acknowledgment that the Lord is the Son of God; acknowledgment that
he is the God of heaven and earth; and acknowledgment that he is one
with the Father. The more a given faith departs from these essentials, the
more illegitimate it is.
People who view the Lord not as God but only as a human being
have a faith that is both illegitimate and adulterous. This is obvious from
two atrocious heresies, the Arian heresy and the Socinian heresy, which
have been anathematized by and cut off from the Christian church
because they deny the Lord’s divinity and climb up another way. I am
afraid that these abominations lie hidden in the general spirit of people
in the church.
Astounding to say, the more that people believe they have better
scholarship and judgment than others, the more readily they latch onto,
and adopt as their own, ideas that the Lord is human but not divine and
that because he is human he could not be divine. When people adopt
these ideas as their own, they join the club of Arians and Socinians who
in the spiritual world are in hell.
[ 3 ] The reason for this general spirit among people in the church
today is that all of us have a spirit who is allied with us. Without that spirit
we could not think analytically, rationally, or spiritually. Without those
types of thinking we would be brute animals, not human beings. We all
invite to ourselves a spirit who is similar to the desire in our will and the
consequent perception in our intellect. If we develop good desires through
truths from the Word and through living by those truths, we connect an
angel from heaven to ourselves. On the other hand, if we develop evil
desires through convincing ourselves of false beliefs and through living an
evil life, we connect spirits from hell to ourselves. Once these evil spirits
are connected to us, we increasingly develop a kind of sibling relationship
with satans. Then we become more and more convinced of falsities that
are against the truths in the Word and more and more hardened in an
Arian and Socinian loathing for the Lord, because no satan can stand to
hear any truth from the Word or to say the name Jesus. If satans hear these
things, they turn into furies running around and uttering blasphemy.
Then if light from heaven flows in they throw themselves headfirst into
caves, into their own pitch darkness. In those places they have a light like
that of night birds in the dark or like that of cats in basements when they
are chasing mice. This is how all people who deny the Lord’s divinity and
the Word’s holiness in their heart and in their faith turn out after death.
singke
(singke)
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