03. As a Bride Prepared…

READINGS

Revelation 21:1-5
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and the sea no longer is. (2) And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of Heaven from God, having been prepared as a bride, having been adorned for her Husband. (3) And I heard a great voice out of Heaven, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God with men! And He will tabernacle with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. (4) And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. And death shall be no longer, nor mourning, nor outcry, nor will there be pain any more; for the first things passed away. (5) And the One sitting on the throne said, Behold! I make all things new. And He says to me, Write, because these Words are faithful and true.

Apocalypse Revealed 881
‘Prepared as a bride [adorned] for her husband’ signifies the Church conjoined to the Lord by means of the Word….[2] By ‘prepared’ is signified attired for betrothal; and the Church is equipped for betrothal and afterwards for conjunction or marriage…by means of the Word, for this is the only medium of conjunction or marriage, because the Word is from the Lord and concerning the Lord, and thus is the Lord…Indeed the Word has been given for the sake of that end…by the ‘husband’ is understood the Lord is plain from vers. 9 and 10 of this chapter, where Jerusalem is called ‘the bride the Lamb’s wife’…From these considerations it can be established that by ‘Jerusalem prepared as a bride for her husband’ is signified the Church conjoined with the Lord by means of the Word.

Arcana Coelestia 6113
The word Church is used…to mean that which constitutes the Church in a person, for a person is a Church when goodness and truth are present in him; and groups of such people make up the Church in general.

Arcana Coelestia 10310
…they have the Church within them who have an affection for truth for its own sake and an affection for good for its own sake, thus who are governed by love towards the neighbour and love to God. For good and truth are the neighbour, and so is God since good and truth are God’s and so are God as He exists with such people.

SERMON

The New Jerusalem is described as a city and as we saw last week this description is symbolic of something spiritual. And when we talk of something spiritual we don’t mean something vague or vaporous, the spiritual realm is the very real realm of you thoughts, belief, affections and desires. While we can’t see mental phenomena with our physical senses we know their reality in our experience. We are able to detect that we have feelings and thoughts because we have inner spiritual senses that are designed for that very function.

The activity of our spirit which we experience as our thoughts and affections to be real must have a structure to them, they must have substance and form and we can know this because we reflect on this activity we see that it has a quality to it, and for a thing to have qualities it must exist and for anything to exist it must have substance and form. Now we may not think too much about our inner life in terms of its substance and form and qualities but in the very fact that we can reflect and detect the things of this inner world means that they do exist as something substantial. I can’t see your thoughts and feelings, you can’t see mine; does this mean they are not real? Of course not, the way we feel and think, the beliefs and values we hold, the love we have for others, these things are more real in terms of our quality of life than any material possession could ever be. We know this is true if we care to reflect on it.

I hope you can see that spiritual things, the things of our mental world, are substantial and as such must have a structure to them. We can’t see spiritual structures with our physical eyes or natural thought but we would be hard pressed to convince anyone that the feelings they feel or the thoughts they experience are non-existent. Spiritual things are real, make no mistake about that, but because they are a degree above the detectable level of our physical senses we need to have something to lift our perception above the merely sensual level of life. In order to see what is spiritual we have to develop our rational faculty, for spiritual things are seen not in the eyes of the senses but in the eye of the understanding. In order to teach us about spiritual realities the Bible uses natural imagery, objects from the natural world, and historical people, natural events, things we are all familiar with, and asks us to think about them in a different way. This takes some effort because we are so used to thinking naturally. To think spiritually in relation to what the Bible has to say we need to be able to see that everything there applies to the inner mental life of people.

So as we saw last week the city of the New Jerusalem is not to be thought of as a physical structure, but that the idea of a city has an inner application and as such represents a structure of thought and belief that is spiritual in nature and so belongs to the world of the mind. This week I want us to consider the idea of this city being something prepared as a bride, having been adorned for her Husband.

But first let’s clarify this idea of the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. This tells us that the structure of thinking that the city the New Jerusalem represents is from God and it descends from out of heaven. Spiritual Christianity teaches that this structure of heavenly thought is found in what makes up its spiritual teachings, what are called the Heavenly Doctrines. These teachings are found in the volumes of books that make up the theology of the New Church, yet as books on the self these teachings are ineffective and dead. The ideas they contain only become living when they are freely taken into human minds and become the basis for living life. These ideas are designed to build a new rational faculty within us from which we can see what is spiritual. Now because these teachings enable those who take them seriously to grasp the inner truths of the Bible and how its stories relate to our inner life and the path of spiritual transformation they form the means by which what is heavenly can become more grounded in the reality of our lives.

The teachings for Spiritual Christianity exist on the physical plane as words printed on the page. Taken together these words form ideas and concepts in natural language about spiritual things. But before they became printed words on a page they always existed as the spiritual sense within the literal sense of the Bible. The spiritual meaning within the Bible is not actually in the printed words of the Old and New Testaments. The inner meaning is spiritual and so exists in the minds of people, or comes to light when they acknowledge the Lord as the Word through a willingness to live from its truths. This acknowledgement took place in Emanuel Swedenborg and the result was the publishing of the Heavenly Doctrines which teach why, and show how, the Word is Divine.

These teachings concerning the spiritual life were drawn out of the literal sense of the Word as it was read by Emanuel Swedenborg who was able to record the insights he received from the Lord through the heavens showing in wonderful detail what the Word teaches concerning the nature of God, the nature of human kind, the nature of life after death and heaven and hell. This revelation has the power to restructure the minds of human beings into a heavenly form for it has descended from out of God through the heavens for this very purpose that human beings might be more completely and fully connected with the Divine life. These teachings because they have the power to bring about this transformation are called the holy city the New Jerusalem…prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Everything that comes forth from God has one end in view; the eternal happiness of every human being. The Lord is Divine Love and Wisdom itself, and the Love He is seeks only the welfare of all under His care. Therefore the Divine Wisdom works tirelessly to bring this about, attending to every detail of life to hold open the possibility for people to realise that God wants them to be intimately connected to Himself, not for His sake but for theirs. We call this Divine care and attention the Lord’s Divine Providence. Love by means of wisdom presents itself to human consciousness in the form of spiritual teachings, in the Word and in the Heavenly Doctrines. It doesn’t force itself on us, but by means of ideas that look very human, at least on the surface, we have opened to us a possibility, a possibility for spiritual life. The teachings are here, the Divine leaves us in complete freedom to pick them up and explore them or leave them aside.

To the natural mind the claim that the Divine reveals itself in the form of ideas and concepts through a human agent may seem unbelievable. So be it, but for those who are willing to lay aside their preconceptions and consider the possibility that a life in accordance with spiritual principles, these teachings are empowering them to resist self-centred patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving, and opening up for them a new way of life where they are brought into deeper sense of connection with the Divine.

This is why these teachings are described as something prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. The first thing to get hold of here is that it is not us who are to be joined to God, we are not the prepared bride, the teachings or Heavenly Doctrines are the bride. Our sense of connection to the Divine is made possible through teachings drawn from the Word accommodated to human comprehension. When we take these teachings into our life we have a sense of connection with the Lord because He is in the truths of Word within us. The Lord can only be in us in what is of Himself, which is why we have the Word, and why we have the Heavenly Doctrines which teach us how the Word is to be understood.

The works that make up the Heavenly Doctrines are designed to restructure our thinking in regard to the Word. They carry within themselves new ideas, new concepts and the possibility for a new belief structure that can form something in the human mind into which Divine can flow and enlighten us. This enlightenment draws our sense of self into the reality of what is spiritual as we look to the Word for our life. The teachings adorn the Word through giving us a new understanding of it in which the beauty of the Divine can be seen. The word translated from the Greek as “adorn” means to put things in their proper order. When we receive truths into the mind from the Word and understand them in the light of what the Heavenly Doctrines teach we receive the holy city of the New Jerusalem as that which is descending from God out of heaven.

In terms of time the descent of the holy city occurred in the publishing of these spiritual ideas so that they had permanence in the material world. Now anyone can pick them up and begin to examine what they have to say. If in the course of that examination a person sees their truth and begins to use them to better understand what the Word teaches concerning the how to acknowledge the Lord as God and from that acknowledgement have their inner and outer life reordered, so what was in print now becomes something in the mind into which the Divine life can presence itself and make alive for us. This living presence then becomes the New Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven in the reality of our personal experience. When the Word speaks of something descending or of movement from what is higher to what is lower, it spiritually refers to what is of a higher spiritual quality finding expression on a lower level or what is more internal becoming manifest on a more external level of life. This sense of the Lord’s presence with people in the truths they have had worked into their lives is what is described in verse 3 where we read…

Rev 21:3 And I heard a great voice out of Heaven, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God with men! And He will tabernacle with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God.

Amen

 

 

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