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.

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

129. 10. The church comes from the Lord and it exists in people who go to Him and live according to His commandments. No one at the present day denies that the church is the Lord's, and that because it is the Lord's, it is from the Lord.

It exists in people who go to Him, because the Lord's church in the Christian world is founded on the Word, and the Word is from Him and from Him in such a way that it is Him. The Word contains Divine truth united to Divine good, and this also is the Lord. This is precisely what is meant by the Word which was with God and which was God, from which men have life and light, and which became flesh (John 1:1-14).

Moreover, the church exists in people who go to the Lord for the further reason that it exists in those who believe in Him. And no one can believe that He is God the Savior and Redeemer, Jehovah who is Righteousness, ¹ the door by which one must enter the sheepfold (that is to say, the church), ² the way, the truth and the life, that no one comes to the Father except through Him, ³ that the Father and He are one, ⁴ besides many other things that the Lord Himself teaches - no one, I say, can believe these things unless he gets his belief from the Lord. No one can believe these things without going to the Lord, because He is God of heaven and earth, as He Himself also teaches. ⁵ Who else should one go to? Who else can one go to?

The church exists in people who live according to the Lord's commandments, because they alone have conjunction with Him. For the Lord says:

He who has My commandments and obeys them, it is he who loves Me....and I will love him....and (I will) make an abode with him. (But) he who does not love Me does not keep My (commandments).... (John 14:21-24)

Love is what conjoins, and conjunction with the Lord is the church.

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