18. Encounter with Nicodemus IV (Jn 3:17-21)

John Chapter 3:17-21
For God did not send His Son into the world that He might judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. (18) The one believing into Him is not condemned; but the one not believing has already been condemned, for he has not believed into the name of the only begotten Son of God. (19) And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness more than the Light, for their works were evil. (20) For everyone practicing wickedness hates the Light, and does not come to the Light, that his works may not be exposed. (21) But the one doing the truth comes to the Light, that his works may be revealed, that they exist, having been worked in God.

Arcana Celestia 2335 by Emanuel Swedenborg
[2] As regards Judgment it is twofold, namely, from good and from truth. The faithful are judged from good, but the unfaithful from truth. That the faithful are judged from good, is plainly evident in (Matthew 25:34-40), and that the unfaithful are judged from truth (Matthew 25:41 to 46). To be judged from good is to be saved because they have received it; but to be judged from truth is to be condemned because they have rejected good. Good is the Lord’s, and they who acknowledge this in life and faith are the Lord’s, and therefore are saved; but they who do not acknowledge it in life, and consequently not in faith, cannot be the Lord’s, and therefore cannot be saved. They are therefore judged according to the acts of their life and according to their thoughts and ends; and when they are judged according to these, they cannot but be condemned; for it is a truth that of himself a man does, thinks, and intends nothing but evil, and of himself rushes to hell in so far as he is not withheld therefrom by the Lord.

[3] But as regards judgment from truth the case is this: The Lord never judges anyone except from good; for He desires to raise all into heaven, however many they may be, and indeed, if it were possible, even to Himself; for the Lord is mercy itself and good itself. Mercy itself and good itself can never condemn anyone; but it is the man who condemns himself, because he rejects good. As in the life of the body he had shunned good, so does he shun it in the other life; consequently he shuns heaven and the Lord, for the Lord cannot be in anything except good. He is likewise in truth, but not in truth separated from good. That the Lord condemns no one, nor judges any to hell, He says in John:–
God sent not His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. This is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, but men loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil (John 3:17, 19).
and in the same:–
If anyone hear My words, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world (John 12:47).


 

A few weeks ago we had a reading from the Heavenly Doctrines that spoke of three general states every person passes through in regard to the processes involved in being regenerated or reborn. These are 1. A state of condemnation; 2. A state of reformation and; 3. A state of regeneration. Today we are going to look at these states so that we can build an understanding of them from the perspective of Spiritual Christianity. But before that we need to just summarise a few key concepts that we have dealt with over the last few weeks.

The first has to do with what the spirit of a person actually is. This is such an important truth because when clearly grasped it shows us what spiritual work actually involves and where we will find it. Your spirit is you, it’s who you are. Questions like, Who am I? What is man? What makes us who we are? Are some of the most profound questions a person can ask. Every genuine spiritual path seeks to provide answers for questions such as these and the teachings for Spiritual Christianity are no different. Our teachings offer us truths that seek to guide us towards finding the answers to such questions. We learn that our spirit is our mind and that the quality of our self is revealed in the thoughts and affections we identify with, delight in and so make our own.

This ability to gather and bring together a system of thoughts and affections that we identify with and call “our self” suggests that there is something deeper to the self than just the thoughts and feelings we experience. This deeper part is found in the fact that we can actually look at our thoughts and affections and choose those we will entertain. Our ability to do this shows that we can think of the self, or spirit or mind in terms of levels, the thoughts and affections that we gather and identify with and then there is the “us” who does the selecting that gathering. We can be conscious of our thoughts and affections but we are much less conscious of what underlies and organises these into that sense of ourselves we are aware of, as ourselves.

What underlies the myriad of feelings and thoughts that pass through our minds or spirits every day is a belief structure and values that governs how we see and relate to the world with its situations and circumstances, other people, life, and God. Beliefs and values tend to be a much more stable level of being than the thoughts and feelings we experience and act like a filter through which these more external spiritual influences are organised. It is these beliefs that determine what we are sensitive to, how we affected by the conditions we experience and how we interpret and give meaning to things. While there is no denying that we experience an external world, there is also no denying that each person’s experience of that world is unique to them.

This is because no two people have identical belief systems. Our experience of life is unique to each of us, so in this sense each of us lives in a very different world to every other person, at least as far as our inner world is concern. The point here is that our individual inner personal worlds are constructed and created by the beliefs we hold. Now this truth can be liberating and full of hope, because it means that if our sense of self is dependent on the beliefs we hold then it can be changed. It means that if we take to ourselves new beliefs found in the truths that a genuine religion teaches and live from these then we can undergo a transformation and be reborn as to our spirits.

But we can go a little deeper and ask ourselves what holds our belief systems together? The teachings for Spiritual Christianity offer us an answer to this question as well. Our belief systems are built around what we love most. And while there is an infinite variety of loves, as many as there are individuals, all can be traced back to either one of two pairs of loves.

In simple terms there are two pairs of loves one of which every human being becomes a unique expression of through the choices they make over the course of their whole life. The first pair of loves and it is these that every person entering into the world is born into are natural loves being the love of self and love of the world. The second pair of loves is that into which a person is born by virtue of undergoing the spiritual rebirth being love to the Lord and love to the neighbour.

Now I think we can all see that if love to the Lord and our neighbour sits at the centre of our sense of self our minds will be organised, in terms of its beliefs and values etc, very differently to a mind whose beliefs are organised around the loves of self and the world. The two mental worlds, that is the mind created by these two pairs of loves will be very different in their structure and quality. And because this is the case, so the way in which the external world with its situations and circumstances, our interactions with others, the meaning we bring to all the aspects of life we are affected by, what we are sensitive to, and how we interpret it all, will be literally worlds apart depending on which of these loves rules in us. One of the most important principles of spiritual life is this idea that how we take the outer world of our experience is a reflection of how our inner world is organised with its system of beliefs, values and loves.

Now we ask ourselves another question, what makes a human being a human being? Again the teachings for Spiritual Christianity point us to an answer. They teach that there are to two things that set human beings apart from animals. The two pillars upon which the human mind is founded are the freedom which belongs to the will faculty and the rationality which belongs to the understanding faculty. The way in which these two faculties are structured are such that a person can go from being natural and become spiritual through a consciousness of a self being free to acquire ones own life through choosing what values one is going to live from. This means that we are given the ability to have the core loves around which our mind is organised changed, which is not the case with animals as they are purely natural and function from within a very limited range of behaviours fixed or bound to the instincts into which they are born.

Relative to human beings animals are born with all they need to live their life and so reach maturity and are able to fully function in the life of their species in a comparatively quick degree of time. No point occurs in an animal’s life where it has an opportunity to make a conscious decision to live its life in a particular way, according to a particular set of values or beliefs. This capacity is a uniquely human one, and it is something every person has from the Lord whether He is acknowledged or not. Generally speaking human life, or what is the same, the life of the human mind, involves gathering information, formulating and organising it and using it to act in order to fulfil its desires.

It is this capacity to grow and develop on the mental plane and then build a life or world in accordance with the things there that are valued that is central to being human. Human self consciousness only exists where there is a sense of having choice within the finite limitations we all exist under. Freedom in a spiritual and psychological sense, or a truly human sense, is the ability to see and assess courses of action in the light of our values and conscience and then choose one over the others. Along with this comes the ability to take responsibility for our actions knowing that for each choice made there are a number of possibilities that remain unfulfilled in those courses of action not taken.

The ability to act in freedom requires the ability to be conscious that we are the agent who is acting and that our actions are the result of a free choice for which we are responsible in view of the values and principles we hold to. If our actions are purely the result of instinctual drives, with the most powerful drive finding expression, then we are not in a state of choice nor can we be regarded as free, nor can we really be regarded as human. The kind of freedom that provides us with a sense of being an independent autonomous self demands that we have the ability to reflect on our motives, and so know that we exist as an independent conscious being who is responsible for our actions. This provides us with the ability to actually reject acting on an impulse or strong instinct; in fact it gives us the ability to consciously refuse to act on certain desires from a matter of principle. It’s in this ability to weigh the content of our mental life and assess its quality in the light of our values that the human sense of self lies. And it is this very ability that makes it possible for human beings to be regenerated and so become spiritual.

So coming back to the teaching referred to earlier, that all people born into this world are born natural, that is, into natural loves with the potential to become spiritual. Because we are born into natural loves, which are the love of self and the love of the world, over the course of our natural mental development our sense of self becomes wedded to beliefs that support these loves. There is no way of minimising the nature of these loves when separated from the governance of higher loves. The Word and the Heavenly Doctrines are emphatic on this; these loves are hell bent, for they look to place the self at the centre of life in place of God. Whether they are successful in this or not depends on how a person responds to the truths they meet over the course of their adult lives.

Barring any serious debilitation in a person’s mental functioning every person enters adult life with a capacity to reflect on their life in the light of truths and to act to amend things in accordance with the insights they receive. If this wasn’t the case there would be no hope of having our sense of self lifted out of it identification with the natural loves of the natural man into new higher spiritual associations or heavenly loves where it can be identified with a new heavenly proprium. In other words without this ability there would be no hope of salvation because there would be no possibility for change.

The loves of self and the world, into which every person is born, are so opposed to heavenly loves that nothing could be more opposite. These loves for the better part of our lives work tirelessly to conceal this spiritual fact from us and we have real difficulty seeing it, in fact without Divine Revelation in the form of the Word and the Heavenly Doctrines we would remain totally oblivious to their opposition to all that is good and true. This old self or proprium is the state of condemnation that rules in us until we are born again. It is built on a foundation of fear and defensiveness, because this is all the loves of self and world can produce in us.

Over the course of our lives the dominant presence of these loves build around themselves a fortress of belief systems that shut the Lord and others out. Of course these systems of belief are often presented to us under the guise of a whole army of rationalisations, justifications and illusions that make out that this old self is not so bad and perfectly acceptable. It offers us a whole wardrobe of outer garments and masks, of acceptable moral and civil behaviours that we can wear in the hope that its true nature is not exposed. But at the end of day while it is in charge everything life presents is only ever taken and used on its own terms. Everything and everyone becomes an extension of this self and those who fail to meet up to its expectations are dismissed as of no real consequence.

Until we undergo a rebirth as to our spirit and acquire new ways of thinking and being our whole sense of self is organised around the loves of self and the world. To be saved is to have a new character of mind organised around love to the Lord and love towards our neighbour, which is to love truths and do them for their own sake, i.e. because they are true and as such produce what is good. Until this begins to take place a person’s identity remains bound to a state of condemnation, not because the Lord condemns them, He doesn’t, but because they choose of their own free will to remain attached to what is of hell within them. And no matter how much the Lord desires to remove them from this destructive state of life, if a person won’t use the faculties they have been given to take hold of truths to remove themselves of their own volition from selfish states of life, then His hands are tied.

You see the Lord doesn’t lift a person out of the hell of their proprial states of life against their will. And so in order to preserve our freedom He has provided us with the truths in the Word and the Heavenly Doctrines, as well as a rational faculty to receive these into our minds and a will faculty provided in these truths so that we can act from them as a matter of life. We may wish He would intervene in a more direct or spectacular way, but the fact that He doesn’t shows us how important our freedom is to Him in spiritual matters. Our eternal welfare depends on it. Everything needed for a person’s spiritual birth is provided for, but they have to reach up and take hold of that provision. A simple act of the will from the truths of the Word and a person enters onto the path of rebirth. For to act from truths is to act from the Lord and all actions from the Lord or the Word have one end in view, the life of heaven.

It is the proprium, the loves of self and the world, that stands condemned and it is a spiritual fact that if our sense of self is inextricably tied into this then we stand condemned with it. The Lord can’t remove our sense of self from this if we are unwilling to work with Him to have our evils identified and removed so that our sense of ourselves might be detached from them. To learn truths and to use them is what is meant by loving the Lord and our neighbour. Love in this sense is a response not a feeling, to believe in the Lord is nothing more and nothing less than to act from truths and it is this that leads to the re-forming of the mind. This work with truths is what is meant by states of reformation. As our sense of self is extracted from the old selfish proprium so the Lord binds us more fully and complete to the loves of heaven giving us a new regenerated will, a new sense of our selves, a heavenly proprium grounded in new higher delights which are destined to break forth in a regenerate mind. A real delight in doing the will of the Lord.

Amen.

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