from WL Worcester (H Blackmer, ed.), 
The Sower.  Helps to the Study of the Bible in Home and Sunday School
 
(Boston: Massachusetts New-Church Union, n.d.)

Table of Contents
 

 

Lesson 38

Topical and Doctrinal Notes

Leading Thought: The Passover

Read the description of the institution of the Passover very carefully (verses 1 to 28), for it is the most important of all the ceremonies that were provided for the Israelitish Church, and it has a very close connection with the most holy sacrament of the Christian Church, namely, the Holy Supper.

The Passover was instituted on the day when the children of Israel left the land of Egypt and were thus delivered from their slavery. For this reason it was to be commemorated every year "forever" (verses 17, 24). When, 1500 years later, the Lord came into the world, He changed the form of it, so that instead of eating the flesh of a lamb, and sprinkling the blood on the side posts and lintel of the house, Christians eat only the unleavened bread, and drink wine, the one representing flesh, and the other blood. So you see that this ordinance is being observed and will be observed forever. But, not so much to remind us Christians of the freeing of the Israelites from bondage, as to remind us of the great work which the Lord accomplished when He came into the world, and which was represented by the delivering of the Israelitish slaves, namely the great work of freeing humanity from slavery to hell.

The Lord came into the world to overcome the hells and glorify His human. The hells had gradually grown up to such a height, that they overflowed and filled the world of spirits, and kept the Lord's sunshine of love and truth from flowing into people’s minds. Just as Moses delivered the children of Israel, so the Lord Jesus Christ delivered all of humanity.

The Lord set out on this great and wonderful work when He was a mere child, a little baby. From the beginning He was troubled by evil spirits who tried to kill Him, and to lead Him to do wrong instead of right. But though they tried ever so hard, yet He always fought against them, and they never succeeded in getting Him to even think what was wrong. How He fought against them, you can see if you will read eleven verses in the fourth chapter of Matthew, where we read of Satan's tempting Him. By always overcoming, He gradually made them move out of the world of spirits, and out of the mountains and hills near heaven, where they had built up great cities for themselves, and He cast them into hell, where He shut them up so that they could not come out again to trouble people and prevent their thinking about the Lord and how to love their neighbor.

While our Lord Jesus Christ was doing this, His human nature which was outside of His Divine nature became changed. When He was born, the human nature (which He had from His mother Mary) was like yours and mine, full of inclinations to evil. By never doing what He was inclined to do, He made these inclinations gradually grow weaker, and in place of them His love of thinking and doing what is right, yes, and what is Divine, grew stronger and stronger, until it was far stronger than that of any good person or any angel who ever lived or ever will live. This love grew stronger than the combined love of all angels of all the heavens. Indeed it became the strength of GOD Himself: it became Divine.

This change in His human nature is called "glorification." You may have heard New Church people speak of "the Divine Human," or "the Divine Humanity." This means the changed nature of the Lord Jesus Christ: His Divine Body.

Because nothing of the nature which He had received from Mary when He was a little baby was in Him any longer, but because it was all changed to a Divine Nature, He no longer called Mary "mother." Did you ever notice that? Look in the Gospels, and you will find that, although others spoke to Him of His "mother," He Himself called Mary "Woman." (John 2:4; 19:26) Now you know the reason.

During all His life in the world, then, the Lord kept making His human nature more and more Divine, and at last, after His crucifixion, in the tomb He put off the last parts of His human nature, the actual earthly matter of His body, and put Divine substance into His body, and so rose with His body made fully Divine, or "glorified." Then the work of deliverance was complete, the world of spirits was cleared of all evil spirits, and He took the good spirits out of the lower earth, into heaven with Himself.

This is what was represented by the Passover, and for this reason He rose during the feast of the Passover, which, as you can see from this chapter in Exodus, lasted seven days. Because the good people whom He took to heaven were then all arranged into societies in that beautiful great country and all lived together in the greatest happiness, therefore, to show this, it was commanded in the rules about keeping the Passover that they should eat the lamb and the unleavened bread according to their households. (See verses 3, 4.)

But, unfortunately, though the Lord so delivered humanity, not long after this, people again began to be so evil, that in the course of seventeen hundred years, the hells again overflowed, the world of spirits again became filled with evil spirits, again people could not be reached by the Lord through angels, and so the Lord again performed the work of redemption. This time it was not necessary for Him to come in person into the world because people had the Word of both Testaments. But the Lord did appear in the world of spirits. He executed a judgment in the year 1757, of which Emanuel Swedenborg was an eyewitness, that is, he saw and heard all that was going on at this judgment in the spiritual world, and the Lord then told him to write about it so that people in the world might know about it. This he did in the work entitled The Last Judgment, and Babylon Destroyed; also in other books.

He tells us that the evil people who lived from the time of the Lord's life on earth until the year 1757, had made for themselves such splendid cities and regions on the mountains and in the valleys of the world of spirits that they seemed like heaven. But this heaven and earth were all destroyed at the last judgment by fearful earthquakes and cyclones. He concludes the story in one place, "Thus perished the old heaven and the old earth; and all those were cast into hell who had not lived a life of faith, which is charity; for they were called the ‘goats’ who stood on the left, who gave no one anything from internal charity, but only for some external reason. This lasted from March 31 to April 11th, at Eastertide, 1757."

You see from this that at the Second Coming as well as at the First, the Lord delivered humanity from hell at Passover, or Easter time.

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