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4. The Word and the Bible
By Kurt Simons | May 19, 2007
The Bible can be confusing, even to its believers:
1. Some parts of the Bible consist of straightforward historical stories, but even these stories clearly have some kind of symbolic lesson. What exactly does this history teach? Different writers and churches have suggested different meanings for centuries.
2. Other parts of the Bible, such as the visions of the prophets and the Book of Revelation, are outright fantastic and seem obviously symbolic. But, here again, people have argued for centuries over what they mean.
3. Bible stories such as those about the earth’s creation (Genesis 1, 2), the burning bush (Exodus 3), and the sun standing still (Joshua 10: 12,13) seem half-way between fact and fiction. Are they true history or pure symbolism? If they are true history, they raise perplexing questions, such as where did Cain’s and Enoch’s wives come from (Genesis 4), why didn’t the bush burn up, and how could the earth’s rotation be stopped to make the sun stand still without catastrophic results? If they are symbolic, what does that say about the apparently historical parts of the Bible? Are those stories “just” symbolic, too?
4. There are ugly stories in the Bible, such as the accounts of Elisha cursing the children and the bears attacking them (2 Kings 2:24), and Christ’s command to hate parents (Luke 14:26). There are collections of apparent trivia that seem irrelevant today, such as the genealogies, details of the tabernacle’s construction, and details of the Mosaic law. There are contradictions, such as light appearing in the creation story (Genesis 1:3) before the sun was created (Genesis 1:14-16). Some of the stories are just plain weird, such as those about Jeremiah being told to buy a linen sash and hide it in a hole in a rock beside the Euphrates river (Jeremiah 13), and Ezekiel being told to shave his head and beard with a sword, weigh the cuttings, divide them into three parts, and burn one, strike around one with a sword, and scatter one to the wind (Ezekiel 5). Why are these type of things included? Are they just a test of faith?
5. What books should be included in the Bible? Different church organizations include different books in their Bible, such as the Catholic Apocrypha. The Jewish Torah has the same books as the standard Protestant Old Testament, but in different order. Also, books that the Protestant version divides into two parts - Kings, Chronicles, Samuel, and Ezra-Nehemiah, appear as only one book in the Torah. Why?
6. The Bible refers repeatedly to the “Word” or the “word of the Lord.” That Word couldn’t be referring to the Bible because the Bible hadn’t been completed when some of the books containing these terms were written. What then is the relationship of the Bible and the Word?
When all these questions are taken together, they challenge the faith of those who believe in the Bible, and offer grounds for dismissing it for those who do not.
The teachings of the Second Coming cut through this cloud of confusion and bring clarity in a definitive way.
What is the Word?
As noted in The First Coming of Jesus Christ, He is truth itself and good itself. Thus, true revelation not only originates in Him, but literally is Him. The revealed Word of God is not a scroll or printed book but a set of true ideas from God. Indeed, at the time of the Most Ancient Church there was no written copy of the Word because the people of that Golden Age didn’t need one. They knew of the truths from direct communication with angels. But once people turned to evil at the “fall” this direct communication ceased. What remained was the understanding that all objects of the created world are a form of symbolism that arises from what the teachings of the Second Coming call “correspondence” (See Correspondences: The Great Lost Secret). These correspondences communicated the spiritual truths people needed to know at the time of the Ancient Church, which arose when the Most Ancient Church fell.
Unfortunately, the people of the Ancient Church continued the downward trend into evil (See The Last Judgment Already Happened - in 1757). They lost touch with the higher spiritual meaning in their symbols, and began to worship the symbolic things themselves. For example, they forgot that the sun corresponded to God and began to worship the sun itself. This was the beginning of idolatry and the related idea of multiple gods. To provide a means of spiritual teaching, God developed a new and more limited but precise form of symbolism - written language. (Later, printing was also created to serve this purpose. Like writing, it provided a reliable means of both preserving and distributing the truths of the Word.)
God adapted the Word’s appearance to the states of the people to whom it was given, changing as they changed.
“The sense of the letter of the Word would have been different if the Word had been written among a different people, or if that people had not been such as it was.”(Arcana Coelestia 10453:3; see also 10461, 10603, 10604).
This is clearly demonstrated in the change in His teaching style from ”Thou shalt not” approach of the Old Testament to the teaching by parable of the New. However, whatever its form, the Word remains His truth. A scroll or book may relate the truth, but the truth itself is spiritual. This means that, while the written form may be distorted as a result of the writers’ biases or misunderstandings, the truth itself, i.e. the Word itself, is not.
The Ancient Word
The Ancient Church had the first written form of the Word of God, the Ancient Word. However, the Ancient Church continued the decline into evil until it too ultimately fell under the “flood” of evil represented symbolically (”correspondentially”) in the story of the flood in Genesis. At that time, most of the Ancient Word was lost, although the copies may remain somewhere in eastern Asia. However, one part was preserved. Moses copied from it what became the first eight chapters and most of chapters 9-11 of Genesis. The Scriptures also mention the Ancient Word’s books of Jasher (Joshua 10:13, 2 Samuel 1:18) and the Wars of Jehovah (Numbers 21:14). The latter book had a section called the Enunciations, referred to, if the passage is properly translated, in Numbers 21:27 (see Arcana Coelestia 2686, 2897 for details).
The Bible and the Word
The Bible was not written as one document originally but was compiled from a collection of smaller books, about 400 years after the time of Jesus. However, as noted above, the selection of books to include as canon in that compilation has been a matter of discussion ever since. In the teachings of the Second Coming, Jesus at last provides the definitive answer. This answer is suggested in the teachings of Psalm 78:2 that the whole history of Israel, i.e. the whole Old Testament, is a parable, and of the Gospels that everything Christ taught is a parable (Matthew 13:34, Mark 4:34). Just as your external body depends on your internal spirit to keep it alive, so the external form of the books that are part of the living Word of God have an internal “spirit…and…life” (John 6:63). The books that are part of the Word are indeed a parable, with that inner spiritual meaning or “correspondenc” or what the teachings of the Second Coming call a “continuous internal sense,” running all the way through them. (see Correspondences: the Great Lost Secret) Some other books of the Bible, such as Acts, have this inner meaning in a few passages, but not all the way through.
It should be noted that this inner spiritual meaning was not added to the external stories of the Word. The spiritual sense existed first, and then God chose various allegorical stories and accounts of actual worldly history that “corresponded” to it and thus could be used to communicate the spiritual sense. The Writings tell us that in heaven, where every angel has a copy of the Word, only the spiritual sense is seen. The angels see nothing of the external names, places, and stories of the Word as they appear to us here.
So which books of the Bible are Divinely inspired, containing that continuous inner spiritual meaning all the way through them? In the Old Testament, the list includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi (see The Second Advent Christian Bible).
“This [list] agrees fairly well with the canon of the Hebrew Word, or the scriptures as Jesus knew them when He was in the world. The Hebrew Bible consisted of: “The Law” (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy); “The Former Prophets” (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings); “The Latter Prophets” (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel), and “The Minor Prophets“…The other Old Testament books which are bound up in our Bible were not included in the original Hebrew canon, but were later added at the end, under the title “The Writings” or “Holy Books.” This collection, of very unequal value, surprisingly included three inspired books: Psalms, Lamentations and Daniel. Why didn’t the Hebrew scholars include these fully divine works in their canon? The answer probably lies in the historical fact that the canon or authorized list of books was considered as “closed” when the Jews returned from exile in Babylon in about the year 400 B.C. The book of Psalms, though acknowledged as fully inspired, was still being added to, right down to the 2nd century B.C. Lamentations also contains late material. Daniel was composed in the year 167 B.C., even after Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language! (Chapters 2-7 are in Aramaic, the language spoken in Palestine at the time of our Lord.) Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon all came into their final form long after the canon had been closed in 400 B.C.” (B. Kingslake, Swedenborg Explores the Spiritual Dimension. London: Seminar Books, 1981, pp. 115)
In the New Testament, only the four Gospels - Matthew , Mark, Luke, and John - and the Book of Revelation have the continuous inner spiritual meaning, the “correspondences,”of the Word. The Epistles, it turns out, were just that, letters of commentary written by human authors. They contain some good and useful teachings, but they are not part of the Word of God.
The Teachings of the Second Coming
As noted in The Last Judgment Already Happened - in 1757, the human race has developed from its early childlike states to our civilization’s present “grown-up” state, Jesus has remained an ever-present parent, never forcing us to confront complex new issues, but never failing to provide the revelation we need to deal with those issues, either. In fact, when you think about it, you can see that if Jesus did not keep “updating” the truth He shares with us, we would not continue to be able to act from our free will.
How so?
Reflect for a moment on what would happen if the evil side of your nature could come up with more “adult,” “sophisticated” arguments than your good side. In such a situation, the clever, complex arguments for evil might appear more convincing than the “simple” arguments for good, leaving you prejudiced in favor of evil. The problem of “sophisticated” evil having an unfair advantage over “simple” good is familiar to every parent, and can be met in one of two ways. Either the parent can attempt to prevent the child from becoming aware of sophisticated evil, or the parent can prepare the child to cope with that evil by providing the child with equally sophisticated ideas of good. An interesting parallel to this choice occurred with regard to the traditional Christian church and its position on what it once regarded as the “sophisticated evil” of science. From the time of Galileo to the Scopes “monkey trial” some segments of that church thought that people should be protected from this “evil.” It can certainly be argued that science has brought evil to the world. But why would God create our human capacity to develop a rational mind if He didn’t intend us to use it? Rather than forbidding us to use this gift, is it not more reasonable to expect God to provide a new and more “adult” understanding of good to prepare us to cope with the development of more “adult” temptations to do evil?
The Gospels offer a familiar example of this type of new provision. In the New Testament, we see Jesus adding a new layer of meaning to the simple and childlike “Thou shalt not” teachings of the Old Testament by means of more sophisticated, parable-based teachings. As with all good parents, His new teachings did not contradict His earlier ones. In His own words, “Do not think that I am come to destroy the law or the Prophets: I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17) This fulfillment involved a “filling” of the original Old Testament teachings with new, more sophisticated, “grown up” spiritual insights.
At the time when Jesus Christ came to earth, however, much of the human race was still far from what might be thought of as spiritual adulthood. He knew that humanity would continue to “grow up,” so the New Testament includes prophecies of yet another coming, another revelation that would meet the needs of that more grown-up time, our time. Like all true prophecy, this prophecy was given in a very ambiguous way. As many science fiction stories have illustrated, if we knew the future it would interfere with our free will. But some of Jesus’ own teachings gave fairly clear clues - ”at least in retrospect - of what the next revelation would be like. In the same way parents explain to their children that there are things the children won’t understand until they grow up, so Jesus told His disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). He followed this statement with another one that was, again, apparently ambiguous at the time but which we can understand now because it has been fulfilled: “… [W]hen He, the spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13). By the “spirit of truth” He meant a further explanation, the internal explanatory spirit within the external body of truth already given in the Old and New Testaments. This spirit of truth would not be something you could see in the physical world but only in your understanding. Thus, Jesus told the Pharisees, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation [i.e., not in the physically visible realm]: Nor will they say, See here! or See there! for, indeed, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20, 21). Other prophecies were even more veiled in symbols. “Every eye will see him” (Revelation 1:7) refers to the mind “seeing” the spirit of truth. The references to Him coming in the “clouds of heaven” (Matthew 24:30, Revelation 1:7) point to how the “sun” of the newly revealed spiritual truth would disperse the “clouds” of human religious confusion so the mind’s “eye” could see heavenly truth directly. The most specific prophecy of all was of the coming of a “New Jerusalem” - a whole new “city” (Revelation 21) of Second Coming teaching of what would become a new, Second Coming form of the Christian Church. However, it is nearly impossible to see that meaning in the literal statements of Revelation.
In the teachings of the Second Coming, then, are found the latest and final “fulfilling” (Matthew 5: 17) of Jesus’ revelation, the promised and prophesied full explanation of truth and spiritual reality. In their great depth and scope, these teachings provide a counterweight to the most sophisticated temptations of modern evil, and so preserve our free will.
The teachings of the Second Coming contain no prophecy of a further coming. Their fully “grown-up” explanation of spiritual truth is the final revelation. On a practical level, there would be no point to further revelation because the Scriptures and the books of the Second Coming together contain more truth than anyone could possibly master in one lifetime in this world. And yet, all that truth is still only a tiny introduction to the vistas of truth and clarity of mind that “come” to us in heaven, vistas so wide that we will study them into eternity and never come to the end.
For Further Reading
From the Books of the Second Coming
The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Concerning The Holy Scripture - A review of what defines the content of the Divine revelation in the Word.
The True Christian Religion. Containing the Universal Theology of The New Church Foretold by the Lord in Daniel 7; 13, 14; and in Revelation 21; 1, 2 - Contains, along with many other topics, a history of the Word and a summary of how the inner and outer levels of the Word are related
Other Titles
W.L. Worcester. Bible Stories and Their Inner Meaning. A Family Study Guide - A story-by-story review of the correspondential inner meaning of all the Divinely revealed books in the Bible.
To Chapter 5: How Can a Loving God Permit Evil?