The above phase is taken from Emanuel Swedenborg’s Apocalypse Explained (246).

Yet elsewhere, Swedenborg insists that God’s truths cannot be instilled (acquired) into one’s inner life without temptations.

So what gives here?

According to Swedenborg, the Lord God uses every circumstance wisely (and providentially) to promote His heavenly trajectories. This means allowing infernal spirits (from hell) to reprove and chasten—that is, to challenge any genuinely spiritual idea in a person’s memory.

(Even noble ideas must go deeper than a person’s memory function in order to be appropriated. But such a temptation to make this happen is not permitted among those with wrongly oriented hearts.)

The resulting conflict (and friction) between opposing influences forges particular notions to form an eternal belief system within one’s inner (spiritual) organic fabric. In this way God uses evil to help in the process of spiritual transformation because evil is then used as an important passive principle to allow Truth to become organically fixed (qualified) deeply into the human spirit.

Gushiness, chumminess and worldly affirmations are manifestations of lazy worshippers choosing not to enter into this humbling process and self-conflict.

Posted on October 1, 2014by thegodguy

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