True Christian Religion #167

By Emanuel Swedenborg

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167. Everyone acknowledges that those three essentials, namely, soul, body and activity, were and are in the Lord God the Saviour. No one but Antichrist can deny that His soul was from Jehovah His Father; for in the Word, in both testaments, He is called the Son of Jehovah, the Son of the Most High God, the Only-begotten. So the Father's Divine is His first essential, as the soul is in man. It follows from this that the Son born to Mary is the body of that Divine soul, for what grows in the mother's womb is simply the body conceived and derived from the soul. So this is the second essential. Activities make up the third essential, since they are produced by the soul and the body working together; and anything so produced is of the same essence as the productive agents. The three essentials, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, make one in the Lord, as the soul, body and activity do in man. This is plainly demonstrated by the Lord's saying that the Father and He are one, and that the Father is in Him and He is in the Father; likewise that He and the Holy Spirit are one, since the Holy Spirit is the Divine which proceeds out of the Lord from the Father, as was fully proved from the Word above (153-154). To prove it again, therefore, would be filling one's stomach 1 to overflowing, and like loading the table with food when one has eaten one's fill.

Footnotes:

1. This curious word means strictly the first stomach of a ruminant animal.

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