Title: A Strange Love Letter

Topic: The Word

Summary: God is love, and the Bible is a divine communication to us, so in some sense it mst be a love letter. But that's a pretty strange love letter!

References:
2 Samuel 12:1-7
Joshua 1:1-9
Judges 13:1-3
Isaiah 63:7-10
Ezekiel 1:28; 2
Matthew 4:17
Luke 1:1-5
1 Thessalonians 1:1
2 Timothy 1:1-2
James 1:1
1Pet 1:1
Deut 4:2; 12:32
Rev 22:18-19

This video is a part of the Spirit and Life Bible Study series, whose purpose is to look at the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible through a Swedenborgian lens.

504. Where also our Lord was crucified. This symbolizes a failure to acknowledge the Lord's Divine humanity, and thus a state in which He is rejected.

It is a saying in the church that people who blaspheme the Lord, crucify Him, and that so, too, do those who, like the Jews, deny that He is the Son of God.

People who deny that the Lord's humanity is Divine are like Jews because everyone views the Lord as a person, and anyone who views His humanity as on par with the humanity of any other person is incapable then of thinking of His Divinity, no matter how often this is called the Son of God, born from eternity, coequal with the Divinity of the Father. When he is told this or hears it read, it penetrates his hearing, indeed, but not at the same time his belief, since he thinks of the Lord as being a material person like any other man, retaining the same properties of the flesh. And because he then sets the Lord's Divinity aside and pays it no attention, he is therefore in the same state as he would be if he denied it; for he denies that the Lord's humanity is the Son of God, even as the Jews did also, for which reason they crucified Him. That the Lord's humanity is nevertheless the Son of God is something plainly said in Luke 1:32, 35, Matthew 3:16-17, and elsewhere.

[2] It is apparent from this why people in the church turn directly to God the Father, and many also to the Holy Spirit, and rarely anyone directly to the Lord.

Since the Jews crucified the Lord owing to their denial that He was the Messiah, the Son of God, therefore their Jerusalem is also called Sodom (Isaiah 3:9, Jeremiah 23:14, Ezekiel 16:46, 48). And the Lord says,

On the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:29-30)

What the fire and brimstone are may be seen in no. 452, 494.