According to the Writings, the Lord has been expressing his love for us for as long as we have existed, varying its form to fit our ability to receive it. Among the earliest people – in what the Writings call the Most Ancient Church – this was relatively direct, with divine truth flowing through heaven into people’s internal minds. People then thought of the Lord as a spiritual human, not a natural one, but the spiritual world was as real to them as the natural world was.

But people eventually turned away, wanting to use their own intelligence to explore what is true. So the Lord adjusted, leading people to know Him through his imprint on the natural world, seeing the truth of His love in everything from the alignment of the stars to the most common plants and animals. But again people turned away, using that knowledge to think for themselves and serve themselves.

So the Lord adjusted again, imprinting His love on the stories and laws of the Old Testament, on the songs of the Psalmist and the visions of the prophets. People were largely turned away, but if they would read these words and follow these rules in their external lives, He could still flow into their internals. But again people people rejected Him, making the laws into utterly external things and twisting the prophecies to suit their own desires. At that point the darkness was nearly complete, with barely a glimmer of knowing the Lord to be found anywhere.

So the Lord adjusted again, imprinting His love – the divine truth – into natural human flesh with the birth of Jesus. Jesus would preach the love and caring that were hidden within the Old Testament, and would put ideas in new forms, that made love of the Lord and love of the neighbor paramount – once more a pure expression of the Lord’s love.

The Writings also say that Christians ultimately turned away from Jesus’s true message, first by dividing the idea of God into three people and later by making salvation simply a matter of belief – of faith alone – rather than a matter of belief that flows into life. And they say that they themselves are a new expression of divine truth, re-establishing the meaning of the Bible and the true messages delivered by the Lord during His life in the natural world.

Clearly, then, the "light" of divine truth has repeatedly "shone in the darkness" of the human mind. And repeatedly people have not comprehended it.

(Verweise: About God 2; Arcana Coelestia 4687 [2-3]; The Apocalypse Explained 151 [3-4])

82. Since this is how the Divine Being is perceived in the heavens, it is instinctive in everyone who accepts any inflow from heaven to think of the Lord in a human guise. The ancients did so and even modern people do, both outside and inside the church. Simple people see him in thought as an ancient one, in glory.

But this instinct has been stifled by all the people who have distanced themselves from the heavenly inflow by pride in their own intelligence and by evil lives. The ones who have stifled it by pride in their intelligence prefer an invisible God, while the ones who have done so by evil lives prefer no God at all. Because this instinct is not in them, neither type knows that it even exists, although this is the essential heavenly divine nature that flows into us first and foremost from heaven because we are born for heaven; and no one enters heaven without some concept of the Divine Being.