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以西結書 16:3

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3 耶和華耶路撒冷如此:你根本,你出世,是在迦南;你父親是亞摩利人,你母親是赫人。

Dalle opere di Swedenborg

 

Apocalypse Revealed #504

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504. Where also our Lord was crucified. This symbolizes a failure to acknowledge the Lord's Divine humanity, and thus a state in which He is rejected.

It is a saying in the church that people who blaspheme the Lord, crucify Him, and that so, too, do those who, like the Jews, deny that He is the Son of God.

People who deny that the Lord's humanity is Divine are like Jews because everyone views the Lord as a person, and anyone who views His humanity as on par with the humanity of any other person is incapable then of thinking of His Divinity, no matter how often this is called the Son of God, born from eternity, coequal with the Divinity of the Father. When he is told this or hears it read, it penetrates his hearing, indeed, but not at the same time his belief, since he thinks of the Lord as being a material person like any other man, retaining the same properties of the flesh. And because he then sets the Lord's Divinity aside and pays it no attention, he is therefore in the same state as he would be if he denied it; for he denies that the Lord's humanity is the Son of God, even as the Jews did also, for which reason they crucified Him. That the Lord's humanity is nevertheless the Son of God is something plainly said in Luke 1:32, 35, Matthew 3:16-17, and elsewhere.

[2] It is apparent from this why people in the church turn directly to God the Father, and many also to the Holy Spirit, and rarely anyone directly to the Lord.

Since the Jews crucified the Lord owing to their denial that He was the Messiah, the Son of God, therefore their Jerusalem is also called Sodom (Isaiah 3:9, Jeremiah 23:14, Ezekiel 16:46, 48). And the Lord says,

On the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:29-30)

What the fire and brimstone are may be seen in no. 452, 494.

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.

Dalle opere di Swedenborg

 

Apocalypse Revealed #421

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421. And to him was given the key to the bottomless pit. This symbolizes their hell opened.

A key symbolizes the power to open, and also to close (nos. 62, 174, 840). And a bottomless pit symbolizes hell, where those people reside who have affirmed in themselves justification and salvation by faith alone, all of whom come from the Protestant Reformed Church. Here, however, they are people who appear in their own eyes and so in the eyes of many others to be educated and erudite - even though in the sight of angels in heaven they appear to be bereft of intellect as regards matters having to do with heaven and the church, since people who affirm such a faith, even so far as to affirm its inner tenets, close the higher constituents of their intellect, and this at last to such an extent that they can no longer see any spiritual truth in any light. The reason is that an affirmation of falsity constitutes a denial of the truth. Consequently, whenever they hear some spiritual truth, namely, a truth of the Word serviceable for doctrine and life for people of the church, they keep their mind in the falsities they have affirmed; and then they either shroud the truth they have heard in falsities or reject it as nothing but words, or they yawn at it and turn away, and this the more conceited they are owing to their erudition. For conceit glues the falsities together until they at last stick together, like solidified sea foam. The Word is therefore hidden from them, like a book sealed with seven seals.

[2] I will describe, furthermore, their character, and the character of their hell, because it has been given me to see it and speak with the inhabitants there, and also to see the locusts that issued from it:

That pit, which is like the mouth of a furnace, appears in the southern zone, and the abyss beneath it extends a great distance toward the east. The inhabitants in it have light, but if light from heaven is let in, the hell becomes dark. Consequently the pit is closed above.

Seen there are huts with arched roofs, built seemingly of brick, which are divided into several small rooms, and each room has in it a table, with sheets of paper lying on it, along with some books. At each table sits someone who in the world affirmed justification and salvation by faith alone, making charity a merely natural moral act, and deeds of charity simply those of civil life by which people are able to achieve rewards in the world; but if people should do those deeds for the sake of salvation, they condemn those deeds, and some of them do so severely, because the deeds have in them human reason and human will.

All the people in this abyss were educated and erudite in the world. And among them are some metaphysicians and scholastics who are held in higher esteem than the rest there. I recognized several when it was granted me to speak with them.

[3] Their fate, however, is this: When they are first admitted there, they sit in the first small rooms; but as they argue for faith to the exclusion of works of charity, they leave their former seats and go into little rooms nearer the east, and this repeatedly until they reach the end, where those people reside who use the Word to defend those tenets. And because they cannot help but falsify the Word then, their huts vanish, and they see themselves in a desert; and at that point they undergo such experiences as described in no. 153 above.

There is also another abyss beneath that abyss, where the residents are people who have similarly argued for justification and salvation by faith alone, but who within themselves, in their spirit, have denied God, and at heart have laughed at the sanctities of the church. They do nothing but argue there, tearing their garments, climbing up on the tables, stamping their feet and battling each other with invectives. And because no one is permitted to do physical harm there, they threaten vocally and shake their fists.

The environment there is unclean and squalid. But this a subject for another time.

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.