1. Survey of Teachings of the New Church Meant by the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation

[Author’s Preface]

AFTER publishing, within the span of a few years, several larger and smaller works on the New Jerusalem (which means the new church that the Lord is going to establish), and after unveiling the Book of Revelation, I resolved to publish and bring to light the teachings of the [new] church in their fullness, and thus to present a body of teaching that was whole. But because this work was going to take several years, I developed a plan to publish an outline of it, to give people an initial, general picture of this church and its teachings. When a general overview precedes, all the details that follow, of however wide a range, stand forth in a clear light, because they each have their own place within the overall structure alongside things of the same type.

This briefing does not include detailed argumentation; it is shared as advance notice, because the points it contains will be fully demonstrated in the work itself.

First, however, I must present the teachings concerning justification as they exist today, in order to highlight the differences between the tenets of today’s church and those of the new church.

52. Brief Analysis

Experience supports this point. How many people today live by the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s other precepts as a religious practice? How many people today are willing to look their own evils in the face and practice actual repentance, thereby initiating a worshipful life? How many devout people practice a repentance that is more than merely verbal and theatrical — confessing that they are sinners and praying (in obedience to the teachings of the church) that God the Father have mercy for the sake of his Son, who suffered on the cross for their sins, took away the damning effect of those sins, and ritually purged them with his own blood? “May the Son forgive our crimes so that we may be presented spotless before the throne of your judgment.”

Surely everyone can see that this kind of worship is not from the heart; it is only from the lungs. It is external but not internal. We are praying that our sins may be forgiven, yet we are unaware of a single sin within ourselves; and if we are aware of any sin, we either give it our favor and indulgence or else believe that we are purified and absolved of it by our faith without having to do any work of our own.

By way of comparison, this is like a servant coming in with his face and clothes covered in soot and dung, approaching his master, and saying, “Lord, wash me.” Surely his master would tell him, “You foolish servant! What are you saying? Look, there is the water, the soap, and a towel. Don’t you have hands? Don’t they work? Wash yourself!”

The Lord God is going to say, “The means of being purified come from me. Your willingness and your power come from me. Therefore use these gifts and endowments of mine as your own and you will be purified.”

Allow me to mention another example. If you prayed a thousand times both at home and in church for God the Father to protect you for his Son’s sake from the Devil, yet you yourself did not use the freedom the Lord was constantly providing you with to protect yourself from evil or the Devil, you could not be kept safe even by legions of angels sent especially to you by the Lord.

The Lord cannot act contrary to his own divine design. His design is for us to examine ourselves, see our evils, and resist them; and to do this seemingly on our own, although in fact the Lord is helping. Nowadays this does not seem like the gospel, but it is — being saved by the Lord is the gospel.

As for why the worship of our mouths is only acceptable to the Lord depending on how worshipful our lives are: Before God and before angels the sound of our speech reflects how much we long for love and faith; and it is the way we live that determines whether love and faith are present in us or not. If love and faith in God are present in your life, to God and the angels you sound like a dove. If love for yourself and confidence in yourself are present in your life, you sound like a screech owl, no matter how you twist your voice around to mimic the sound of a turtledove. The spiritual quality present within the sound produces this effect.

40. Brief Analysis

The teachings of today’s Christian theology are based on an idea of three gods, an idea that resulted from taking the teaching that there is a trinity of persons at face value. We see the wrongness of those teachings only after we have accepted in their place the idea that there is one God and that the divine trinity exists within him, because seeing how wrong those teachings are is not possible before making that switch.

Before that, we are like people at night who are looking at various objects in the light of only a few stars; we see statues and mistake them for living human beings. Or we are like people lying in bed in the twilight before dawn, seeing something like ghosts in the air above them and thinking the apparitions are angels. Or we are like people who see any number of things in the dim, deceptive light of their own imagination and believe them to be real. It is well known that the true nature of things like that is not detected and does not become apparent until we come into the light of day — that is, the light of intellectual wakefulness. When genuine truths come forth to be seen in their own light, which is the light of heaven, the same thing happens to teachings of the church that have been mistakenly or falsely understood and reinforced.

Surely everyone is capable of understanding that all teachings based on the idea of three gods are inwardly wrong and false. I say “inwardly” because the idea of God is central to everything having to do with the church, religious practice, and worship. Theological concepts dwell at a higher level in the human mind than all other concepts, and the highest theological concept is the idea of God. Therefore if our idea of God is false, everything else that follows from it derives a falseness from or becomes falsified by the source from which it originates. Whatever is highest (which is also what is inmost) acts as the essence of the things that result from it lower down. That essence, like a soul, forms those lower things into a kind of body that is an image of itself. If that essence is false, and it descends and encounters truths lower down, it taints them with its own blight and error.

Our having the idea of three gods in our theological concepts can be compared to patients’ having a disease that persists in their hearts or lungs, but the patients consider themselves healthy because their doctor, unaware of their underlying condition, has convinced them they are well. A doctor who knows about their disease, however, and still convinces them they are well deserves to be and should be charged with causing immeasurable harm.