgment, which they have come to believe will be a time when everything they can see perishes and new things come into being, when souls will return into their bodies and then begin once more to live as people because of this reunion. This faith implies the other, about angels having been created in the beginning, for it is not possible to believe that heaven and hell come from the human race when you believe that no one is going to get there until the end of the world.

[2] So to convince people that this is not the case, I have been allowed to associate with angels and to talk with people in hell for several years now, sometimes constantly from morning until evening, and so to learn about heaven and about hell. The purpose of all this is that church people should remain no longer in their mistaken beliefs about a resurrection on Judgment Day and about the state of their souls in the meanwhile, or about angels and the devil. Because this faith is a mistaken one, it brings darkness with it; and for people who think about such things on the basis of their own intellect, it leads to doubt and eventually to denial. They are actually saying in their hearts, "How can such a vast heaven and so many stars be destroyed and disappear, along with the sun and the moon? How can stars that are larger than the earth fall on the earth? How can bodies that have been eaten by worms and destroyed by decay and scattered to the four winds be reunited to their souls? Where have these souls been in the meanwhile, and what have they been like without any of the senses they had in their bodies?"

[3] There are many other questions like these, which do not accord with belief because they are incomprehensible, and for many people they are destroying any belief in a life after death, in heaven and hell, and along with these the rest of the contents of the faith of the church. This destruction can be observed in people who say, "Who has come back from heaven and told us that it exists, or from hell, to say that it exists? What is this business about people being tortured by fire to eternity? What is this Judgment Day? Haven't we been waiting for it for centuries, all in vain?" along with any number of other things that imply a denial of everything.

[4] Many people who are particularly skilled in worldly affairs think like this; so to prevent them from further disturbing and misleading people of simple faith and simple heart and bringing on a hellish darkness concerning God, heaven, eternal life, and the other matters that follow from them, the deeper reaches of my spirit have been opened by the Lord, enabling me to talk after their death with all the people I have ever known during their physical lives. I have talked with some for days, with some for months, and with some for a year. I have talked with so many others that it would be no exaggeration to talk in terms of a hundred thousand, many in heaven and many in hell. I have talked with some just two days after their deaths and told them that now their funerals and burial rites were being performed so that they could be interred; to which they have responded that it was a good thing they had cast off what had served them as a body for their functions in our world, wanting me to say that they were not dead at all. They were just as alive and just as human as ever, having simply crossed over from one world to another. They were not aware of having lost anything, since they were just as much in a body as before, enjoyed volition and understanding just as before, and had thoughts and affections, sensation, and desires similar to the ones they had in our world.

[5] Many people who have just died, when they have discovered that they are living persons just as they were before, and in a similar state (for our first state after death is like the one we were in on earth, although this changes gradually for us either toward heaven or toward hell), have been moved by a newfound joy at still being alive. They have said they would not have believed it. They were absolutely amazed that they had been in such ignorance and blindness about the state of life after death, all the more so that this is true of people within the church, who could be in more light about such matters than all the rest of the whole world. ¹ Now for the first time they were seeing the reason for this blindness and ignorance, namely, that their outward concerns, their concerns for worldly and bodily matters, preoccupied and filled their minds so completely that they could not be raised into heaven's light and look into ecclesiastical subjects beyond the formalities of doctrine. When bodily and worldly matters are loved as much as they are today, nothing flows in from them but darkness when the mind tries to press further.

Footnotes:

10598. Exodus 34

1. And Jehovah said to Moses, Hew for yourself two tablets of stone like the first ones, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you broke.

2. And be ready by the morning; and you shall come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and you shall stand with Me there on the top of the mountain.

3. And no one shall come up with you, and also no one shall be seen on all the mountain; also no flock or herd shall feed before this mountain.

4. And he hewed two tablets of stone like the first ones; and Moses rose early in the morning, and went up to Mount Sinai, as Jehovah had commanded him, and took the two tablets of stone in his hand.

5. And Jehovah descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of Jehovah.

6. And Jehovah passed through above his face, and proclaimed, Jehovah, Jehovah, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering with regard to anger ¹ , and great in goodness and truth,

7. Keeping goodness for thousands, bearing iniquity and transgression and sin; and He does not at all absolve ² , visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the sons and on the sons of sons, on the third and on the fourth [generations].

8. And Moses made haste and bowed to the earth, and adored.

9. And he said, If now I have found grace in Your eyes, O Lord, let [my] Lord, I beg You, go in our midst, for they are a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin ³ , and make us Your inheritance.

10. And He said, Behold, I am making a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels which have not been created in all the earth nor in all nations; and all the people in whose midst you are will see the work of Jehovah, because this is a marvel which I am doing with you.

11. Observe that which I command you this day. Behold, I am driving out from [before] your face the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.

12. Take care, lest by chance you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land onto which you come, lest by chance it become a snare in your midst.

13. Therefore you shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and tear down their groves.

14. Therefore you shall not bow down to any other god, for Jehovah the Jealous One is His name, God the Jealous One is He.

15. Lest by chance you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go whoring after their gods and sacrifice to their gods, and they call you and you eat of their sacrifice,

16. And you take their daughters for your sons, and their daughters go whoring after their gods, and they cause your sons to go whoring after their gods.

17. You shall not make gods of cast metal for yourself.

18. You shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. Seven days you shall eat the unleavened bread that I commanded you, at the appointed time in the month of Abib, because in the month of Abib you came out of Egypt.

19. All that opens the womb ⁴ is Mine, and of all your cattle you are to give the male, whatever opens [the womb] among oxen and small cattle ⁵ ,

20. And whatever opens [the womb] among asses ⁶ you shall redeem with one of the small cattle; and if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. All the firstborn of your sons you shall redeem. And My face shall not be seen empty-handed ⁷ .

21. Six days you shall work, and on the seventh day you shall rest; in ploughing and in harvesting you shall rest ⁸ .

22. And you shall keep the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the end ⁹ of the year.

23. Three times in the year all your males shall be seen at the face of the Lord, Jehovah, the God of Israel.

24. For I will drive out the nations from [before] your face and cause your borders to be enlarged; and no one will covet your land when you go up to see the face of ¹⁰ Jehovah your God three times in the year.

25. You shall not offer ¹¹ the blood of My sacrifice with anything made from yeast; and the sacrifice of the feast of the Passover shall not remain through the night until morning.

26. The firstfruits of the first things of your ground you are to bring to the house of Jehovah your God. You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk.

27. And Jehovah said to Moses, Write these words; for in accordance with ¹² these words I make a covenant with you and with Israel.

28. And he was there with Jehovah forty days and forty nights; he did not eat bread and he did not drink water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten words.

29. And so it was, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai (and the two tablets of the Testimony were in Moses' hand when he came down from the mountain), that Moses did not know that the skin of his face gleamed while he talked to Him.

30. And Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face gleamed; and they were afraid to approach him.

31. And Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the princes in the assembly turned back to him, and Moses talked to them.

32. And afterwards all the children of Israel approached, and he commanded them all the things that Jehovah had told him on Mount Sinai.

33. And Moses finished talking to them, and he put a veil over his face.

34. And whenever Moses went in before Jehovah to talk to Him he took the veil off until he was going to come out; and he came out and told the children of Israel what had been commanded.

35. And the children of Israel saw Moses' face, that the skin of Moses' face was gleaming, and Moses drew the veil back over his face, until he went in to talk to Him.

CONTENTS

The subject in the internal sense of this chapter is the Church to be established among the Israelite nation. But since the character of that nation was such that they were incapable of receiving what was Divine from an interior level they were accepted in order that what was representative of a Church might exist among them, though not an actual Church. This matter is dealt with in verses 1-9.

Footnotes: