The power of truth is perfectly obvious in the spiritual world. Indi-
vidual angels who have divine truths from the Lord, even if their
physique is as feeble as that of a baby, can take on a whole squadron of
infernal spirits that look like giants, like the Anakim and the Nephilim.
One angel can force such spirits to flee, chase them to hell, and push
them down into underground caves there. Whenever those spirits come
out of the caves they do not dare come near the angel.
In that world those who have divine truths from the Lord are like
lions, even if in physique they are no stronger than sheep. Even in this
world the same is true for people in relation to evils and falsities. People
who have divine truths from the Lord have the power to fight devils who
are in full battle formation. Essentially those devils are nothing but evils
and falsities.
Divine truth has this kind of strength because God is absolute good-
ness and absolute truth. He created the universe by means of divine
truth, and all the laws of the divine design through which he preserves
the universe are truths. This is why it says in John, “All things were made
by the Word, and nothing that was made was made without it” (John 1 : 3 ,
10 ); and in David, “By the Word of Jehovah the heavens were made, and
all the host of them by the breath of his mouth” (Psalms 33 : 6 ).
88 Although God came down as divine truth, he did not separate the
divine goodness from it. This becomes clear from his conception, about
which we read that the power of the Highest covered Mary (Luke 1 : 35 ).
“The power of the Highest” means the divine goodness.
This also becomes clear from the passages where the Lord says that
the Father is in him and he is in the Father, that all things belonging to
the Father are his, and that the Father and he are one, and so on. “The
Father” means the divine goodness.89 3. In the process of taking on a human manifestation, God followed his
own divine design. In the section on divine omnipotence and omni -
science we showed that in the act of creating, God introduced his design
into the universe as a whole and into each and every thing in it. There-
fore in the universe and in all its parts God’s omnipotence follows and
works according to the laws of his own design. The treatment of those
laws runs from §§ 49 to 74.
Now, because God came down, and because he is the design (as was
also shown in that section), there was no other way for him to become an
actual human being than to be conceived, to be carried in the womb, to