Secrets of Heaven #761

By Emanuel Swedenborg

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761. I have already said [§§741, 751] that spiritual struggle is a battle inside us between the evil spirits and angels present with us, and that we sense this conflict indistinctly in our conscience.

Further vital information about this combat is that angels constantly defend us and deflect the evil that the evil spirits intend against us. They even defend the falsity and evil we have in us, because they know very well where we obtained the falsity and evil: from evil spirits and demons. We never produce anything misguided or wicked out of ourselves. It is the evil spirits with us who produce it and at the same time cause us to believe that it comes from us. Such is their malevolence. What is more, at the same instant that they are filling us with these things and making us believe this way, they are also accusing and condemning us. I can back this claim with many different experiences.

Those lacking faith in the Lord cannot receive light dispelling this belief that they are the source of evil, so they adopt the evil as their own and become just like the evil spirits who accompany them. That is the human condition.

As angels are aware of this, during the trials of regeneration they even defend our falsity and evil. Otherwise we would suffer defeat, since we have nothing in us that is not evil and therefore false and are accordingly nothing more than a heap and conglomeration of evils and resulting falsities.

  
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Many thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation and its New Century Edition team.