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])

9. Angels from their wisdom go still further. They say that not only everything good and true is from the Lord, but everything of life as well. They confirm it by this, that nothing can spring from itself, but only from something prior to itself; therefore all things spring from a First, which they call the very Being [Esse] of the life of all things. And in like manner all things continue to exist, for continuous existence is a ceaseless springing forth, and whatever is not continually held by means of intermediates in connection with the First instantly disperses and is wholly dissipated. They say also that there is but One Fountain of life, and that man's life is a rivulet therefrom, which if it did not unceasingly continue from its fountain would immediately flow away.

[2] Again, they say that from this One Fountain of life, which is the Lord, nothing goes forth except Divine good and Divine truth, and that each one is affected by these in accordance with his reception of them, those who receive them in faith and life find heaven in them while those who reject them or stifle them change them into hell; for they change good into evil and truth into falsity, thus life into death. Again, that everything of life is from the Lord they confirm by this: that all things in the universe have relation to good and truth,-the life of man's will, which is the life of his love, to good; and the life of his understanding, which is the life of his faith, to truth; and since everything good and true comes from above it follows that everything of life must come from above.

[3] This being the belief of the angels they refuse all thanks for the good they do, and are displeased and withdraw if any one attributes good to them. They wonder how any one can believe that he is wise from himself or does anything good from himself. Doing good for one's own sake they do not call good, because it is done from self. But doing good for the sake of good they call good from the Divine; and this they say is the good that makes heaven, because this good is the Lord. ¹

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