Title: Saving the Tree of Life

Topic: First Coming

Summary: The Lord's salvation takes two forms: an ongoing saving of individual souls that respond, but also a one-time rescuing of the whole human race from destruction and oblivion.

Use the reference links below to follow along in the Bible as you watch.

References:
Isaiah 53:9
Matthew 20:25, 28
Luke 2:9-10; 3:2, 4-6
John 12:44, 47
Acts of the Apostles 13:47
Romans 5:18-19
1 Timothy 2:1-4, 6; 4:10
Hebrews 5:8-9
Genesis 1:27-28; 12:1, 3; 13:4; 15:5; 22:17; 28:12, 14
Deuteronomy 1:10
Genesis 47:27
Exodus 1:20
Jeremiah 33:25
Ezekiel 36:8
Acts of the Apostles 6:7
Matthew 1
Luke 3:23

8878. 'Of those who hate Me' means those who completely reject the Lord's Divinity. This is clear from the meaning of 'those who hate God' as those who are ruled by evil and therefore by falsity. For these are they who reject the Lord's Divinity; and to the extent that they are ruled by evil and therefore by falsity they not merely reject but also hate it. The reason why the Lord's Divinity is what they reject is that those ruled by evil do not see things in heavenly light, only in natural light, and eventually only in the light of sensory awareness provided by the body. In this inferior light these people cannot possibly see the Lord's Human as anything more than human. They are unable to recognize what the Divine Human is, because they have an altogether empty and meaningless notion of the Divine. If they are told that the Divine itself is Divine Love, and that Divine Love is the Essential Being (Esse) of all life; if they are told that by virtue of His conception the Lord was that Love, which was thus the Essential Being of His life, that is, was Jehovah; and if they are told that He glorified, that is, made Divine, His Human to be the likeness of Him, then those of them who are endowed with some intellectual ability may indeed be able to some extent to grasp all this. Even so, they do not believe it; for when they pass from the intellectual light in which they are then seeing things into their natural and sensory light, they sink into complete and utter darkness regarding this truth, and consequently into denial of it.