115. 1. Redemption was actually a matter of gaining control of the hells, restructuring the heavens, and by so doing preparing for a new spiritual church. I can say with absolute certainty that these three actions are redemption, because the Lord is bringing about redemption again today. This new redemption began in the year 1757 along with a Last Judgment that happened at that time. The redemption has continued from then until now. The reason is that today is the Second Coming of the Lord. A new church is being instituted that could not have been instituted unless first the hells were brought under control and the heavens were restructured.

Because I have been allowed to see it all I could describe how the hells were brought under control and how the new heaven was built and put into the divine design, but that would be the subject of a whole work. In a little work published in London in 1758 I did lay out how the Last Judgment was carried out.

Gaining control over the hells, restructuring the heavens, and establishing a new church was redemption because without those actions no human being could have been saved. In fact, they follow in a sequence. The hells had to be controlled first before a new angelic heaven could be formed, and that heaven had to be formed before the new church on earth could be instituted, because people in the world are so closely connected to angels from heaven and spirits from hell that at the level of the inner mind they are one. This point will be taken up in the last chapter of this book, which specifically covers the close of the age, the Coming of the Lord, and the New Church [753-791].

561. Active Repentance Is Easy for People Who Have Done It a Few Times; Those Who Have Not Done It, However, Experience Tremendous Inner Resistance to It

Active repentance is examining ourselves, recognizing [and admitting to] our sins, confessing them before the Lord, and beginning a new life. This accords with the description of it under the preceding headings. People in the Protestant Christian world - by which I here mean all [Christians] who have separated from the Roman Catholic Church, and also people who belong to that church but have not practiced active repentance - experience tremendous inner resistance to such repentance, for various reasons. Some do not want to do it. Some are afraid. They are in the habit of not doing it, and this breeds first unwillingness, and then intellectual and rational support for not doing it, and in some cases, grief, dread, and terror of it.

[2] The primary reason for the tremendous resistance to active repentance among Protestant Christians is their belief that repentance and goodwill contribute nothing to their salvation. They believe that faith alone brings salvation; when faith is assigned to us, it comes with forgiveness of sins, justification, renewal, regeneration, sanctification, and eternal salvation, without our having to cooperate either actually on our own or even seemingly on our own. The teachers of their dogma call this cooperation of ours useless, and even a roadblock that is resistant and harmful to [our reception of] Christ's merit. Although the lay public is ignorant of the mysteries of this faith, its teaching has nevertheless been sown in them through just a few words: "Faith alone saves," and "Who among us can do anything good on our own?"

This has made repentance among Protestants like a nest of baby birds abandoned by parents who were caught and killed by a bird-catcher.

An additional cause of this resistance is that in spirit, so-called Reformed people are among spirits in the spiritual world who are no different than they are, who introduce these reactions into their thinking and steer them away from the first step of introspection and self-examination.