The Lord, The Redeemer

In the preceding chapter we have briefly presented Swedenborg's teaching about God as the Creator. God, says our inspired author, is a Divine, Self-existent Being from whom all Creation proceeds. He is all-powerful, all-wise and everywhere present, Infinite and Eternal. The one dominant note of Swedenborg's concept of the Creator is that this God is a God of Love. His attributes are infinite; but love is not an attribute of God.

It is the very essence of his Being; and from this love all creation proceeds. Having demonstrated this to his satisfaction, Swedenborg next presents us with new ideas about God as the Redeemer. Until quite recent times the Christian world believed in a tri-personal God. There was one person of the Father, one person of the Son, one person of the Holy Spirit. In some mysterious way all these Persons in the Godhead were co-eternal. They had unanimity of thought and purpose, and really constituted One God. Even today many people profess this same idea in their Christian faith.

They have a crude idea of Three Persons sitting on golden thrones, who, reign as one God, yet exercise distinctly different functions in the government of mankind. Swedenborg presents quite a new idea on this subject. To him the Creator is also the Redeemer. And he shows us that this is the plain teaching of the Bible. The Old Testament contains no mention of a trinity. “There is no God else beside me; a just God and a Savior; there is none beside me. Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God and there is none else.”

In this, and a score of similar passages in the Old Testament, it is Jehovah, the God of Israel, who is speaking to his people. The same idea is contained in the prophecies relating to the coming of the Messiah. “His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” Not “a son born from eternity,” but the Divine Father himself was to be the Savior and Redeemer of mankind. Swedenborg tells us that Jehovah God descended to earth and assumed our human nature. God has always been divinely human. But now he would be God Incarnate.

He would clothe himself with a physical body and mind like our own, in which he could accomplish the work of redemption. In his infinite creative majesty God cannot reveal himself to mortal eyes. In that sense no one can look on God and live. We cannot with the naked eye even look at the radiant glory of the natural sun, still less at the awful majesty of God. But through a piece of smoked glass we may look at the sun. The smoke on the glass serves as a veil to protect the eye.

So we also may look at God when, in his loving kindness, he has veiled himself in the body and mind that we know as the Lord Jesus Christ. There is a verse of a well-known hymn that expresses very aptly our inability to look at the unclouded majesty of the Divine:

“Lord! how can I, whose native sphere Is dark, whose mind is dim, Before thy radiant light appear, And on my naked spirit bear Thine uncreated beam?” Man has always wanted to know God. He has wanted a God whom he could see and know and love.

But no one could ever bear the light of the unclouded majesty of the Creator. This human yearning for God is finely expressed for us in the words of Job, “Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his presence... I would know the words which he would answer me, and understand what he would say unto me.” To satisfy this human search for God, but more especially to make possible our redemption, the Almighty clothed himself with a finite human nature and was born into the world as the Savior, Jesus Christ.

He came, calling himself in our poor language the Son of God, the Son of Man. Yet in the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ was the full consciousness that he was the self-revelation of the Divine. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” “I and my father are one.” Jesus Christ was not a second person in the Godhead, but Jehovah himself clothed with an earthly humanity which he assumed in order to work out human redemption. That we may understand more clearly what is meant by the Lord as the Redeemer, Swedenborg tells us what is meant by redemption.

Here are his exact words, “Redemption consisted in subjugating the hells, restoring the heavens to order, and after this re-establishing the church; and this redemption, God, with his Omnipotence, could only bring about by means of the Human.” This is one of the most pregnant statements to be found in Swedenborg's works. The commonly accepted idea of redemption is that Christ offered himself as a sacrifice whereby he could pay the penalty incurred by sinful humanity, and thus satisfy the demands of Divine Justice.

This is expressed in the words of a well-known hymn: “There was not any good enough To pay the price of sin; He only could unlock the doors of heaven And let us in.” Those words are absolutely true, but not in the sense we usually attach to them. People had fallen so low that the influences of heaven no longer reached them. The power of evil was so strong that it shut them off from the sunshine of heaven. A new pathway to God was necessary. Freedom of the soul must be restored.

Mankind must be redeemed, not from the punishment that would be meted out by an angry Father, but from the spiritual bondage into which it had fallen. And that redemption could be realized only by God himself. So the ever-loving Divine Father came to earth. He incarnated himself, that is, he clothed himself with a human mind and a human body in which he could fight with evil and break its power. He could not come to us in his unclouded majesty, but he could clothe his Divine Humanity with a finite veil. He came as the Work, or the Divine Truth.

Yet he did not separate it from the Divine Good. In the inmost recesses of the soul of Jesus Christ dwelt the Father, Jehovah Lord of Hosts. “I am the Lord, a just God and a Savior, beside me there is no God.” These words take on a new meaning when we realize that the Lord Jesus Christ was the self-revelation of our Heavenly Father. Another important thought in regard to Swedenborg's teaching about the Redeemer is that the incarnation was according to divine order. The incarnation was not an afterthought of the Divine Mind.

It was not a hastily thought out plan made necessary by human disobedience to Divine Law. God is omniscient, that is, he knows all things. He is outside the realm of time. Past, present and future are one with God. From eternity the incarnation was an inevitable event. Swedenborg assures us that from the earliest days of the race it was known that the Divine would one day manifest himself upon earth and take upon himself our human nature. Hence from Genesis to Malachi the Bible contains prophecies of the coming of the Messiah. In the older forms of Christian theology the acts of redemption were the Lord's trial, crucifixion and resurrection. Swedenborg presents us with a new idea.

The passion on the Cross, he asserts, was the last great victory over temptation by which the Lord fully glorified his Humanity. The acts of redemption, according to Swedenborg, were different. The Lord executed a judgment in the spiritual world. He separated the sheep from the goats. Out of those worthy, he formed a new heaven. He restored things to order on the spiritual plane; ensured for all mankind spiritual freedom; and as a means of contact between heaven and earth, he instituted a new church.

These were the great acts by which the Lord brought redemption to mankind. Deeply interesting is Swedenborg's treatment of the subject of how the Divine and the Human became one in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is a brief quotation: “That the Father and the Son, that is, the Divine and the Human, became united in the Lord like soul and body, is in agreement with the belief of the church at this day and also with the Word; yet scarcely five in a hundred know it.”

Swedenborg then goes on to show how by overcoming evil the Human drew nearer to the Divine; and at the same time the Divine was able to come nearer to the Human, until at last the two were united or merged in one. He cites a long series of passages from the Gospels. “I and my Father are One.” “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” “He that is in the bosom of the Father, he hath revealed him.” These are but three passages taken from more than a dozen statements quoted by Swedenborg from our Lord's own declarations concerning his union with the Divine.

What Swedenborg is here trying to demonstrate, and in which he entirely succeeds, is that God became man, and Man became God in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Or, to put it in the words of the Apostle Paul, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” Further than this, Swedenborg explains for us the difficulty that we all experience when we say that Christ is the manifestation of the Father and then read in-the gospels that in times of temptation he prayed to the Father for help.

He describes the two states of Glorification and Humiliation (Examination). “It is acknowledged in the church that when the Lord was in the world he was in two states, called the state of examination (implying humbled) and the state of glorification. The state of examination is described in the Bible in many places, especially in the Psalms of David; and particularly in Isaiah (chapter 53) where it is said, 'He poured out his soul even unto death.'“ This, continues Swedenborg, was his state of humiliation in which he prayed to the Father.

“Moreover, except for this state he could not have been crucified.” But the Lord had also his states of glorification, as at his transfiguration; and when he wrought miracles; as well as when he claimed “I and my Father are one.” “None but an Incarnate God could have redeemed mankind.” And since there is but one God, Jehovah, Lord of Hosts, he it was who came to redeem mankind. Not a Son born from eternity, but our Heavenly Father himself came to earth as our Savior. This is the gist of Swedenborg's teaching about the Lord the Redeemer. “Am not I Jehovah; and there is no God else beside me? A just-God and a Savior there is none beside me.”

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