The Lord, in His essence, is love itself.
That's sort of a metaphysical statement, and it's easy to read over it without really grasping it. But it is everything; it is the answer to every question we will ever have about life, about humanity, indeed about reality itself. The Lord is love itself. That's His substance and His being, and it is the basis of all existence.
Love, of course, is impossible to express directly. We can talk about how to be loving, about what love makes us want to do, about love's effects. We can show love through countless actions. We can even see its image in the faces of people who feel it. But without some such tangible form, love is inexpressible, and in a philosophical sense does not actually exist.
Within the Lord, this expression of love comes in the uncountable concepts and ideas that we collectively call wisdom. And since the Lord's love is infinite and divine, and is the source of all human love, so also the Lord's wisdom is infinite and divine and the source of all human wisdom.
That, then, is the simplest way to describe the Lord: He is perfect, divine love expressed as perfect, divine wisdom.
But love cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs an object, a recipient, and of its nature wants to bring that "other" close, make that "other" happy, and be conjoined. To have that, the Lord had to create something that was not Himself. He did this by extending his love and withdrawing from it, creating something that was in accord with His love but was not part of it - what we know as physical reality. Since it was no longer part of the Lord, this "stuff" had no love of its own, was finite rather than infinite, and was utterly dead – but because it was in accord with love the Lord could love it from the outside and keep it in existence.
But physical reality couldn't love the Lord back. So out of that physical reality He formed human beings, creatures with their own forms of love and wisdom and free will, who could accept His love and return it and who could experience the joy of conjunction.
The history of that relationship -- between the Lord and humanity -- is, of course, a convoluted one, but it all centers on that principle: The Lord created us so He could love us, be conjoined with us, and make us happy.
The Bible contains a record of that relationship, starting in mythic form in Genesis. In the early days of human spirituality on earth, symbolized by Adam and Eve, in what Swedenborg calls the "Most Ancient Church", people accepted the Lord's influx of love and leading freely, and lived in innocence and delight. But, using their free will, they eventually turned to their own minds for guidance - represented by the serpent in the Bible's story of the Garden of Eden - and then the further fall represented by the great flood. From the remnants of good and truth that still existed in human society, the Lord raised up the Ancient Church, represented by Noah, which he led through knowledge and understanding. But again through free will people eventually turned that knowledge into idolatry and magic, as in the fallen nations that surrounded the Children of Israel.
To preserve the name Jehovah and and the symbolic relationship between spiritual and physical things, the Lord then formed the Jewish or Israelitish Church, which created the written Word with all its internal meaning, and preserved that meaning in its rituals of worship. To do it, though, he had to leave their minds and hearts closed, since they had both been corrupted by the earlier churches. So they did things that were important, but without love and without understanding. The fact that they were forced into order put them in constant conflict with the Lord, which is why He is so often pictured as angry, and why there is so much battle and violent imagery in the Old Testament.
By the end of that church, the hells had grown so strong, so full from the legions of evil people flowing in, that they threatened to block off the flow of love from the Lord to the world. So the Lord, through Mary, took on a human body, complete with all the evil tendencies people have. Through that human layer, the Lord could battle the hells directly, by subjecting himself to every conceivable temptation and overcoming them all - something not possible within His divine essence, which has no evil and cannot be tempted. We see only glimpses of that temptation in the Gospels - the 40 days in the desert, the Garden of Gethsemane, the cross itself - but the Writings tell us it was constant from his earliest childhood to the end of his earthly life.
Through His earthly life, the Lord accomplished several things. First, He defeated the hells and put them in order, so that His love could reach mankind fully again. Second, He opened a window into the deeper meanings of the Laws of Moses and illustrated the importance of love through His teachings. Third, He made a human being divine. Fourth, He made His own divinity human. And he did all these things so that human beings would be better able to receive and return His love.
This explanation, obviously, sheds some light on the idea of the Trinity. The Son was not a separate person; He was the Lord Himself internally, clothed in a human body, creating a human presence which is still with us. The Holy Spirit likewise is not a separate person; it is the Lord's love taking action before us.
There is much more that could be said. Indeed, the Writings say that at their deepest level the inspired parts of the Bible are entirely about the Lord's life in this world. For now, though, it is enough to say that the Lord continues to be, as He has always been, divine love reaching out to us through divine wisdom, seeking to be one with us and to bring us joy.
(References:
Arcana Coelestia 1690, 2523, 10645; Divine Love and Wisdom 4, 28-29, 55, 114, 170-176; Heaven and Hell 2; The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding Faith 34, 35; True Christian Religion 81)
