85. Experiences in the spiritual world have made it very plain to me that “the goats” mean precisely people like these. In the spiritual world we see the same things that exist in the physical world. We see houses and mansions. We see parks and gardens — the gardens contain trees of all different kinds. We see fields of crops and fields that have recently been plowed. We see meadows and lawns. We also see flocks and herds. All these things are the same there as they are here on the physical planet Earth. The only difference is that the things on Earth have a physical origin but the things in the spiritual world have a spiritual origin.

In that world I have often seen sheep and goats. I have seen them battling with each other, much like the battle described in Daniel 8. I have seen goats with horns that curved forward and that curved backward. I have seen goats furiously charging at sheep. I have seen goats with two horns, and goats with four horns, violently butting sheep with them. When I have looked around to see what this meant, I have seen people arguing with each other about whether faith is united to goodwill or is entirely separate from it.

These experiences have made it clear to me that the modern-day view that faith is what justifies us (which is a faith that is by definition completely separate from goodwill) is a goat; and faith that is united to goodwill is a sheep.

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.