1. THE PRECEPTS OF THE DECALOGUE

Article I.

After the Last Judgment Was Executed, a New Church Was Promised, Which Is Meant in the Book Of Revelation by the New Jerusalem

1. Explain Revelation 21:1-20. Also Revelation 22:1-5.

2. Show from the Word elsewhere that by Jerusalem is meant the Church, as in the following passages:

Isaiah 1:1; 2:1; 3:8; 5:3; 7:1; 10:10-12, 32; 22:10; 31:5; 33:20; 36:2, 7, 20; 37:10, 32; 40:2; 41:27; 44:26, 28; 52:9; 62:1, 7; 64:10; 65:18; 66:10, 20. 27:13; 30:19, 2:3; 3:1. 4:3; 24:23; 28:14; 31:9; 65:19; 66:13, 5:3; 8:14; 22:21.40:9; 51:17; 52:1-2; 62:6.

"Daughter of Jerusalem": Lamentations 2:13, 15. Micah 4:8. Zephaniah 3:14. Zechariah 9:9.

Jeremiah 1:3, 15; 2:2; 3:17; 4:3, 10-11; 5:1; 6:1; 7:17, 34; 8:5; 9:11; 11:6, 13; 13:9; 14:2, 16; 17:19, 21, 26, 27; 19:7, 13; 22:19; 23:14, 15; 25:8; 26:18; 27:3, 20, 21; 29:2; 32:2, 44; 33:10, 13, 16; 34:19; 35:11; 36:9; 37:5, 12; 38:28; 39:8; 40:1; 44:2, 6, 9, 13, 17, 21; 51:50; 52:12-14. 4:16; 6:6; 34:1, 7; 39:1; 52:4.27:18; 29:25; 34:8; 35:11.24:1; 27:20; 29:1, 2, 4, 20.4:5; 15:4; 34:6; 52:1, 3.4:4; 8:1; 11:2, 9, 12; 13:13; 17:20, 25; 18:11; 19:3; 25:2; 32:32; 35:13, 17; 42:18, 4:14; 6:8; 52:29; 13:27; 15:5.Lamentations 1:7, 8, 17; 2:10; 4:12.

Ezekiel 4:1, 7; 5:5; 8:3; 9:4, 8; 13:16; 14:22; 16:2-3; 17:12; 21:2, 20, 22; 22:19; 23:4; 33:21; 36:38.24:2; 26:2, 4:16; 12:10, 11:15; 12:19; 15:6.

Daniel 1:1; 6:10; 9:2, 12, 16, 25; 5:2, 3; 9:7.

Joel 3:1, 5-6, 16-17, 20.

Amos 2:5; 1:2.

Obadiah 1:11, 20.

Micah 1:1, 5, 9, 12; 3:10, 12; 4:2.

Zechariah 1:12, 14, 16-17, 19; 2:2, 4, 12; 3:2; 7:7; 8:3-4, 8, 15; 12:2-3, 6; 14:4, 10-11, 17; 12:2, 9; 14:2, 12, 16. 14:8, 14; 9:10. 8:22; 12:6, 11; 14:21. 12:5, 7-8, 10; 13:1.Malachi 3:4; 2:11.

Zephaniah 1:4, 12, 3:16.

Psalms 51:18; 79:1, 3; 122:3, 6; 125:2; 128:5; 137:6, 7; 147:2; 68:29; 135:21. 102:21; 116:19; 122:2; 137:5; 147:12.

3. Some mention of preceding events in the book of Revelation, as concerning the dragon ¹ and the scarlet beast, ² and their destruction. ³

4. The Last Judgment - that it has been described, and needs to be further described.

5. Why a New Church is established following the execution of a Last Judgment.

6. That it is not established before then in order to keep holy things from being profaned.

7. That a promise was given at the time that the spiritual meaning of the Word would be disclosed. Moreover, that the Lord alone is the Word.

8. His Advent then.

9. That heaven has therefore been opened to me.

Article II.

The Church Is Now at an End, and among Few Today Is There Any Religion

1. People do not know regarding the Lord that He alone is the God who rules heaven and earth, thus that He is one God in person and essence, in whom is the Trinity; and yet all religion is founded on a concept of God and on adoration and worship of Him.

2. People do not know that faith is nothing else but truth, and they do not know whether what they call faith is the truth or not. (Excerpt some passages from the little work on the Lord. ⁴ )

Today's faith - say what it is. Also that there are degrees of justification. Whether they are truths may be concluded from the following observations.

If this is faith, there is no need for truths, nor for charity, and not even for any concept of them.

It is not known what charity is.

There is no knowledge of evil and good.

Article III.

Every person is a person after death, and he is then what his love is, and a person's love is the life which awaits everyone after death to eternity.

1. Everyone is examined after death to discover the nature of his love.

2. Every spirit is a form of his affection.

3. The whole of heaven is distinguished into societies in accordance with the varieties of their affections, and the whole of hell into societies in accordance with the varieties of their lusts.

4. Whatever the character of a person's affection, such is the character of his thought.

Article IV.

The devil in, a person resides in the evil qualities of his life, and the Lord in the good qualities of his life

Article V.

To refrain from evils is to do good, and this is the essence of religion

1. Some observations regarding combats and temptations or trials.

2. To refrain from evils is no other than to drive away the devil, and to the degree that a person does this he is conjoined with the Lord and heaven is opened, and for as long as he does not, he is in hell.

Article VI.

A person who refrains from evils because they are sins has faith, and this to the degree of his refraining

Some truths are matters of faith and not of life. To the degree that truths which are matters of life are applied to one's life, to the same degree truths which are matters of faith become truths of one's faith, and the latter not a whit more or less than the former.

List truths of faith which are otherwise matters of knowledge and not faith.

On the prayer of the English before the Holy Supper, ⁵ and on that of the Swedish also, including excerpts from "Obstacles to the Impenitent." ⁶

Therefore there are two tables [of the Decalogue], and they are called a covenant. In the measure that a person carries into practice the one, in the same measure the other is opened.

Article VII.

The Ten Commandments of the Decalogue contain in summary all tenets of religion

1. Many observations regarding the holiness of the Decalogue.

Recapitulation

A recapitulation of the seven articles, with the observation that no one can deny that they are the essence of religion.

Footnotes:

257. 4. Strict materialists justify their rejection of divine providence by observing that in many nations where Christianity is accepted, there are people who claim divine power for themselves and want to be worshiped as gods and who call upon the dead. They do actually say that they are not claiming divine power and wanting to be worshiped as gods, but they still say that they can open and close heaven, forgive or bind sins, and essentially save or damn people, and this is strictly divine doing. The only goal of divine providence is our reformation and salvation. This is what it is constantly working for with each one of us. Salvation comes only through belief in the divine nature of the Lord and a trust that he saves us when we live by his commandments.

[2] Can anyone fail to see that this is the Babylon described in the Book of Revelation and the Babel that we find throughout the prophets? We can see that it is the Lucifer of Isaiah 14 if we read verses 4 and 22 of that chapter. It says in verse 4, "You will proclaim this parable about the king of Babel," and goes on to say, "I will cut down the name and remainder of Babel" in verse 22. This makes it very clear that "Babel" there is "Lucifer" when it says, "How have you fallen from heaven, Lucifer, child of the dawn. And you said in your heart, 'I will scale the heavens, I will raise my throne above the stars of God and sit on the mountain of the meeting in the northern regions; I will rise above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High'" (verses 12, 13, 14).

It is widely recognized that they call upon the dead and pray for their help. We refer to this as invocation because the practice was established by the Papal Bull that confirmed the decisions of the Council of Trent, where it states explicitly that they are to be invoked. Is anyone unaware that we should pray only to God and not to any dead mortal?

[3] Now, though, I need to explain why the Lord let things like this happen. There is no denying that it was for the sake of the goal, our salvation. We know that there is no salvation apart from the Lord; and because this is true, it was vital that the Lord be preached from the Word and that the Christian church be established by this means. This called for leaders who would do this with passion, and the only ones available were people who would preach with the kind of flaming passion that comes from self-love. It was primarily this fire that roused them to proclaim the Lord and preach the Word. It is because their initial state was like this that Lucifer is called "the child of the dawn" in verse 12.

However, once they realized that they could use the holy nature of the Word and the church to gain power, the self-love that had at first roused them to proclaim the Lord broke loose from within and eventually rose to such a height that they transferred all of the Lord's divine power to themselves, leaving nothing unclaimed.

[4] This could not be prevented by the Lord's divine providence, because if it had been, they would have preached that the Lord was not God and that the Word was not holy, and would have become Socinians or Arians, thereby destroying the whole church. The church, though, despite the quality of its leadership, did survive among its subject people. All the people of that religion who turn to the Lord and abstain from evils as sins are saved; so they make up many heavenly communities in the spiritual world. It has also been provided that one of these nations should not accept the yoke of this kind of control, because they regarded the Word as holy. These noble people are the French.

But what has happened?

[5] When self-love has promoted its power all the way to the Lord's throne, has removed him from it and set itself there, then the only thing that can happen is that the other love, the Lucifer, will profane everything that has to do with the Word and the church. To prevent this, the Lord in his divine providence made sure that they would distance themselves from worship of him; invoke the dead by praying to their statues, kissing their bones, and kneeling at their tombs; prohibit the reading of the Word; ascribe holiness to a Mass that ordinary people do not understand; and sell salvation for cash. They were allowed to do this because otherwise they would have profaned the holy nature of the Word and the church. As explained in the preceding section, we cannot profane what is holy unless we know about it.

[6] To prevent the profanation of the Most Holy Supper, it has happened under the Lord's divine providence that they have divided it. They give the bread to the congregation and drink the wine themselves. The wine in the Holy Supper means what is holy and true, while the bread means what is holy and good. When they are separated, the wine means truth profaned and the bread means what is good adulterated. Particularly, they have made the Supper physical and material and focused on it as the primary feature of religion.

Anyone who looks closely at these individual items and weighs them in some mental enlightenment can see the marvelous workings of divine providence in protecting what is holy in the church and in saving everyone who can be saved, virtually snatching from the flames everyone who is willing to be rescued.