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By the Rev. Lee Woofenden
Bridgewater, Massachusetts, December
30, 2001
Isaiah 65:17-25 A new heaven and a new earth
"Behold,
I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former
things will not be remembered, nor will they come to
mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will
create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and
its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take
delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying
will be heard in it no more.
"Never
again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few
days, or an old man who does not live out his years; he
who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he
who fails to reach a hundred will be considered
accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they
will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will
they build houses and others live in them, or plant and
others eat. For like the days of a tree will the days of
my people be; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of
their hands. They will not labor in vain nor bear
children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people
blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with
them. Before they call I will answer; while they are
still speaking I will hear.
"The
wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will
eat straw like the ox; but dust will be the serpent's
food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy
mountain," says the Lord.
Revelation
21:1-5 A new heaven and a new earth
Then
I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven
and the first earth had passed away, and there was no
longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride
beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud
voice from the throne saying, "Now the tabernacle
of God is with humankind, and he will dwell with them.
They will be his people, and God himself will be with
them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from
their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or
crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed
away"
The
one who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I
am making all things new!"
The Last
Judgment #73
The state of the world from now on
The
state of the world from now on will be just as it has
been before. This is because the immense change that has
taken place in the spiritual world does not force any
change on the outward form of the material world. So
there will be civic affairs just as before; peace
treaties, alliances, and wars just as before; and all
the other events, great and small, that take place in
human communities. . . .
However,
the state of the church will not be the
same from now on. Yes, it will look much the same
outwardly; but inwardly it will be different.
Outwardly,
the churches will be divided the way they have been.
They will still go on teaching their doctrines, and
there will be similar religious practices among
non-Christians. But from now on, people in the church
will have more freedom of thought in matters of
faith--that is, in the spiritual issues that have to do
with heaven--because spiritual freedom has been restored
to us.
Behold,
I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former
things will not be remembered, nor will they come to
mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will
create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and
its people a joy. (Isaiah 65:17, 18)
It
is a beautiful promise that we are given, both in the
prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament and in the prophet
John in the New Testament. In Isaiah, the Lord tells us
of the future creation of a new heaven and a new earth.
This new society will be so peaceful and secure that all
the former things--weeping, crying, infant mortality,
early death, theft and military conquest--all these
things will not even be remembered anymore! Even
the animal kingdom will be transformed, with the
(former) carnivores and the herbivores eating peacefully
together. "They will neither harm nor destroy on
all my holy mountain," says the Lord.
The
apostle John, who is the prophet of the New Testament,
sees this beautiful vision fulfilled, describing it in
the end of his strange and powerful spiritual vision,
which we know as the book of Revelation. "Then I
saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven
and the first earth had passed away, and there was no
longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God. . . .
And the one who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold,
I am making all things new!'"
Emanuel
Swedenborg--unlike the hundreds of religious figures who
predicted that the great Last Judgment was about
to come, followed by the new kingdom of God--said that
in his day, the mid-1700s, the Last Judgment had
already happened! We missed it here on earth, he
said, because it was not a physical event observable by
material eyes, but a spiritual event that only spiritual
eyes could see. John's vision took place in the
spiritual world, and so, Swedenborg said, did the events
that they predicted. And it was because his spiritual
eyes were opened by the Lord that he could see them,
while the rest of the world went on its way all unaware
of the momentous changes taking place in the higher
realms of reality.
Still,
we have grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as
living in a new age. Scientific knowledge has mushroomed
in the last two hundred years, and technology along with
it, so that things never even conceived of in
Swedenborg's day are now so routine we don't even think
about them. We take it for granted that if we need to
get to a place that is fifty or sixty miles away, we can
hop in the car and be there in an hour or so. For
Swedenborg, such a trip meant many hours astride a
horse, or bumping along in a horse-drawn carriage. We
flip a switch, and the light goes on. This would have
been considered magic in Swedenborg's day! And we pick
up the phone, or sit down at the computer keyboard, and
instantly we are communicating with someone on the other
side of the country, or on the other side of the world.
Such things were simply impossible in the eighteenth
century.
And
yet, have things really changed all that much? Yes, we
do have far greater knowledge, and our technology is
light years beyond anything Swedenborg knew. But have people
really changed? Has human society really changed?
There were people at the turn of the last century who
believed that war was a thing of the past, and that the
new era of science and of new spiritual understanding
was even then ushering in the peaceable kingdom so
beautifully described by Isaiah. World War I was called
"the war to end all wars"; but its aftermath
led inexorably to the even more terrible World War II.
The
United States itself--which we like to think of as the
most enlightened nation yet to grace this earth--has
engaged in one war or another nearly every decade of its
existence. Even now, our country is engaged in a
"war against terrorism" that has already
killed at least as many innocent civilians in
Afghanistan as the number of people who died in the
horrible attacks of September 11.
I
used to say that slavery had been all but eliminated
from our world. However, in a recent online debate I
found out, to my chagrin, that although few if any
countries still have laws on the books condoning
slavery, the practice itself is still going strong
throughout the world. Hundreds of thousands of people
are living in conditions of slavery not only in the
third world, but in the developed nations. This includes
the United States, where many legal and illegal
immigrants and others have been reduced to unpaid
servitude in American homes and clandestine
manufacturing operations.
Meanwhile,
and all the scourges of human greed and lust for power
continue to operate in our society, apparently as strong
as ever. The crime rate in our cities continues at a
high level, with thefts and murders taking place every
day. Corruption in business and in government is daily
news in the media. And as for the freedom that Americans
are so proud of, and that we see as one of the
distinguishing characteristics of our nation, it is
frightening to see how overwhelming is the support among
the American people to give up those freedoms one by
one, in exchange for the security against outside
threats that our government is promising us in return.
And so we find ourselves in the ironic position of
giving up our personal rights and freedoms in the cause
of a war that is supposed to be defending freedom and
democracy against the forces of terrorism and despotism.
Have
things really changed all that much? Or are we just
doing the same things all over again, but in a more
high-tech way?
Though
Emanuel Swedenborg is sometimes called a prophet, he
actually made very few predictions about the future. In
fact, in The Last Judgment #74, just after the
section we heard earlier, he says, "I have had
various conversations with angels about the state of the
church from now on. They have said that they do not know
what is going to happen--only the Lord knows that."
However,
in The Last Judgment #73--the second-to-last
numbered section in the book--Swedenborg does make this
"prediction":
The
state of the world from now on will be just as it has
been before. This is because the immense change that
has taken place in the spiritual world does not force
any change on the outward form of the material world.
So there will be civic affairs just as before; peace
treaties, alliances, and wars just as before; and all
the other events, great and small, that take place in
human communities.
Sound
familiar? Yes, Swedenborg confidently predicted that
after the Last Judgment took place, things would be
pretty much the same in our world as they had been
before. No cataclysms with sun, moon, and stars falling
to earth and burning it to a crisp. No great battles in
the sky with hosts of angels routing hordes of devils,
and hurling them to earth to inflict terrible plagues
upon the unfortunate inhabitants of this realm. No
locusts looking like horses prepared for battle, with
the tails of scorpions, tormenting people for five
months.
All
of these things--and the many other cataclysms described
in the prophetic books of the Bible--were never going to
take place in this world, Swedenborg says, but describe spiritual
events in symbolic language. And, says Swedenborg, they
have already taken place. The great battles and
disasters described in Daniel, Isaiah, Matthew, and
Revelation were accomplished over two hundred years ago,
in the spiritual world. And except for those precious
few people who read about it in Swedenborg's writings,
no one here on earth even knew the difference.
And
yet, this is exactly what Swedenborg predicted would
happen. We wouldn't even know the difference. Things
would go on just as they had before, with wars and
rumors of war, civic affairs both good and bad, human
communities functioning as they have always functioned,
people living their lives day to day and year to year as
they always have.
For
those of us who long for a new world, this can be a
painful and stubborn fact. Things just don't seem to
change very much, or very fast. We have a wonderful
vision of that loving, peaceful kingdom that will
envelop our earth when the enlightenment of the new
spiritual age does its work. And then we read the
newspaper or watch the news on TV. Things sound pretty
much the same, don't they?
But
there is a difference. It is not a difference in outward
affairs--as much as technology has changed the
face of our society. It is a change in the inner quality
of our existence. Continuing from Swedenborg once again:
However,
the state of the church will not be the same from now
on. Yes, it will look much the same outwardly; but
inwardly it will be different.
Outwardly,
the churches will be divided the way they have been.
They will still go on teaching their doctrines, and
there will be similar religious practices among
non-Christians. But from now on, people in the church
will have more freedom of thought in matters of
faith--that is, in the spiritual issues that have to
do with heaven--because spiritual freedom has been
restored to us.
Spiritual
freedom has been restored to us. That is the critical
change that has taken place for us since the Last
Judgment. Up to Swedenborg's day, the church still held
sway over human minds. Few and courageous were those who
dared to defy the church and disagree with its teachings
on any subject--including science. And those who did
defy the church often did not live to tell the tale, or
were forced with threats of torture and death to recant
the views they had so painstakingly coaxed out of the
world of nature. The church governed people's minds
through fear and by force of arms. And the spiritual
atmosphere, choked as it was with evil spirits,
supported the church in that despotism of the mind and
the body.
All
of this ended with the Last Judgment. The Lord
decisively cleared away all the choking influences of
spiritual evil that had been restricting the flow of
light and warmth from heaven and from the Lord. And
though that great confrontation in the spiritual world
barely registered a ripple here on earth, the state of
the church and of human minds was forever altered.
Spiritual freedom was restored. The church could no
longer dictate to the learned world or to the masses
what they were to believe, and enforce it by brute
force. The scholarly world was cut loose from the
strictures of religion, and scientific discovery
blossomed.
Even
more important, people were freed from the inner
compulsion they felt to believe in the teachings of the
church or spend eternity in hell. Many simply left the
church, no longer able to accept its teachings or its
validity. Those who stayed felt more and more that it
was their choice whether to believe or not--both in
general and when it came to particular teachings of the
church. Mentally and spiritually, we entered a whole new
world.
This
is the "new heaven" that Isaiah, John, and
Swedenborg speak of. It is the new heaven of freedom,
rationality, and choice that we all inhabit in our
hearts, minds, and spirits. We no longer have to blindly
accept what the church teaches us. We can now decide for
ourselves what we will believe--and how we will carry
those beliefs into action.
And
this is where the new earth comes in. The Lord has
already accomplished the great spiritual battles that
were necessary to prepare the way for the New Jerusalem
to come down onto our earth from heaven. The path is
clear. We have the knowledge, the understanding, the
insight we need, if we will open our minds to it. What
is left is the hardest part for us: putting all that
knowledge and spiritual insight into practice.
The
Lord did the large-scale spiritual work for us. Now it
is our turn to accept the gift of new spiritual freedom
that the Lord has given us, and use it to change our
world. The Lord will not do it for us. We must roll up
our sleeves, get out in our community and our world, and
do the work of transforming our society from the inside
out, from bottom to top. Clearing the way spiritually
was the Lord's job. Making it happen here on earth is
our job. Amen.
Artwork:
Peace on Earth © Nancy Glasier
and is used with permission.
Christ-Centered
Art Gallery
Music:
The Prism (Colors of Love)
© 2001 Bruce DeBoer
Used with permission
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