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Exodus 20

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1 And God spoke all these words, saying,

2 I am Jehovah thy God, who have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

4 Thou shalt not make thyself any graven image, or any form of what is in the heavens above, or what is in the earth beneath, or what is in the waters under the earth:

5 thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I, Jehovah thy God, am a jealous ùGod, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and to the fourth [generation] of them that hate me,

6 and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.

7 Thou shalt not idly utter the name of Jehovah thy God; for Jehovah will not hold him guiltless that idly uttereth his name.

8 Remember the sabbath day to hallow it.

9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work;

10 but the seventh day is the sabbath of Jehovah thy God: thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy bondman, nor thy handmaid, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.

11 For in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore Jehovah blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

12 Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be prolonged in the land that Jehovah thy God giveth thee.

13 Thou shalt not kill.

14 Thou shalt not commit adultery.

15 Thou shalt not steal.

16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

17 Thou shalt not desire thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not desire thy neighbour's wife, nor his bondman, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's.

18 And all the people saw the thunderings, and the flames, and the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw [it], they trembled, and stood afar off,

19 and said to Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear; but let not God Speak with us, lest we die.

20 And Moses said to the people, Fear not; for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before you, that ye sin not.

21 And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near to the obscurity where God was.

22 And Jehovah said to Moses, Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: Ye have seen that I have spoken with you from the heavens.

23 Ye shall not make beside me gods of silver, and ye shall not make to you gods of gold.

24 An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice on it thy burnt-offerings, and thy peace-offerings, thy sheep and thine oxen: in all places where I shall make my name to be remembered, I will come unto thee, and bless thee.

25 And if thou make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone; for if thou lift up thy sharp tool upon it, thou hast profaned it.

26 Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.

   

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True Christian Religion # 9

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9. (iii) THAT IS WHY THERE IS NO NATION THROUGHOUT THE WORLD POSSESSED OF RELIGION AND SOUND REASON WHICH DOES NOT ACKNOWLEDGE GOD AND THE FACT THAT HE IS ONE.

The consequence of the Divine influence operating on the souls of men as described above is that every man has an inward voice telling him that there is a God, and that He is one. None the less there are those who deny the existence of God, those who recognise nature as a god, and those who worship several gods and also statues as gods. The reason is that these have choked the interiors of their reason or understanding with worldly and bodily thoughts, thus blotting out their original or child-like idea of God, and at the same time throwing religion away over their shoulders. The confession of the creed shows plainly that Christians acknowledge one God, but it also shows how they see Him. It runs:

The catholic faith is that we reverence one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity. There are three Divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and yet there are not three gods, but one God. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. They have one Divinity, equal glory and co-eternal majesty. So the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. But as Christian verity compels us to confess each person severally to be God and Lord, so does the catholic religion forbid us to speak of three Gods and three Lords.

Such is the Christian faith on the oneness of God; but it will be seen in the chapter on the Divine Trinity [163-188] that there is a conflict in that confession between the ideas of a Trinity and the oneness of God.

[2] The rest of the nations in the world, who are possessed of religion and sound reason, insist that God is one: all the Mohammedans in their empires, the Africans in many kingdoms of their continent, and the peoples of Asia in several of theirs, not to mention the present-day Jews. The most ancient people of the Golden Age, those who had any religion, worshipped one God whom they named Jehovah. So did the ancients of the following age, before the establishment of empires under a sole monarch. For at this time worldly, and finally bodily, loves began to close up the higher regions of the understanding, which had previously been open; then they had been like temples and shrines for the worship of one God. But the Lord God, in order to re-open them and thus restore the worship of one God, founded a church among the descendants of Jacob, and set at the head of all the commandments of their religion this:

There is to be no other God before my face, Exodus 20:3

[3] Jehovah too, the new name which He gave Himself for them, means the supreme and single Entity from which everything comes which is and comes into being anywhere in the universe. The early gentiles acknowledged as their supreme God Jupiter, 1 perhaps so called from Jehovah; and they endowed with divinity many of the other members of his court. But the philosophers of the following age, such as Plato and Aristotle, admitted that these were not gods, but so many properties, qualities and attributes of the one God, which were called gods on account of the divinity immanent in each of them.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.