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READINGS
John Chapter 1:6-15
There was a man sent from God; his name was John. (7) He came for a witness, that he might witness concerning the Light, that all might believe through Him. (8) He was not that Light, but that he might witness concerning the Light. (9) He was the true Light; He enlightens every man coming into the world. (10) He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him, yet the world did not know Him. (11) He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. (12) But as many as received Him, to them He gave authority to become children of God, to the ones believing into His name, (13) who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but were born of God. (14) And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. And we beheld His glory, glory as of an only begotten from the Father, full of grace and of truth. (15) John witnesses concerning Him, and has cried out, saying, This One was He of whom I said, He coming after me has been before me, for He was preceding me.
Arcana Coelestia #6886 by Emanuel Swedenborg
…It may be evident that the Divine Being (Esse) cannot communicate itself to anyone except by the Divine Existing (Existere), that is, the Divine itself cannot communicate itself except by the Divine Human, and the Divine Human cannot communicate itself except by the Divine truth, which is the Holy of the Spirit.
Arcana Coelestia #9399
The Divine truth proceeding from the Lord is the light which illuminates the mind of man, and constitutes his internal sight which is that of the understanding. The subject treated of in these passages is concerning the Word, which is the Divine truth proceeding from the Lord.
True Christian Religion #176 by Emanuel Swedenborg
In the Word it is read that Jehovah God dwells in light inaccessible, who then could go to Him, unless He were to dwell in light accessible? that is, if He did not descent and assume the Human and become in this the light of the world. Who cannot see that to go to Jehovah the Father in His light, is as impossible as for one to take the wings of the morning, and by means of them fly to the sun.
SERMON
Last time we left off our reading with this statement drawn from verses 4 & 5 where it says,
Joh 1:4-5 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men; (5) and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
The condition of our mind prior to our regeneration in regard to spiritual things is nothing but gross darkness; we actually have no capacity of ourselves to grasp anything pertaining to spiritual realities. Any genuine comprehension we have of such things is from the Lord alone or from the truths of the Word which is really the Lord with us. We should never be tempted to attribute our understanding of spiritual things to our own intellectual ability, all power in this regard is from the Lord, who gives us the ability to reason about truths but more importantly grants us the ability to love them by responding to the challenges they make on our life in freedom.
Our spiritual life is found in the Word alone or in Divine Truths for these are able to enlighten our minds so that we can see into the nature of the darkness that binds our sense of self to selfish attitudes and perspectives. While the loves of self and the world have the chief place in our lives we remain unable to see the way forward – yet the light shines, but as the scripture declares it is incomprehensible until we see that the Lord is the Word which is the Divine truth itself.
So far are we from comprehending this, that when we first begin to awaken to spiritual life, the Lord, ever sensitive to our lowness of state, makes provision for those who are willing to live from the truths they have in their possession that they may be led into the light. This provision is in the form of a witness – a witness to the light. But what is this witness? Remember we are not looking at these things in terms of historical characters in time, but rather in terms of their living reality in our experience now. So the first three things we discover regarding this witness to the light is that it is described by three terms, the first is “man”, the second is the name “John”, and the third is the phrase “sent from God”. Each of these terms describes this thing called “the witness of the light”. So let us deal with each of these terms and see if we can come into a fuller understanding of what this witness to the light might be. Firstly the term “a man”, in the Greek is anthropos, which literally means “human faced”, this connection of the witness to what is human is spiritually significant and points to a key teaching concerning how the Divine accommodates Himself to the human mind as the Divine Human. Next of this “anthropos” we see it is given a name and names in Scripture are not abstract terms for things but are given to reveal the character or nature of the thing to which the name is attributed. So this “anthropos” is described as to its nature or quality by the term, John which means “Jehovah is a gracious giver” and finally we see that this “anthropos” is sent by God.
We saw last week that the term “God” as used by John here is a term interchangeable with the idea of the Divine Love. So we see that we are being taught here how the Divine Love operates by means of the Word. God or Divine Love meets us through sending forth the human or anthropos. What this is saying spiritually is that because of the negative influence self interest has on darkening the mind and rendering it powerless to grasp truth, which is the only means by which a person can enter into spiritual life, the Divine Love sends forth a witness, which is termed here, “a man, or human face from God…” which is a most precious gift seen in that the name John means, “Jehovah is a gracious giver”. So while the literal sense speaks of a man named John sent from God, and the natural man thinks in terms of a historical person and event, the spiritual man sees it not in terms of history, but in terms of present spiritual activity, and so looks for the meaning of these words in terms of our relationship to the Word. Thus from a spiritual perspective the term John is not to be understood as the name of some individual man, but rather should be seen as a description of the nature of what God sends forth from Himself, a human form accommodated to finite minds. He alone is the gracious giver; this is what the term John used here teaches us. The use of the name John (Jehovah is a gracious giver) points us to this eternal truth. For the nature of Divine Love is such that it seeks to give all that it possesses to another – we could say then, that God being Divine love, is continually in the act of giving itself.
This gift from the Lord to assist us into the life of genuine charity is a witness to the light or the Divine Truth, and because it is described as “human faced”, it is therefore a witness to the true face of a genuine humanity, or if you like a witness to what is truly Human. If this witness is sent forth from God then it must be of God, this means that it carries within it a testimony as to the true nature of the Divine Love, for what comes forth from the Divine can do nothing else but bear witness to the Lord’s nature. If we are to be able to receive from the Divine then His gift to us must be in a form we can receive. The Lord looks to give us eternal life, He is concerned for our salvation, and to that end He seeks our deliverance from the tyranny of self centred attitudes and beliefs that separate us from the life of heaven. As human beings we can only receive from the Divine what is in a human form – we have no capacity to receive the Divine as He is in Himself for we are finite whereas He is infinite and the finite cannot grasp the infinite – Thus if we are to receive what God or Divine Love gives, then this love must present itself to us in a human form or in a form we are capable of grasping within the bounds of our limited finite minds. Thus this form is described in the Scriptures as, “a man, a Human, sent from God to testify concerning the light. The term man is not a reference to a historical person, but to the quality of what is truly human that we have the opportunity to come into contact with and enact every day.
This witness is ever present for us in life, we just need our eyes opened to appreciate its closeness to us, for God as the gracious giver never ceases to shed forth His gift of life, ever seeking to point us to the Word or Lord who is the one true light – have we heard or seen His witness today? Have you seen this man – the human face of God – called John? Or are we so in the darkness we are unable to grasp even this? John cries out in the barrenness that is our lack of understanding in spiritual things, he calls out as the voice of one crying in the wilderness. To begin to hear this cry we must come to see what the human face God sends us is.
The face of anything is its surface. And in the case of human beings our faces are the most expressive part of us. When it expression is true to what is within, our mental and affectional states are reflected there in a corresponding form for all to see. In our facial expressions we reveal what we are experiencing within, whether it be happiness, joy, contentment, or pain, grief and anger; every emotion has a corresponding facial expression through which the state of our world within can be presented to the world without. So spiritually the face corresponds to and reveals what is more internal.
The human face is designed to express the affectional or emotional states of our mind, and also serves to give expression to the thought although this is primarily by means of the voice. If this is the function of a face then where then do we find the human face sent by God? Such a face must reveal the nature of the Lord to us, and if it does this, then its expression will be one of love, mercy, compassion and goodness, for this is what the Lord is, and where do we find the voice that points us to the Divine Truth – for that which is able to reveal the mind and heart of God to our comprehension must be the witness spoken of here. So can we see that this witness is really the Word itself? The historical man we know as John the Baptist, when spoken of as the witness to the light is in fact a symbolic representative of the true witness to the Divine truth, which when you think about it can only be the Word itself in some form. Why? Well because it is the Word that testifies concerning the light, it is the Word that is both the witness of itself and the Divine Truth itself, therefore it alone can be said to be from God or Divine Love, for the Lord is Divine love and wisdom and that which comes forth from Love and Wisdom as the living presence of the Lord in our midst is every form of goodness and truth that is able to touch the human heart and enlighten the human mind.
Of this witness it is said in verse 8…
Joh 1:8 That one was not the Light, _but_ [he came] so that he should testify concerning the Light.
All that is said of John in the Word, when understood spiritually, teaches us concerning the uses and function of the literal sense of the Word. The literal sense of the Word is a vessel that holds within it a deeper meaning which we call the Celestial and Spiritual senses. These three senses or levels of meaning are all contained in the literal sense and each on its own level bears witness to the light or the Divine Truth, even as John in the gospel story points his hearers to the Lord as the light. None of these senses are the light as it is in itself for no finite human mind can grasp that light and so remains in relative darkness. But all levels of meaning a person or angel is able to enter into are in fact accommodations, or in the terms of the teaching we are looking at from John’s gospel, witnesses of the light or Divine Truth, tailored to the limitations of a finite mind.
The Divine truth is the light that is able to enlighten everyone coming into the world, and that light shines forth from the Word, but because we are unable to grasp or comprehend it, when we come to the Word in recognition that the Lord is found within it and nowhere else so the Lord grants us the ability to grasp its witness. When we look to the Word as the source of our life, seeking to understand it in the light of the heavenly doctrines, so then we can be enlightened as to those things within that stand opposed to, and prevent us entering into a greater sense of reality of the heavenly life. Armed with this light we have truths accommodated to our understanding that open up possibilities for our spiritual regeneration unseen before. Once truths are active in our life we are empowered to make choices that involve resisting our evils and promoting what is good.
The literal sense of the Word or John calls us to repentance, to walk a different path from the world, it teaches who the Lord is and where he is to be found and so bears testimony to the light or divine truth and so in this sense tells us about the light but is not the light itself – this light, to which the literal sense points, can only bring life to those who are willing to act in accordance with their understanding of Word, to act on the voice of the witness and order their lives according to it. So we read of the light that…
Joh 1:10-13 He was in the world, and the world came to be through Him, and the world did not know Him. (11) He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. (12) But as many as received Him, He gave to them authority to become children of God-to the ones believing [or, trusting] in His name, (13) who were begotten, not from [or, by] bloods, nor from a will of flesh, nor from a will of a man, but from God.
Those who receive the Word of life are given the authority to be born of God – for it is the Word or Divine Truth that recreates our minds into a form receptive of the life of heaven when we live from its witness or our understanding of its requirements upon our life freely. To receive the Word or the Lord is to live from the Word, those who do this, these are they born of God and in them the Word becomes flesh and dwells within them to the degree that they dwell in the Word.
Amen
