1. True Christianity

Containing a Comprehensive Theology of the New Heaven and the New Church

The Faith of the New Heaven and the New Church

THE faith of the new heaven and the new church is stated here in both universal and specific forms to serve as the face of the work that follows, the doorway that allows entry into the temple, and the summary that in one way or another contains all the details to follow. I say "the faith of the new heaven and the new church" because heaven, where there are angels, and the church, in which there are people, act together like the inner and the outer levels in a human being. People in the church who love what is good because they believe what is true and who believe what is true because they love what is good are angels of heaven with regard to the inner levels of their minds. After death they come into heaven, and enjoy happiness there according to the relationship between their love and their faith. It is important to know that the new heaven that the Lord is establishing today has this faith as its face, doorway, and summary.

466. The Fact That Two Trees - the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil [Genesis 2:9] - Were Placed in the Garden of Eden Means That Free Choice in Spiritual Matters Has Been Granted to Humankind

Many have come to believe that Adam and Eve in the Book of Moses do not mean the first created people. They support their position with evidence that people existed before Adam, which is based on calculations and the chronologies of various peoples. They also point to what Cain, the firstborn of Adam, said to Jehovah:

"I will be a wanderer and an itinerant on the earth - whoever encounters me will kill me. " Therefore Jehovah placed a mark on Cain so that whoever encountered him would not kill him. (Genesis 4:14-15)

And after he left the presence of Jehovah, he lived in the land of Nod and built a city. (Genesis 4:16-17)

Therefore the land was inhabited before Adam.

But Adam and his wife mean the earliest church on this planet. This is demonstrated in a number of ways in Secrets of Heaven, which I published in London. That work also indicates that the Garden of Eden means the wisdom of the people of that church; the tree of life means the Lord is in us and we are in the Lord; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil means we are not in the Lord but in a sense of our own autonomy instead, like people who believe that they do everything, even what is good, on their own; and eating from this tree means incorporating evil into ourselves.

757. Today the Christian Church Is at Its End; the Lord Foretold and Described This Event in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelation

The sections under the preceding heading showed that "the close of the age" means the time when the church is at an end. From this we can see what the Lord meant when he spoke of the close of the age in the Gospels (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21).

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, his disciples came to him privately and said, "What will the sign of your Coming and the close of the age be?" (Matthew 24:3)

Then the Lord foretold and described what the progressive stages would be like at the end, leading up to his Coming. He said, among other things, that he would come in the clouds of heaven with power and glory and gather his elect (Matthew 24:30-31), which never happened during the actual destruction of Jerusalem. The Lord described these events in the prophetic mode; in that mode, each expression is pregnant with meaning. (What each phrase there entails has been explained in Secrets of Heaven 3353-3356; 3486-3489; 3650-3655; 3751-3757; 3897-3901; 4056-4060; 4229-4231; 4332-4335; 4422-4424.)