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.

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

3877. 'Therefore she called his name Levi' means the essential nature of it. This is clear from the meaning of 'name' or 'calling the name' as the essential nature, dealt with above in 3872. That nature is what is contained in the words, 'Now this time my husband will cling to me, for I have borne him three sons', dealt with immediately above in 3875, 3876. This nature is what is meant by 'Levi', and also by the tribe named after him; and it is the third universal attribute of the Church, or the third development when a person is being regenerated or is becoming the Church. It is also charity. The situation with charity is that it contains the will for truth within itself, and through the will for truth contains the understanding of truth. For one in whom charity is present possesses those abilities to will truth and to understand it. But before a person arrives at charity he must pass through an external stage, that is to say, of understanding truth, then of willing truth, until at last he has an affection for truth, which is charity. And when charity is present in that person he looks to the Lord, who is meant in the highest sense by 'Judah', Jacob's fourth son.