orphans, I am coming to you; you will see me.”And elsewhere, “Behold I
am with you every day, even to the close of the age” (Matthew 28 : 20 ).
Also from the Lord’s saying, “He will not speak from himself; instead he
will take from what is mine.”140 Now, because the Holy Spirit means divine truth and this was in the
Lord and was the Lord himself (John 14 : 6 ), and the Holy Spirit could
not come from anywhere else, therefore the Word says, “The Holy Spirit
was not yet in existence, because Jesus was not glorified yet” (John 7 : 39 );
and after he was glorified, “He breathed on his disciples and said,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20 : 22 ). The Lord breathed on his disci-
ples and said this because breathing on someone is an outward represen-
tation of divine inspiration. To be inspired is in fact to be inserted into
angelic communities.
From these points the intellect can grasp what the angel Gabriel said
about the Lord’s conception: “The Holy Spirit will descend upon you
and the power of the Highest will cover you; therefore the Holy One that
is born from you will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1 : 35 ). Likewise,
“The angel of the Lord said to Joseph in a dream, ‘Do not be afraid to
accept Mary as your bride, for the Child that is conceived in her is from
the Holy Spirit.’ And Joseph did not touch her until she bore her first-
born Son” (Matthew 1 : 20 , 25 ). The “Holy Spirit” in this passage is the
divine truth that radiates from Jehovah the Father. This emanation was
the power of the Highest that covered Mary then. This view is therefore
in alignment with the following statement in John: “The Word was with
God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh” (John 1 : 1 , 14 ).
The Word there means divine truth, as you can see above under the
heading “the faith of the new church,” § 3.
141 We have already shown that the divine Trinity exists within the Lord.
This will be shown further in the following sections where we will need
to deal with this point explicitly. Here I will only add something to show
the absurdity of dividing the Trinity into persons.
It would be like a minister in the church teaching from the pulpit
what people should believe and practice while another minister stands
next to him and whispers in his ear, “You are saying the right thing; say
some more about that.” The two of them tell a third minister standing
on the pulpit stairs to go down into the church, open the congregation’s
ears, and pour these things into their hearts; the third minister is also
told to make the people pure and holy—living examples of justice.
The divine Trinity divided into persons, each of whom is individually
God and Lord, is like three suns over one solar system—one sun beside