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2. The Last Judgment Already Happened - in 1757
By Kurt Simons | May 19, 2007
To fully understand what happened at the Last Judgment, it is useful to understand two things:
1. The Greek word for “judgment” in the New Testament, krisis, actually means “separation” (and in some places is translated that way - e.g. Matthew 25: 32). As will become apparent, that is a more accurate term to use in describing what happened, so we will here use the term “Last Separation.”
2. The Last Separation of the New Testament was the fourth time such a judgment/separation had occurred. The spiritual history of the human race is the history of a series of churches. Here again we need to look at a word’s meaning. In this case, the term “church” has a dual meaning. It most fundamentally refers to a spiritual entity, whose members are known only to God. It also refers to worldly organizations. The two kinds of “church” are typically linked together but we will here be focusing on the spiritual part.
As explained in Correspondences: The Great Lost Secret, a true church’s most fundamental purpose is to provide a communication channel, a channel of inflowing power from God through heaven to earth (Arcana Coelestia 530). This inflowing power is a fundamental requirement for human life to exist in the natural world, but it cannot reach us if the channel becomes corrupted or blocked. Corruption occurs when the people of a spiritual church fall away from the Word’s teaching and into evil. This creates a real threat to the spiritual life of the world and, if things get bad enough, even to its physical life.
The first church in history was the Most Ancient Church, symbolized (or “corresponding to” - See Correspondences: The Great Lost Secret), by Adam and Eve, which existed at the time of the Golden Age. This church became corrupted and “fell” away from following God’s guidance when its people chose to decide for themselves what was good and evil rather than listening to God. This choice is symbolized by Adam and Eve abandoning God’s Tree of Life and eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead, symbolic of their deciding for themselves what was good and evil. (Genesis 2: 9). In the resulting “fall,” symbolized by their being ejected from the Garden (Genesis 3: 23), the Most Ancient Church went through a “last separation.” This means that the remaining good people in the world at that time were separated from those who had fallen into evil. This separation was a sign that their church, the Most Ancient Church, had become so corrupt spiritually that it could no longer serve as that necessary channel of inflowing life from God and through heaven (see The First Coming of Jesus Christ). Thus, the Most Ancient church spiritually died.
Since life in this world requires that channel for God’s life-giving power, when one spiritual church dies, God always starts up a new spiritual church to replace it. This new church is initially built with good people who had been “separated” from the previous church, the “remnant” of that church (e.g., Jeremiah 23: 3; 44: 7; Micah 2: 12). In the case of the Most Ancient Church, the replacement was the Ancient Church.
Unfortunately, people continued in increasing numbers to choose to do evil. In other words, the “fall” did not stop with the Most Ancient Church but continued in its successor. As might be expected from its overall downhill trend, the Ancient Church got into even worse evils than the Most Ancient Church, evil so bad that it physically killed some of them. The Bible story symbolically describing this situation was the Flood (Genesis 7), in which most of the people of the Ancient Church spiritually drowned themselves in evil as that Church spiritually died. However, once again, the remaining good people were separated, the “remnant” this time symbolized by Noah and his ark floating above the “flood” of evil.
God then set up the Israelitish church (sometimes called The Second Ancient Church), whose history is recorded in the Old Testament. This church too became corrupted and suffered its own separation and spiritual death, seen in such events as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19) and referred to in Jesus’ statement, “The time of judgment for the world has come, when the prince of this world will be cast out” (John 12: 31). God then came to earth in person to set up the Christian church (see The First Coming of Jesus Christ).
You would think that with the God of the universe personally coming down to establish a church, the people involved in that church would never get back into evil again. But that’s not what happened. Even Jesus’ physical presence on earth does not interfere with human free will. Thus, even while He was still in the middle of His First Coming, Jesus was already teaching that He would have to come again (e.g. John 14, 16, 21, 24 and the book of Revelation). The need for His return began to be demonstrated 325 years after Christ’s resurrection, when there was an important religious council at Nicea, an ancient city in Asia Minor. At that Council, the monotheism of true Christianity was replaced with the wrong and spiritually destructive idea of God as not simply a split personality, but as more than one person with more than one motive. The Council proposed the illogical and completely unfair idea of a father God mercilessly condemning the whole human race for the rest of its history for a sin that two people, Adam and Eve, committed at the beginning of history, in the Garden of Eden. The only way that God could be appeased was the sacrifice of His Son, a second God. Why such an angry God would be so helpful as to send his son to be sacrificed is not made clear, nor is it explained how there could be more than one omnipotent and omnipresent god. In any case, the second God, Jesus Christ, was all that was loving and just, in a word, a polar opposite personality from the first God, reinforcing the idea of God and Jesus as two separate people.
So devastatingly wrong were these ideas of that Council, which have been followed in one form or another in most of the first Christian church ever since, that it caused that church to “fall.” In other words, in following those false ideas of God, the first Christian church destroyed its ability to serve as the spiritual link between heaven and this world that is necessary for life to exist here. This teaching may be “hard to hear” (John 6:60) and not seem in keeping with the appearances we see all around us. There are still many Christians who live good lives and go to heaven despite having the idea of three gods, or a god in three persons, just as there are people following teachings of the earlier churches that are also no longer living links to heaven. But just as a physical body dies when the spirit is separated from it, so the spiritual “internal” of the first Christian church died as a result of those false ideas.
The consequences of the first Christian church’s spiritual death can be seen, if we choose to look for them, in everything from the Dark Ages and the corruption in the church organization that Luther criticized to the horrors of our own age. But its most dramatic results were not visible here since they occurred in the spiritual world, where there were major disruptions.
After death, people awake in the World of Spirits, which is a place intermediate between heaven and hell. There they make final preparations, and then move on to whichever of those two places they have chosen (see The Death Process). This all is normally a fairly rapid process and usually takes no more than about 30 years of our time (there is no time as we know it in the spiritual world). But the Christian church’s fall caused massive interference with this process. Many evil people stayed in the world of spirits instead of going to hell. Then they set up empires, “imaginary heavens” (The Doctrine of Faith 64), that they used to fool many good people and put those people into a kind of bondage that prevented them from going on to the real heaven. All of this, it might be noted, had been predicted in the prophecies of the book of Revelation (e.g., the good people stuck in bondage were the souls under the altar of Revelation 6: 9-11).
Jesus, as always, is patient and allows human free will the widest possible range of expression. In keeping with that principle, He allowed the spiritual and natural turmoil of the fallen first Christian church to go on for centuries. But the pattern of history repeated itself, and the abuses finally grew so bad, so spiritually dangerous to the world, that He set in motion a major housecleaning, which was the great and terrible final “day of judgment, burning like a furnace” (Malachi 4:1, Revelation 6) that had been foretold as far back as the Old Testament prophets. This Last Separation of the first Christian church took place in 1757 and was as dramatic as all the prophecies had foretold, with “multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision” (Joel 3: 14), fighting with a dragon (Revelation 12), mountains collapsing into hell, and crowds of very happy people set free to go to heaven. Swedenborg’s description of it reads like some disaster film script. However, the Separation, this time of good and evil spirits, took place entirely in the spiritual world, with Swedenborg the only witness from our world. As dramatic as its appearances were, their spiritual point was the same as it had been at Jesus’ first coming, to put the hells back into order to protect the human race’s spiritual free will.
Perhaps the teachings of the Second Coming describe the end of the first Christian church so extensively because this was the final such separation. There will never be another last separation because this new church, the Second Advent Christian Church, will last forever. The truths revealed at the Second Coming are so powerful and complete that this new church based on their teachings will never fall. It is important to note, however, that this does not mean that people or organizations calling themselves Second Advent Christian will not fall and do wrong things; free will - and evil - are as alive and well as ever. But evil spirits will never again be allowed to gain control of the World of Spirits as they did before the final Last Separation.
Most important, however, is the fact that the Last Judgment didn’t simply clear the channel of inflowing power from heaven to earth; it expanded that channel. The effect of this has been an expansion of spiritual freedom rippling out into the world. It is interesting, for instance, to note that both the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, as well as both the American and French revolutions occurred, all within a few years of the conclusion of the first Christian church’s Last Separation. But all that was only a foretaste. In the two centuries since the Last Separation, freedom of thought and action has expanded in every area of human activity in a way without precedent in history. The world is far from perfect, but more people enjoy more freedom in more aspects of their lives than has been possible since the Golden Age. Not every result of this new freedom has been positive; evil people have used their freedom to develop in negative ways. However, the purpose of spiritual freedom is to allow us to choose good or evil. We are free to make good choices, and with our greater spiritual freedom, the teachings of the Second Coming tell us, these good choices can potentially accumulate into a new Golden Age - and, this time, it will last.
For Further Reading
From the Books of the Second Coming
Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment
and Concerning the Spiritual World
A blow-by-blow retelling of the story of this huge event, with explanatory comments on its implications and effects.
To Chapter 3: The Second Coming Already Happened -“ in 1770