# The Other Life/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII.
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD IN HEAVEN.
TO be with Christ! to see the Lord! to diminish the sad distance which now seems to intervene between Him and our souls, is the highest, deepest, sweetest hope of the Christian heart.
Behold how this sacred hope is created and nourished by the melodious utterances of the Holy Word.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
"In thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand are pleasures for evermore."
"Behold! the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people; and God Himself shall be with them and be their God."
"Whom have I in heaven but Thee?"
"My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him."
​"My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest."
"My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?"
Swedenborg, the herald of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven; he who by divine authority has unsealed the Word of God and opened it to our spiritual perceptions; he who has seen into the world of spirits, into heaven and hell and into the mechanism of the universe; what does he report to our hungry and thirsty souls about this great mystery, the presence of the Lord in the world we are to inhabit hereafter?
Strange are his utterances at the first inspection, and many a mind has turned away, no doubt, from his pearls of priceless wisdom and beauty, which it needed but a little patience and reflection to discover.
"The Lord is the all in all in heaven."
"The Divine Sphere of the Lord constitutes heaven."
"The Divine Sphere of the Lord in heaven is love to Him and charity to the neighbor."
"The angels taken collectively are called Heaven, because they compose it."
"In proportion as the angels receive goodness ​and truth from the Lord, so far are they angels and so far are they heaven."
The angels are heaven! Heaven, then, is not a world or place created by the Lord out of nothing as a home for the angels? nor a place into which one may possibly be admitted as through the gates of a city? No! Heaven considered as an objective scene of supernal grandeur and beauty, is created instantaneously, from moment to moment, not only for the angels but through the angels. It is a cosmos representative of angelic states of thought and affection, springs up with them, changes with them, and would instantly vanish like a dream, if the angels could be withdrawn. On the other hand every soul added to heaven increases its glory and splendor and bliss, adds something organically to it which did not exist there until its arrival.
Now, notice particularly. It is the Lord in the angels which is heaven. Out of the angels, above the angels, He is infinite, invisible, incomprehensible. In and through the angels He creates heaven. The Lord is the all in all in heaven, not by the transfusion of his divine substance into the angels, but by his divine sphere. His divine sphere is not Himself, but an emanation of divine love and wisdom from Himself. It is this divine ​sphere received by the angels which is called the Lord in the angels. There are different heavens and myriads of different societies with their infinitely different forms and surroundings, all produced by the different modes and degrees of receiving and manifesting the divine sphere which is the life of heaven.
The angel himself contributes nothing either in spirit or substance to the creation. His own body is a form organized out of spiritual substances, which are emanations from the divine substance. The life which animates it is not his own life, but a constantly inflowing force from the divine life. In Him we live, move and have our being. The spirit's individuality, his impenetrability, resides in his free agency, in his volition, in his power so to turn or modify his own spiritual forms one way or another, that the divine life flowing in shall create through and around him one kind of a world or another.
This is not pantheism. If the universe was God, He would create all its external forms in correspondence with his own infinite divine love and wisdom. There could be no evil, no hideous things moral or physical, no suffering, no disease, no death, no hell. The fact that such things exist ​is proof that some great determining power intervenes between God and the universe. That power is the free agency, the selfhood of our spirits.
Again, nature is not God, any more than the emanations of a man's mind constitute the man. Take nature away, obliterate every organic form from the dew-drop to the sun, and God remains the same, infinite, indivisible, self-existing, sole-existing Spirit.
The love and wisdom emanating from the Supreme Being may then be so appropriated by the selfhood of his creatures as to be turned into hatred and folly. This is the origin of evil and of hell. The angel receives them in a different manner. By obedience to the divine law, he permits the divine love and wisdom to reign in him and to work through him. He knows that nothing is his own. His apparent goodness and truth are the Lord's love and wisdom, received, implanted and manifested in his life. In profound humility and self-renunciation he feels that he is not good; that he is not wise; that "there is none good but God."
The evil spirit claims everything as his own. He maintains that his evil is good and that his falsity is truth.
It is the presence of the Lord, therefore, through ​reception and obedience, in the heart of the angels, which constitutes heaven; first the heavenly state or life, and next the heavenly place or objective world.
The sphere of the Lord which constitutes heaven in the hearts of the angels, is love. Heaven is love. Love to the Lord and love to the neighbor are the life of heaven, and there is no heaven without them. This life is attained by obedience to the divine commandments. What we call the commandments of God are simply the laws or modes of his own Divine existence, stated to us in legal forms for our spiritual guidance. To keep the commandments is to live like God in our finite sphere; hence to be like Him; hence, by spiritual affinity, to love Him; and, finally, by the great law of spiritual attraction, to be with Him.
"If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him and he with Me.'
"The love of God, the fealty we owe him Implanted in our hearts and fruitful there, Will make our outward life a noble poem By making first the inner life a prayer."
The whole Christian world has some idea of this presence of God in the human soul. It knows that ​this is "the kingdom of God" which is said to be within us, and which comes without observation.
Augustine beautifully observes:
"Too late I sought Thee; too late I found Thee. I sought Thee at a distance and did not know that Thou wert near. I sought Thee abroad in thy works; and behold! Thou wert within me!"
The Christian world, however, does not understand that this God-in-the-heart is heaven; that love and charity are the whole of it; that the entire spiritual world is created continuously out of it and through it; that the degree and state of it in ourselves determine what heaven we shall go to; what we shall see there and do there; and the form under which the Divine Being shall manifest Himself to us.
Is there any other presence of the Lord in the spiritual world besides that which proceeds from the secret, inward appropriation of the divine love and wisdom, manifested spiritually as love and charity?
Yes. Every internal presence must have its outward correspondential form, its external manifestation. The Lord, who is all-in-all in the angelic soul, is also, in some manner, the all-in-all of the angelic world. The whole universe around us ​hereafter will be a splendid theatre representing under symbolic forms the ineifable mysteries of the Lord's spiritual kingdom. We will then understand the words of the poet:
"The sun, the moon, the stars, The seas, the hills, the plains; Are not all these, O soul! The Vision of Him who reigns?"
There, however, we shall have the key to the vision, and we shall read, as in an ever-newly-created book, the sublime movements of the Providence within us.
The chemist and naturalist tell us that the vast coal-beds of the earth are condensations of the heat and light which prevailed in the primeval ages of the world. We will understand, hereafter, how all visible objects are condensations or concretions on different planes of being of the divine love and wisdom, which are the heat and light of the spiritual world.
Though God is seen representatively in everything surrounding the angels. He is pre-eminently present and manifest in the spiritual Sun. He is called the Sun of righteousness because he is the sun visible to the righteous. It is said that there is no need of the sun or of the moon in heaven, but ​that the glory of God and the Lamb are the light of it. The glory of God is the divine love, which is received into the heart and projected outwardly, by the great law of spiritual creation, as a sun. The glory of God is, therefore, the cause of the spiritual sun, which, by its heat and light, is the great symbol and representative of the divine love and wisdom.
The spiritual sun, thus representing the Lord from whom it directly proceeds, appears to every one according to his power of receiving and reflecting the spiritual light and heat it communicates; high or low, near or remote, bright or dull, flaming with celestial gold, or resplendent with the silvery beams of the spiritual sphere. It appears always before the faces of the happy angels, who receive its warmth into their hearts, and its light into their minds. They never look toward it without thinking of the Lord, and its appearance to them is an ever-flaming revelation of the state of their own heart toward God.
Evil spirits, alas! have turned their backs upon it, for they have denied and forgotten the Lord, and it is a dull, lurid spot in their murky atmospheres.
Is there no personal manifestation of the Lord ​to the angels, as that of man to man face to face?
Yes; ever since the Supreme Being assumed a human body and rose with its spiritual form into heaven. He has become the Divine Man, and frequently stands revealed in that Divine Humanity to the humble and loving children of his heavenly kingdom.
It is a law of the spiritual world that when a spirit fixes the heart and mind on any person with strong intent and aspiration, that person will appear in apparent space under a form determined by the state of the thinker himself. When therefore an angel in his hour of fervent prayer, draws near to his Maker in the serene strength and glow of faith and love, the Lord may appear outwardly before him, face to face, eye to eye, like man to man.
This God, who is the all-in-all of the heavens, is Jesus Christ. The "Father " of our theological speculations, is an abstraction which no man has ever seen or can see. The Son alone hath revealed Him. The Godhead, so far as it can be manifested to finite beings, exists in the Divine Humanity, known historically to the men of this earth as the Lord Jesus Christ.
Said He not of Himself?—
​"I am Alpha and Omega: the beginning and the ending: which is, and which was, and which is to come: the Almighty."
It will be profitable for us to inquire into the great spiritual laws which govern these manifestations of the Divine Presence to both men and angels; for there is nothing in them accidental or arbitrary or miraculous in the common acceptation of that word. A true conception of this subject will give us a clear insight into some of the most remarkable things related in the letter of Scripture.
It is a great law that God can never appear to man or angel as He really is; but the appearance is determined and modified by the state of the person into whom He flows, and to whom he appears outwardly,—the external appearance being always a correspondence of the internal experience.
This explains the curious fact of the Lord's varying appearances to his disciples after his death. Mary, who was so intimate with Him, mistakes Him for the gardener and inquires after the Lord. Peter and John, speaking to Him in the broad daylight, do not know Him, until a miracle suggests his true character to them. Other disciples walk with Him and converse with Him on his own death and resurrection: but "their eyes are ​holden" and they do not know Him. They recognize Him in the breaking of bread; and lo! He vanishes from their sight.
The same Divine Being has appeared to patriarchs, prophets and apostles under many different forms: frequently as an angel called "the angel of Jehovah;" as a man wrestling all night with Jacob; as a man standing with a drawn sword before Joshua; even as three men appearing to Abraham; as a human being dying a shameful death upon the cross; as a risen body showing to an unbelieving soul the print of the nails and the mark of the spear; as a dazzling splendor on the mount conversing with Moses and Elias; as a form of light ascending to heaven; as a flaming angel standing in the sun; as "the Ancient of days" seated upon a sapphire throne with "the appearance of fire" round about Him.
God is unchangeable, infinite in form and perfections. These varying manifestations are the records and expressions of varying states of reception in the finite soul of man and the finite Church. God is finited in appearance, whenever his Spirit enters into the perceptive faculties of his finite creatures. All men and angels might thus see God at the same moment of time throughout the entire uni​verse, and no two of them could have precisely the same revelation.
To see God therefore is no such wonderful and impossible thing as a sensuous mode of thought interprets it to be. It is simply to have an external or symbolic representation of the state of your own soul as to its reception of the divine love aud wisdom.
Before the Lord assumed a human form by the process of birth and growth in this world. He had no spiritual body of his own, by which He could appear to the angels. "The Angel of Jehovah " who spoke in the first person as if he was the Lord himself, was always some angel, whose consciousness and selfhood were laid entirely asleep while the Divine Spirit spake through him. When the angel returned to his own state, he had no recollection of what had transpired or of anything he had said.
Swedenborg says of this manifestation through angels, not from them:
"In order that man may be spoken to by vocal expressions, which are articulate sounds in the ultimates of nature, the Lord uses the ministry of angels by filling them with the Divine Spirit, and by laying asleep what is of their own selfhood, so ​that they think they are Jehovah while speaking. Thus the divine of Jehovah, which is supreme, descends into the lowest spheres of nature in which man sees and hears. Hence it may appear how the angels spake by the prophets, viz., that the Lord himself spake, although by angels, and that the angels did not speak at all of themselves."
This possession of one spirit by another so that the latter thinks, speaks, acts, or writes at the dictation of the former, without the least intervention of his own individuality and without his subsequent remembrance of what had occurred, has been frequently and abundantly confirmed and illustrated by the strange psychological phenomena which have excited so much credulity and incredulity during the present century.
The appearance of Jehovah to Abraham under the form of three men can thus be made credible. Jehovah can take spiritual possession of a man in the flesh as easily as of a spirit. In modern times it might be called mesmeric possession. Three strangers or travelers passing through the country may have been used as mediums or ministers. They are brought to Abraham, who perceived by interior illumination that they represent the Divin​ity. He speaks of them and prays to them as if they were one person. They deliver the message of God and go on their way, utterly ignorant, when they come to themselves, of the whole transaction.
A similar phenomenon took place when two angels or messengers, evidently two men (for the people of Sodom saw them also), visited Lot and saved him and his family from the fearful destruction which fell upon the cities of the plain. So also a man wrestled with Jacob all night so that he received a permanent muscular deformity, and Jacob exclaimed in the morning, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."
This theory that the persons who appeared to Abraham, Lot and Jacob were really men in the flesh, representing per force the Divine character, although not distinctly announced by Swedenborg, is fully accordant with his philosophy. Most of the cases of spiritual vision recorded in the Bible were of course openings of the spiritual sight; but in these cases there seems to have been no opening of the spiritual sight, and all the phenomena prove them to have really taken place in the natural world.
These appearances on earth were as strictly sym​bolical or representative of spiritual things as all appearances in the spiritual world are. Why did Abraham see three men as one God? Because Abraham at that time represented the childhood of the church, or of the Lord in the church, when it is particularly under the care of the celestial angels, and before Isaac (representing the rational principle) was born. So long as men think sensuously, or in accordance with the reports of the senses, and do not correct their first impressions by rational analysis, the divine trinity of Love, Wisdom and Use, known also as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, is presented to their perceptive faculties as three distinct persons; while their higher intuitions speak loudly for the essential unity of the Godhead.
The mass of the Christian world has not yet developed beyond this stage of sensuous interpretation. The cultivation of the rational and scientific elements of thought will lead it to higher ground and enable it to substitute real for apparent truths.
Why did God appear under a dual and not a triune human form to Lot? In correspondence with the things represented, which were those relating to judgment, involving the salvation of the faithful and the damnation of the wicked. The ​Divine Love or Father, the essential Divine, as Swedenborg calls it, never judges. Therefore he is left out.
"The Father judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son."
"I will send the Comforter to you, and when He is come He will reprove the world of sin, of righteousness and of judgment."
When we refer to the sublime and mysterious representations of God, which were made visible to the prophet Ezekiel and to the Apostle John, representations which were seen in the open heavens, enough has been said to prove the organic spiritual law, that God appears to every one according to his state, and that the capabilities of the state, intellectual and, moral, determine the form and manner in which the Divine Being shall be made objective to him.
The same law, with its special limitations, has always prevailed and will prevail for ever. It is just as credible that Swedenborg saw and conversed with God, as it is that Abraham or Moses or Paul did so. It is an occurrence which is possible to all men and which happens very frequently in the spiritual world. There is nothing miraculous about it. God is always speaking to us; in nature, in ​his Word, in his providence, in our own souls; and imvardly through spirits and angels. The wonder is, not that God speaks to us, but that we, poor ignorant creatures, refuse to believe it and will not hear him.
We have no statement from Swedenborg himself either printed or written of the first manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ to his mental vision. There is a story handed down by tradition, and which contains nothing improbable, that while eating heartily at dinner, his spiritual eyes were opened for a moment or so, during which he saw his floor covered with serpents and toads, representative of the gross evils of gluttony, and a man in the corner of the room who said to him, "Eat not so much."
The next night, the same man appeared to him, this time, as Dr. Beyer professes to have received from the mouth of Swedenborg, "sitting in purple and majestic splendor near his bed." This man or angel or spirit, or the Lord himself shorn of his glory and veiled in accommodation to the state of the new seer, gave him a commission to open the spiritual sense of the Word of God.
"I have been called," says Swedenborg, in a letter to Dr. Hartley, dated 1769, " to a holy office by the Lord himself, who has most graciously mani​fested himself in person to me, his servant, in the year 1743; when he opened my sight to the view of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege of conversing with spirits and angels, which I enjoy to this day."
In the other life it is spiritual affinity, nearness, likeness, sympathy which determine presence. The Lord is omnipresent, but He is most nearly and distinctly and sweetly present to those who love Him most and thence know Him best.
The angels who understand intuitively the relation between the subjective and objective in the other life, and who see in everything some manifestation of the Divine, do not mistake the appearance of the Lord in their apparent spaces and times for a form possessing any fixedness or real externeity. They know it to be a heavenly vision, varying in power, beauty and glory according to their own interior states.
The following elucidative paragraph from Swedenborg is very interesting:
"When the Lord appears in heaven, which often occurs, He does not appear clothed with the sun, but in an angelic form, distinguished from the angels by the Divine which is translucent in his face. For the Lord is not there in person, be​cause in person He is always encompassed with the sun; but He is present there by aspect. It is common in heaven for persons to appear as present in the place where the view is fixed or terminated, although it is very far from the place where they actually are. This presence is called the presence of the internal sight, of which I shall speak hereafter. I have also seen the Lord out of the sun and a little beneath in an angelic form; and also near to me, in a similar form with a resplendent countenance; and once as a flaming or burning light in the midst of the angels."
This last manifestation reminds us of the mystical splendors of the sublime vision of Ezekiel:
"Then I beheld, and lo! a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins, even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the color of amber."
In No. 40 of Earths in the Universe, is a remarkable account of a personal manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ to certain spirits as a Divine Man standing in the sun of the spiritual world. It is there stated also that several spirits who had been men upon earth in the lifetime of Jesus, and who had seen and known him, declared before the ​whole company that the person appearing in the sun was the identical God-Man. Jesus Christ, whom they had known on earth.
The last means or medium by which the Lord is present in the spiritual world is through his written Word. This is astonishing to those who do not believe in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, and to those also who suppose them to be nothing but a literal message from God to man like the written or printed laws by which a king may govern his subjects.
Swedenborg asserts that the Word is absolutely divine; that it is not only the crown of revelation, but "the plenitude of God." Its inmost is the Divine Truth or the Divine Mind itself.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
"And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."
This conception of the true nature of the Bible, vastly exceeds any thought of its inspiration or holiness ever before promulgated. In its inmost it is God himself; absolute divine truth, incommunicable to finite creatures. It descended through the minds of the celestial angels and was presented outwardly to them by special dictation as a grand ​system of celestial truth. Flowing thence through the spiritual heavens, it was dictated in a form of spiritual truth. Descending still lower into the natural degree, it took on a natural and literal form, apparently imperfect, feeble, obscure, accommodated to the feeblest and obscurest states of the human understanding.
Now all these senses, utterly different in external appearance as they are—the divine, the celestial, the spiritual, the natural—are absolutely one. They coexist, cohere and connect by correspondential forms in all the spheres of creation. When man upon earth reads a verse in the letter humbly and believingly, spiritual angels instantly perceive it in the spiritual sense, celestial angels in the celestial sense, the Lord hears and feels it, and the Divine Truth runs the whole scale of thought from centre to circumference. Thus we are consociated with angels and conjoined to the Lord by means of his Word.
The Word, written by angels from direct divine dictation, is preserved in every heavenly society with great care, and is approached with profound reverence. It is the source of all their wisdom and power. The public worship is from the Word, and the minister does not explain its meaning from ​his self-derived intelligence, but from interior illumination, so that he can diseover and draw forth truths which were not visible from an exterior standpoint. The Word is appealed to in all cases of doubt or difficulty; for the Law of the Lord reigns supreme in heaven. The Word there answers all the questions of the earnestly-seeking soul, as the precious stones on the breast-plate of the high-priest responded to his prayers by beautiful variations of their light.
These copies of the Word shine in heaven with a great light, varying in color, power and beauty with the states of the particular society. They illumine the temples where they are kept, and even the faces of the angels who assemble to hear, as the face of Moses was brightened by gazing on the tablets containing the decalogue. The sphere of the Word, which is in reality that of God himself, cannot be safely approached by those who are in contrary or unloving and unbelieving states. Swedenborg saw this attempted by unprepared spirits, but they were hurled senseless to the ground with phenomena resembling thunder and lightning. This explained to him the miraculous power which emanated from the ark of the covenant, prostrating the statues of heathen gods before it, ​and instantly destroying those who touched it profanely or even innocently. The ark of the covenant represented the Word in the heavens; and what seemed a miracle from the earthly standpoint, was the orderly operation of a spiritual law.
It gives great offence, without any rational foundation, to the leaders in orthodox communions, that Swedenborg should assert that the Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles and several minor books in the Old Testament, are not of equal value with the rest of the Scriptures. Some of them even intimate that Swedenborg found it convenient, in defence of his new theology, to expunge from the canon those portions which militate most against it. How utterly unfounded such a charge is, will be apparent on the slightest examination of the facts.
The separate books of which the Bible is composed were written in different ages and places and by different persons. They were not collected into one volume until several hundred years after Christ. The task of separating the true Word of God from the mass of spurious or apocryphal literature which had gathered around it was undertaken by councils of bishops, or left to individual churches. There was no great guiding light or principle. The de​cision was reached through fancy or prejudice, upon meagre facts and unsatisfactory data. It was frequently made by vote!
The consequence was, that apocryphal books were read in many churches for several centuries, and that the grandest of all the Sacred Books, the Revelation, was for a long time rejected by the highest authorities. A still greater evil resulted, viz., that the whole theory of inspiration was made to rest upon tradition and authority, and the Church bound down to literal interpretations, so that it has never had any worthy conception of what the divinity of the Word is.
Swedenborg comes with a key to the biblical mysteries; a key which he did not invent, but which was given to him. We apply this key to five-sixths of the books bound up as the Word of God, and we find it to draw from them spiritual truths full of wisdom and beauty. We find also that it has no more application to the remaining books than it has to the orations of Cicero. They have no spiritual sense and no human ingenuity can put one into them. The difference between the genuine Word of God and the pious works which have been mistakenly bound up with it, is fundamental, organic and eternal; a difference easily dis​covered by those who will give the matter a patient and candid investigation.
The apostolic writings, however, are of great theological value. They have subserved an important use in the first Christian Church, and will ever be referred to under the New Dispensation, as only of less importance than the veritable Word of God. Swedenborg's estimate of their character is thus given:
"In regard to the writings of Paul and the other apostles, I have not given them a place in the Arcana Cœlestia, because they are dogmatic writings merely, and not written in the style of the Word, as are those of the Prophets, of David, of the Evangelists and the Revelation of St. John. The style of the Word consists throughout in correspondences, and thence effects an immediate communication with heaven; but the style of these dogmatic writings is quite different, having indeed communication with heaven, but only mediately or indirectly."
"The reason why the apostles wrote in this style was, that the new Christian Church had to make its beginning through them; consequently the style used in the Word would not have been proper for such doctrinal tenets, which required plain and ​simple language suited to the capacities of all readers. Nevertheless the writings of the apostles are very good books for the Church, as they insist on the doctrine of charity and faith thence derived as strongly as the Lord himself has done in the gospels and in the Revelation of St. John."
Reviewing this whole question of the presence of the Lord in heaven and in the human heart, and the spiritual laws by which revelation is effected, and especially the true nature of the Divine Word, it becomes clear to the mind, how an unfolding, by divine commission and special illumination, of the spiritual sense of that Word, is a veritable Second Coming of the Lord. This is the means whereby the New Jerusalem, a compact body or system of spiritual truth leading to an angelic life upon earth, is "descending from God out of heaven."
How long will the professed church of Christ fail to recognize this stupendous blessing, of which Swedenborg has been only the passive medium? How long will it grope in the darkness of naturalism, adhering to the falsities of the past, and fail to discover the great light which is already streaming from the open heavens, and which will illuminate, in the Lord's time, even the darkest corners of the earth?