Crucifixion

Putting the “squeeze” on Jesus

The Lord’s life on earth represented the ultimate Valentine’s Day message and gift. He came into the world and assumed a human body because he loved us all.

However, the need for God to take on a human body for the sake of salvation is not clearly understood. Theologically, the current central Christian belief is that God the Father sent to earth and sacrificed His beloved Son. While the Father was touched by this sacrifice there were still contingencies—Jehovah God would only save those individuals whom Jesus gave the nod to (called the “elect”).

This means that only one of the Gods of the Holy Trinity loves us while another has serious misgivings—or at least, whose love is conditional. There is something anti-intuitive about any Divine quality of love being conditional and therefore, not embracing Infinite Mercy.

Emanuel Swedenborg had another idea about all this. He boldly claimed that Jesus was Jehovah in the flesh! Before your head explodes consider this—even in the current elaboration of Trinitarian doctrine, Jesus is considered equally a God with Jehovah. If this is true why does Jesus show signs of human fearfulness towards His impending crucifixion at Gethsemane?

The Lord knew ahead of time not only of the crucifixion but also of the triumphant outcome and glorification. Why would someone who was equally a God in the Trinitarian scheme be frightened or lack any confidence from a sure thing? An easy answer might be that because the Lord had a physical body he was susceptible to pain and human fear.

I can buy into that.

However, at Gethsemane, when Jesus was sweating blood because of the intensity of his impending crucifixion, why would the Lord need to pray for the Father’s help? And why would the Lord need an angel to give Him confidence to move forward? Could Jesus not tap into His own divine powers?

Swedenborg says He did! Since Jesus and Jehovah were actually one and the same Deity, the Lord praying among the olive trees was simply a communication between His imperfect human nature (the flesh) and His perfect Divine Nature (Jehovah). Jehovah represented the Lord’s Divine Soul but having taken on a physical body, Divine and Holy things were mixed into the human gene pool (from Mary). This was the means by which the Lord could take on humanity’s sins and conquer them. Jesus made His flesh comply perfectly to the dictates of the Father’s will (the Lord’s Divine Soul) through a life of victories over human temptations and compulsions. The word “Gethsemane” means “olive press.” Which is a fitting term for someone who was being “squeezed” and feeling the cosmic “pressure” to succeed.

This is why there was an empty tomb—the Lord made His flesh equally holy with His Divine Essence (Jehovah). This process of glorification allowed the Lord to gain power over heaven and earth.

When we approach the Lord to guide our lives, we gain access to this holy power in overcoming our own temptations and compulsions. I like Swedenborg’s theology because it shows that Jehovah God has an eternal and endless love for the human race. He came into the world to make His Truth visible to the world of men and women. Divine Truth is the only begotten Son of Divine Love. Truth puts Love on display, just as Jesus’ life on earth put His Father’s (His divine spirit’s) infinite love and mercy on display.

The true message of our Lord’s life on earth is the world’s greatest Valentine’s Day message in history!

Posted on February 14, 2010by

http://www.provinggod.com

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The Hidden Agenda Of The Lord’s Ministry

Jesus was actually a double agent. All the time He was teaching, performing great miracles, and finally having to suffer on the cross, Jesus was also on a secret assignment from heaven.

This assignment was secret because it was kept hidden from our view. This secret part of His divine mission included dealing with special challenges both on earth and in the spiritual world. The Lord not only had to deal with disbelief and sin on an earthly plane, He had to directly confront the forces of evil coming from Hell.

Many Christian theologians believe that Christ took our sins upon Himself, gave his life as a ransom on the cross, appeased the Father through His death, and arose from the dead in order to broker a deal with the Father to remove our guilt—as long as we had the proper “faith.”

That is not how the Lord actually ransomed himself, or portrayed how He ultimately glorified the Father, and the Father, Him.

The Lord’s secret mission on earth can only be deciphered if one has access to the higher levels of meaning that are hidden within the literal words of Scripture. Thankfully, theologian Emanuel Swedenborg has provided us access to this rarefied knowledge.

You see, unbeknownst to most Christians, Jesus was actually Jehovah himself. The strategy of God taking on a human body was not just to provide the Romans with something solid to nail on the cross, but to strip hell of its power.

The forces of hell, while frightening, are still only finite forces. Nothing finite can ever challenge an Infinite God—unless God could take on a finite body giving hell a medium through which evil could attack. This required not only a physical body, it necessitated a body born of a woman. Hell attacks people through their inherited evils. Since God had no evil of His own, He needed to acquire humankind’s hereditary disposition towards evil by entering into the human gene pool.

The Lord did NOT gain “all power over flesh” by arising from death, but through a life on earth whereby He battled and successfully fought off all inclinations and sins of the flesh. It is this inner confrontation that is addressed within the deepest level of meaning contained within the literal words of Scripture.

This incarnation, furnished with real human genes, is how the Lord took the sins of humanity upon himself. The Lord conquered sin by resisting temptation from hell and subordinating his human essence to the will of the Father (the Lord’s heavenly essence) through a life of HUMILITY (called exinanition).

Crucifixion is designed for maximum humility. This was the Lord’s final and ultimate test of humiliation. If He had gotten off the cross to physically prove his authority and then demanded obedience, the flesh would have won. Jesus came into the world to serve us, not bring us to our knees through physical force. Giving up the physical force to compel people and sacrificing the human urge to dominate over others is what is meant by the Lord’s life being a ransom.

This battle between the Lord’s flesh and His divine spirit is even transparent in the literal words of Scripture describing Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane. Here is where the Lord is feeling so much pressure to go on with his deadly mission that he seeks a way out and begins sweating blood. Here, the big “squeeze” is being put on the Lord’s human nature. This is why Gethsemane means “olive press.”

By overcoming all these obstacles the Lord united His human essence (the Son) with His divine essence (the Father). In this “top-down” and “bottom-up” process, the Son glorified the Father and the Father glorified the Son. The Lord’s human was made fully divine.

But even this great event in history saved no one. The Lord came into the world to keep the possibility of salvation left open. Even traditional Christianity supports the notion that there is a caveat to salvation. A person is only saved if he or she has the proper “faith.” However, Swedenborg puts a different wrinkle on what constitutes proper faith. He maintained that only a faith conjoined with good works saves. Love is faith put into action. But this brings free will and human cooperation with God’s tenets into the equation of salvation.

Free will is given to men and women as a gift of God’s divine love. Love is meaningless without free will. And free will cannot be maintained unless a person can be kept in a balance between good and bad influences. The Lord appeared on earth at a time when human free will was being threatened by an overwhelming influence from Hell.

The Lord’s victory over the hells restored the cosmic balance between good and evil influences, and thus protected human free will.

Heaven is a choice.

Posted on November 26, 2008thegodguy

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What does it mean to ‘take up our cross daily’?

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by Rev. Dr. Jonathan Rose

Many biblical passages are sometimes cited to support the common idea that the image of the cross refers solely to Jesus’ death on the cross and that this event took away our sins.

In Matthew, an angel appears to Joseph and tells him he must name the baby in Mary’s womb Jesus “for He will save His people from their sins” (1:21). In John 1:29, John the Baptist sees Jesus and exclaims, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” In John 3, Jesus likens Himself to the brass serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness which cured anyone who looked at it: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). He goes on to say, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (3:16). Some could interpret these and other passages to mean that Jesus took away our sins through His death on the cross.

Types of crosses

Take-up-our-cross-dailyBut in actuality, Scripture speaks of more than one type of cross. In Luke 9:22, Jesus tells His disciples what’s going to happen to Him at the end of His life: “The Son of Man must suffer many things,…and be killed, and be raised the third day.” Note that he says “killed,” not crucified. Jesus continues, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” (9:23).

This interaction took place before Jesus’ death and resurrection. In this conversation, Jesus never told His disciples He was going to be crucified. Crucifixion was reserved for only the worst criminals. There is not a chance the disciples would believe that Jesus was going to be crucified. So what is this cross? Jesus invites us to follow Him in bearing it. He must not be referring to a physical cross, because the disciples had never seen him carrying one. And Jesus says we are to take up our cross daily. How many times can you be crucified physically? Not more than once. So what does it mean to take up our cross daily?

We must allow for two crosses: the physical cross that Jesus died on at the end of His life and some nonphysical “cross” that Jesus was already bearing every day when He made the statement in Luke, and which He invites us to bear as well.

How are we to bear our cross?

Paul says in Galatians, “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another…. Those who practice [the works of the flesh] will not inherit the kingdom of God…. [While] those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:16, 17, 21, 24). This passage is talking about crucifixion not as a physical thing but as a spiritual thing, and not as something that Jesus alone went through, but something we have to go through if we are to follow Him. Bearing the cross is the pain of dealing with the burden of our lower nature and warring against its passions. We need Jesus, because we have no power against hell on our own. And yet we have to repent and cooperate in bringing our lower nature into order. That we can do daily.

Jesus’ death was not about redemption; rather, it was His life that redeemed us. Jesus makes this clear when He tells the Pharisees in Luke 13:32, “Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I shall be perfected.” The time when he was casting out demons (meaning conquering sin) and performing cures was “today and tomorrow,” meaning during His life; His death, meant by the “third day,” was not about casting out demons; that was a process through which He was perfected and became fully Divine.

In John, Jesus prays to the Father saying He has “finished the work” the Father gave Him to do (17:4). He’s not dead yet, and yet He says He’s finished His work. Redemption is the work that He had finished, that He accomplished during His life. His work of redemption was conquering the hells through bearing His spiritual cross. It was the inner work He did every day of His life. This work gave Jesus the power to take away the sins of the world. We draw on that power when we practice repentance. By a life of repentance we take up our cross daily and follow the Lord.

The Rev. Dr. Jonathan Rose is a minister in Bryn Athyn, PA. He is the series editor and a translator for the New Century Edition of the Theological Works of Emanuel Swedenborg. For more information: jsrose@digitalwave.com.

https://newchurch.org/

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