although step by step they turn increasingly to one side, till they come
around to the opposite direction, bump into a stone, and fall over.
[ 3 ] If we read the Word with our own intelligence, we are like sailors
navigating without a compass, who steer their ship onto the rocks and
perish. We are like someone out walking through a large field in a thick
fog who sees a scorpion but thinks it is a bird; in trying to catch it and
pick it up, the person is fatally stung. We are like a seagull or an osprey
that sees a tiny part of the back of a huge fish under the water, so it flies
down and attacks, but its beak becomes stuck and it is dragged underwa-
ter and drowns. We are like someone who goes into a labyrinth without a
guide or a spool of thread; the deeper we go in, the more we forget the
way out.
If we read the Word under the supervision of our own intelligence
rather than under the Lord’s supervision, we think we are as keen-sighted
as Lynceus and have more eyes than Argus, when nevertheless inwardly
everything we see is false and nothing true. As we convince ourselves of
this falsity, it looks to us like the North Star, and we point all the sails of
our thought toward it. By then our eyesight for truths is no better than a
mole’s: if we see truths at all, we bend them to favor things we ourselves
made up—we distort and falsify the holy contents of the Word.
2. These three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are three essen- 166
tial components of one God. They are one the way our soul, our body, and the
things we do are one.In any given thing there are general essential compo-
nents and there are also specific essential components. The general and
specific components combine to make one essence.
In our case, our general essential components are our soul, our body,
and the things we do. These three components combine to make one
essence, as you can see from the fact that one component comes from
and exists for the other in an unbroken chain. We begin from our soul.
The soul is the essence of the semen that originates us. Our soul not only
initiates but also sequentially produces the features of our body. Then
there are the things we do, which come from both our soul and our body.
Because one of these components produces another, and therefore the
subsequent components are grafted onto and connected to those that
came before them, it follows that these three components share one
essence. This is why they are called the three essential components.
The same three essential components—soul, body, and action—existed 167
and still exist in the Lord God the Savior, as everyone acknowledges. The
concept that the Lord’s soul came from Jehovah the Father is something
§167 the holy spirit & divine action 239