189. CHAPTER FOUR

THE SACRED SCRIPTURE OR THE WORD OF THE LORD ¹

I. The sacred scripture, that is the Word, is Divine truth itself.

Everyone professes the Word to be from God, divinely inspired and therefore holy, but up to the present no one has known where in it the Divine is. For taken literally the Word looks like any ordinary book, written in a strange style, neither high-flown nor brilliant as many secular books appear to be. This is why if a person worships nature as God or in preference to God, so that his thought comes from himself and his own personality (proprium) rather than from heaven inspired by the Lord, he can easily fall into error about the Word and come to despise it. Thus he may say to himself when he reads it: 'What does this or that mean? Can this be divine? Can God, whose wisdom is infinite, talk like this? Where is there anything holy in it, and where does this holiness come from, except from religious belief and the conviction it carries?'

Bilješke:

8483. '[And] Moses was incensed with them' means that [therefore] they were averse to God's truth. This is clear from the meaning of 'being incensed' or being angry - when said of Moses, who represents God's truth - as aversion to it, dealt with in 5034, 5798. The appearance is that the Lord is averse or turns away, but in reality it is man who turns away, 5798. The Word many times attributes to Jehovah anger and wrath, even fury, against people, when in fact Jehovah radiates pure love and pure mercy, and no anger whatever, towards a person. That way of speaking about Him in the Word is due to appearances; for when people are opposed to the Divine and as a result shut off from themselves the flow of love and mercy, they plunge themselves into the misery of punishment and into hell. This seems like lack of pity and like vengeance on the part of the Divine because of the evil they have done; but in fact there is nothing of the sort present in the Divine, only in evil itself. But see what has been shown already about these matters in 1857, 2447, 6071, 6832, 6991, 6997, 7533, 7632, 7643, 7679, 7710, 7877, 7926, 8197, 8214, 8223, 8226-8228, 8282. From all this it is evident that 'Moses was incensed with them' means that they were averse to God's truth.