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Ezekiel 22

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1 And the word of Jehovah came unto me, saying,

2 And thou, son of man, wilt thou judge, wilt thou judge the bloody city? Yea, cause her to know all her abominations,

3 and say, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: A city that sheddeth blood in her midst, that her time may come, and maketh idols against herself to defile herself.

4 Thou art become guilty by thy blood which thou hast shed, and hast defiled thyself with thine idols which thou hast made; and thou hast caused thy days to draw near, and art come unto thy years: therefore have I made thee a reproach unto the nations, and a mocking unto all countries.

5 Those that are near, and those that are far from thee, shall mock thee, who art infamous [and] full of tumult.

6 Behold, the princes of Israel have been in thee to shed blood, each according to his power.

7 In thee have they made light of father and mother; in the midst of thee have they dealt by oppression with the stranger; in thee have they vexed the fatherless and the widow.

8 Thou hast despised my holy things, and hast profaned my sabbaths.

9 In thee there have been slanderous men to shed blood; and in thee have they eaten upon the mountains; in the midst of thee they have committed lewdness;

10 in thee have they discovered their fathers' nakedness; in thee have they humbled her that was unclean in her separation.

11 And one hath committed abomination with his neighbour's wife; and another hath lewdly defiled his daughter-in-law; and another in thee hath humbled his sister, his father's daughter.

12 In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast overreached thy neighbours by oppression, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord Jehovah.

13 And behold, I have smitten mine hand at thine overreaching which thou hast done, and at thy bloodshed which hath been in the midst of thee.

14 Shall thy heart endure, shall thy hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee? I Jehovah have spoken, and will do [it].

15 And I will scatter thee among the nations, and disperse thee through the countries, and will consume thy filthiness out of thee.

16 And thou shalt be polluted through thyself in the sight of the nations, and thou shalt know that I [am] Jehovah.

17 And the word of Jehovah came unto me, saying,

18 Son of man, the house of Israel is become dross to me: they are all copper, and tin, and iron, and lead, in the midst of the furnace: they are become the dross of silver.

19 Therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Because ye are all become dross, therefore behold, I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem.

20 [As] they gather silver, and copper, and iron, and lead, and tin, into the midst of the furnace, to blow the fire upon it, to melt it, so will I gather you in mine anger and in my fury, and I will lay you on and melt you.

21 Yea, I will collect you, and blow upon you the fire of my wrath, and ye shall be melted in the midst thereof.

22 As silver is melted in the midst of the furnace, so shall ye be melted in the midst thereof: and ye shall know that I Jehovah have poured out my fury upon you.

23 And the word of Jehovah came unto me, saying,

24 Son of man, say unto her, Thou art a land that is not cleansed, nor rained upon in the day of indignation.

25 There is a conspiracy of her prophets in the midst of her like a roaring lion ravening the prey; they devour souls; they take away treasure and precious things; they increase her widows in the midst of her;

26 her priests do violence to my law, and profane my holy things: they put no difference between the holy and profane, neither do they make known [the difference] between the unclean and the clean, and they hide their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them.

27 Her princes in the midst of her are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain.

28 And her prophets have daubed for them with untempered [mortar], seeing vanity and divining lies unto them, saying, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah! and Jehovah hath not spoken.

29 The people of the land use oppression and practise robbery; and they vex the poor and needy, and oppress the stranger wrongfully.

30 And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the fence, and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none.

31 And I will pour out mine indignation upon them; I will consume them in the fire of my wrath: their own way will I recompense upon their head, saith the Lord Jehovah.

   

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Jeremiah 23:14

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14 And in the prophets of Jerusalem have I seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in falsehood, and strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that none doth return from his wickedness. They are all become unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.

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The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings #277

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277. Inflow. The inflow of heaven into the world and the inflow of the soul into all parts of the body: 6053-6058, 6189-6215, 6307-6327, 6466-6495, 6598-6626 (which include evidence from personal experience). Nothing comes into being from itself, but rather from something prior, so everything comes from one primary entity: 4523, 4524, 6040, 6056. Everything constantly continues to exist in the same way that it came into being, because continued existence is a perpetual coming into being: 1 2886, 2888, 3627, 3628, 3648, 4523, 4524, 6040, 6056. Inflow happens according to the divine design: 7270. This makes it possible for us to see that everything is continuing to exist from the primary and underlying reality, because it came into being from that underlying reality: 4523, 4524, 6040, 6056. Every bit of life flows in from that primary underlying reality because that is its source, so it flows in from the Lord: 3001, 3318, 3337, 3338, 3344, 3484, 3619, 3741, 3742, 3743, 4318, 4319, 4320, 4417, 4524, 4882, 5847, 5986, 6325, 6468, 6469, 6470, 6479, 9276, 10196. Every "coming into being" comes from an underlying reality, and nothing can come into being unless it has its own underlying reality within it: 4523, 4524, 6040, 6056.

All of our thinking and all of our willing flows into us: 904, 2886, 2887, 2888, 4151, 4319, 4320, 5846, 5848, 6189, 6191, 6194, 6197, 6198, 6199, 6213, 7147, 10219 (which include evidence from personal experience). Our ability to examine things, to think, and to reach conclusions as the result of analysis comes from an inflow: 2888, 4319, 4320. If the inflow from the spiritual world were taken away from us we could not survive for a single moment, and yet we are in a state of freedom: 2887, 5849, 5854, 6321 (which include evidence from eyewitness experience). The life that flows in from the Lord varies depending on our state and on our receptivity: 2069, 5986, 6472, 7343. In evil people the goodness that flows in from the Lord is turned into evil and the truth into falsity: 3643, 4632 (which include evidence from eyewitness experience). How much we receive of the goodness and truth that is constantly flowing in from the Lord depends on the extent to which evil and falsity in us have been moved out of the way: 2411, 3142, 3147, 5828.

Everything good flows in from the Lord and everything evil flows in from hell: 904, 4151. People nowadays believe that everything is in and from themselves even though it is all flowing in; and they ought to know this from the church's teaching that everything good comes from heaven and everything evil comes from hell: 4249, 6193, 6206. If people believed the way things actually are, they would not take evil into themselves, because they would throw it out of themselves and back into hell, and they would not claim that goodness was their own and therefore would not take any credit for it: 6206, 6324, 6325. How happy our state would be then-with the Lord's help we would have an inward perspective on both goodness and evil: 6325. People who deny the existence of heaven or who know nothing about it are unaware that there is any inflow coming from it: 4322, 5649, 6193, 6479. What inflow is: 6128, 6190, 9407 (which is illustrated by comparisons).

[2] Inflow is spiritual; it is not physical. It flows from the spiritual world into the physical world and not from the physical world into the spiritual world: 3219, 5119, 5259, 5427, 5428, 5478, 6322, 9109, 9110. Inflow flows through the inner self into the outer self and not the reverse: 1702, 1707, 1940, 1954, 5119, 5259, 5779, 6322, 9380. This is because the inner self is in the spiritual world and the outer self is in the physical world: 978, 1015, 3628, 4459, 4523, 4524, 6057, 6309, 9701-9709, 10156, 10472. The appearance that there is an inflow from outward things into inward ones is an illusion: 3721. Within us, inflow flows through our rational faculty into our factual knowledge and not the reverse: 1495, 1707, 1940. The nature of the pattern of inflow: 775, 880, 1096, 1495, 7270.

Inflow comes directly from the Lord and also indirectly through the spiritual world or heaven: 6063, 6307, 6472, 9682, 9683. The Lord flows directly into the tiniest details of everything: 6058, 6474-6478, 8717, 8728. On the Lord's indirect inflow through heaven: 4067, 6982, 6985, 6996. It happens through the spirits and angels who are associated with us: 697, 5846-5866. The Lord flows through angels into the goals from and for which we think, intend, and act as we do (1317, 1645, 5846, 5854), and also into matters of conscience within us (6207, 6213); through spirits, he flows into our thoughts and from there into the contents of our memory (4186, 5858, 5864, 6192, 6193, 6198, 6199, 6319). It is hard for people to believe this: 6214. How the Lord flows into things that are highest and things that are lowest at the same time, or into what is inmost and what is outermost at the same time: 5147, 5150, 6473, 7004, 7007, 7270. The Lord flows into what is good in us and through that goodness into what is true, but not the reverse: 5482, 6027, 8685, 8701, 10153. Goodness gives us the ability to accept the inflow from the Lord; truth apart from goodness does not: 8321. Nothing that comes into our thoughts does us any harm, but what comes into our will does, because it becomes part of us: 6308. The Divine at the highest levels is quiet and peaceful, but as it comes down toward the lower levels within us it becomes unpeaceful and even tumultuous because of the disorder there: 8823. The effect of the Lord's inflow on the prophets: 6212.

There exists a kind of divine inflow that is general: 5850 (which includes some description of it). It is a constant force that causes things to act in keeping with the overall design: 6211. This is the kind of inflow that affects the lives of animals (5850), and also the members of the plant kingdom (3648). Even in us, thought descends into speech and will into behavior in accord with this general inflow: 5862, 5990, 6192, 6211.

Fotnoter:

1. The Latin phrase subsistentia est perpetua existentia, here translated "continued existence is a perpetual coming into being," was a common theological maxim in Swedenborg's day. (For passages in which it is implied that the idea is generally accepted, see Secrets of Heaven 3483, 5084:3; Marriage Love 380[8]; Soul-Body Interaction 4.) Swedenborg frequently built on it (in addition to the Secrets of Heaven passages cited here in New Jerusalem, see §§775:2, 4322, 5116:3, 5377, 6482, 9502, 9847, 10076:5, 10152:3, 10252:3, 10266; Heaven and Hell 106, 303; Divine Love and Wisdom 152; Soul-Body Interaction 9; True Christianity 35[8], 46, 224:1). The notion is referred to as a commonplace in part 5 of Discourse on Method by Descartes: "This is a commonly accepted opinion among theologians-that the action by which God now conserves [the universe] is the same as that by which He created it" (Descartes [1637] 2001, 37). This maintenance in existence is sometimes given the technical term preservation or conservation. Elsewhere Descartes offers this explanation: "There is no relation of dependence between the present time and the immediately preceding time, and hence no less a cause is required to preserve something than is required to create it in the first place" (Descartes [1641] 1984, 116). Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas makes a similar statement about all "creatures," that is, created things: "The being of every creature depends on God, so that not for a moment could it subsist [have independent existence], but would fall into nothingness were it not kept in being by the operation of the Divine power" ( Summa Theologiae 1:104:1; translation in Aquinas 2012, 14:505). Another formulation of this concept is that "God's concern with the world is not to be thought of as relating merely to the provision of the world with its initial impulse into being, but as an incessant and intimate care for the beings to which he has given all that they have and all that they are" (Mascall 1966, 101). [SS, JSR]

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation for their permission to use this translation.