divine design are capable of conceiving and giving birth to these thoughts
and others like them, and filling the church with craziness and garbage—
which, of course, has actually happened.
Take for example the idea that God could procreate a Son from eter-
nity and could arrange that a third God would then emanate from him-
self and his Son. Or the idea that God could be enraged at the human
race and schedule it for destruction, but then be willing to be brought
back to compassion by the Son through the Son’s intercession and the
Father’s recollection of the cross. Not only that, but God could put his
Son’s justice into people and insert it into their hearts like Wolff ’s “simple
substance,” in which, as that author himself says, everything of the Son’s
merit exists, even though that substance cannot be divided, since divided
it would collapse into nothing. Then there is the idea that through a
Papal bull God could forgive the sins of anyone he felt like forgiving and
could purify utterly godless people of their black sins, thereby making
dark devils shine like angels of light, while the godless people changed
and developed no more than a stone would, but instead stayed as still as a
statue or an idol.
People who fixate on divine, absolute power without recognizing or
acknowledging any divine design are capable of scattering abroad these
and many other insane ideas the way a winnower scatters chaff on the
wind. On spiritual topics having to do with heaven, the church, and eter-
nal life, people like this are prone to wander far from divine truths like a
blind man in a forest who one moment trips over stones, the next knocks
his head against a tree, and the next catches his hair in the branches.
91 The divine miracles followed the divine design as well; they followed
the design of inflow from the spiritual world into the physical one. Until
now no one has known anything about this design, however, because no
one has known anything about the spiritual world. The nature of this
design will be revealed in its own time, when I come to the discussion of
divine miracles as opposed to magical miracles.92 4. The “Son of God” is the human manifestation in which God sent him-
self into the world.The Lord frequently says that the Father “sent” him, or
that he “was sent” by the Father (for example, Matthew 10 : 40 ; 15 : 24 ; John
3 : 17 , 34 ; 5 : 23 , 24 , 36 , 37 , 38 ; 6 : 29 , 39 , 40 , 44 , 57 ; 7 : 16 , 18 , 28 , 29 ; 8 : 16 , 18 ,
29 , 42 ; 9 : 4 ; and very often elsewhere). The Lord says this because “being
sent into the world” means coming down among people, which he did
through the human manifestation he took on through the Virgin Mary.
The human manifestation really is the Son of God, in that he was
conceived by Jehovah God as the Father, as it says in Luke 1 : 32 , 35.