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Genesis 1

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1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first Day.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

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Divine Love and Wisdom # 358

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358. Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love

Part 5

The Lord has created and formed within us two vessels and dwellings for himself called volition and discernment. Volition is for his divine love and discernment for his divine wisdom. I have already discussed the divine love and wisdom of God the Creator, who is the Lord from eternity, and I have discussed the creation of the universe. Now I need to say something about our own creation.

We read that we were created in the image of God and according to his likeness (Genesis 1:26). In this passage "the image of God" means divine wisdom and "the likeness of God" means divine love, since wisdom is nothing more than the image of love. Love actually presents itself to view and to recognition in wisdom, and since that is where we see and recognize it, wisdom is its image. Then too, love is the reality of life and wisdom is its consequent manifestation. This "image and likeness" of God is strikingly visible in angels. Love shining from within is their faces and wisdom in their beauty, with beauty as the form of their love. I have seen this, and I have come to know it.

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

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Wisdom

Napsal(a) New Christian Bible Study Staff, John Odhner

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “wisdom” as “accumulated philosophic or scientific learning; the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships; good sense.” That sounds reasonable: It means knowing a lot, and knowing what to do with that knowledge. Right?

Swedenborg’s definition, however, is a little different. In “Divine Love and Wisdom” (a book with a bit to say on the subject), he writes that “wisdom is nothing more than the image of love.” The image of love? What does that mean? And how can it possibly relate to the sensible dictionary definition?

Imagine, though, that you’re called on to settle a dispute between two co-workers. Each one offers a litany of grievances, nasty things the other has said and done. What do you do?

One approach would be to seek facts and knowledge and judge on them alone. You could tote up the grievances, look at their severity, try to calculate who started it and who’s had the worst of it and hand out some punishment. The other approach would be to try to understand each person’s feelings, the source of their anger, and seek a solution that will make both happy (or at least no longer angry).

Which approach is the wise one? We’d say the second. Why? Well, partly because it would actually work, but more profoundly because it is the one that addresses love, that addresses the emotional states of the people involved. A truly wise decision is one that seeks to create more love, one that seeks an atmosphere of caring and respect. And could a selfish, uncaring person be part of such a decision? Not really. In this situation, wisdom is a result of love: love for the people involved, the love of a caring solution, and love for the good things those people could do if they worked together with mutual caring and respect.

Put that way, wisdom as “the image of love” makes a bit more sense. Yes, it considers facts and involves knowledge, and it looks at them through a loving lens. Wisdom is love applied to life.

There’s also a deeper, more profound and philosophical answer to the question. This involves the idea that love - the Lord’s love, which is love itself - is the actual substance of reality, that it flows out from the Lord to form spiritual reality, and flows through spiritual reality to form physical reality. That love molds itself into forms so it can function as the reality we know, but everything is ultimately made of energy that comes from the Lord’s love.

That’s a difficult concept to grasp, but it’s actually reflected in modern physics. The leading scientific theory is that the universe started with the “Big Bang,” a moment of essentially infinite energy that ballooned out to form space and time. As the volume of the energy increased, it started cooling and forming patterns, and those patterns eventually got so tight and small that they began behaving as particles of matter - the particles that make up all the physical “stuff” in the universe. This means that matter - even the very stuff of our bodies themselves - is really just energy trapped in space. That’s a strange thought, but it’s well-demonstrated. It is, in fact, the underlying meaning of Einstein’s famous equation “e = mc2,” and is the basis of atomic energy.

In the physical universe, then, there are really two aspects that are equally important and intrinsically intertwined: the energy that existed at the moment of the Big Bang, and the patterns and wrinkles that formed the energy into matter. And so it is with spiritual reality as well: There is love itself, which is the essential energy, and there is wisdom, which is the wrinkling and shaping that gives love a way of creating things and expressing itself.

To put that in simpler terms, we could say that wisdom is a way of packaging love so that it can be used. The Lord does that on a universal scale: He packages His love in the form of all creation so that we can live and flourish and learn to love as well. And we - hopefully - do that in the scale of our own lives. Presented with a problem, we start pulling together little threads of love, little ways of caring, and weaving them together into a solution: a package of love; a little bit of wisdom.

Why, then, is the common idea of wisdom such an intellectual one - as Merriam-Webster would have it- That’s because the physical world is a sort of twice-filtered expression of the Lord’s love, and His love is hidden away to such a degree that we cannot see it or sense it in any way. Smack yourself in the head with a rock, and you don’t feel the Lord’s love - you feel a rock smacking you in the head. The fact that that rock is an expression of the Lord’s love is pretty well hidden.

“Facts” are similar. They express reality, and reality is an expression of the Lord’s love, but it is so deeply hidden that those “facts” are about as soft and loving as that head-smacking stone. But, like that stone, those facts are very visible, very tangible. So when we think of “wisdom” on the physical plane, what we identify is the large collection of rocky facts involved. Thus wisdom seems like an intellectual thing.

True wisdom, however, involves cracking open those facts to see the states of love they represent, and working with the love. That’s harder to see, but much more important.

(Odkazy: Apocalypse Revealed 189; Arcana Coelestia 1226; Conjugial Love 130; Divine Love and Wisdom 34, 35, 39, 180, 213, 287, 358; True Christian Religion 242)