Volume 1 of articles reprinted from Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life is now available in paperback and Kindle formats:
This hefty 507 page tome offers a selection of 53 articles organized into three parts:
- Part 1: Who is God?
- Part 2: Who God Isn’t
- Part 3: Creation
Part 1 presents the beautiful and satisfying teachings of the Bible and Emanuel Swedenborg on the loving, wise, and powerful nature of God.
Part 2 explains exactly why traditional Christian beliefs about God, such as the Trinity of Persons, are unbiblical and false.
Part 3 offers much light on how and why God created the universe, and how God governs everything in the universe, including human society. It also tackles the thorny issue of why, if God is all-loving and all-powerful, there is so much evil, pain, and suffering in the world.
To preview or purchase the paperback edition on Amazon, click here.
To preview or purchase the Kindle edition on Amazon, click here.
Enjoy!
Volumes in this series:
- God and Creation
- The Bible and its Stories
- Spiritual Rebirth (not yet published)
- The Afterlife (not yet published)
- Sex, Marriage, and Relationships (not yet published)
Share this:
Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
this is tempting. Rather than burning my eyes trolling your blog I can just read all the good stuff in book format.
I have a question: How hard was it for you to get published? Is it the sort of thing these days where you just sign up to amazon and they take care of everything? Or did you have to wrangle with editors and publishers and find a printing deal?
Hi The Iron Knuckle,
Yes. And the articles are all organized for you in an orderly sequence, unlike on the blog.
One day I did a little math and discovered that if I put all of the articles I’ve written for this blog into book form, it would amount to fifteen or twenty average-sized books. (This does not include the comment sections, which would probably swell it to forty or fifty books.) However, these volumes so far are rather fat, so it won’t turn out to be that many books. Plus I’m not going publish all of the time-specific and dated material on the blog. Only the articles that are timeless. 🙂 As of now I’m planning for a five-volume set. For me, it’s another format to help in spreading the good news. Plus, there’s more permanence in print publishing than in web-based publishing, and the books can be put into library collections and so on.
I am self-publishing these volumes through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service. There is no charge to publish a book in paperback and/or Kindle format on KDP. Amazon makes its money by selling the books and taking its cut. This also means you don’t have to stock, sell, and ship the books yourself. Amazon takes care of all that. The paperbacks are published by Print On Demand, so there is no “stock” of books. The POD machinery just prints a copy whenever someone places an order for a particular book. Sure beats having a garage full of unsalable books that you had to pay for up front!
However, you do have to have print-ready copy. I am an editor, I have a fair amount of experience in book and page design, and I have the necessary software, so I do the layout myself. (I’m not as good at doing the Kindle versions.) If you’re not able to do that yourself, you’d likely have to hire someone to do it for you, which could run into some $$$.
The other downside of self-publishing is that no one is going to market your book for you. If you want people to buy it, you’ll have to do your own marketing. So don’t expect to become a bestselling author via self-publishing. It occasionally happens for authors who manage to catch a wave or hit a nerve, but it’s rare.
Hi Lee,
I was just wondering if you have a relative timeline for books 3-5. I’m currently working through book 1 and even as a long time Swedenborgian I am learning a lot!
The article about how the Wrath of God is actually the Love of God blew my mind! So now when I read in the bible about God being “angry” or the wrath of God I just swap in how it’s actually God’s love coming closer to us and the evil and selfishness inside of us feels like it’s God’s anger because it doesn’t like being exposed for what it is by God’s love. I never thought of it like that. It also reminds me of the situation when a young child is about to touch a hot stove. The parent yells “No”! The parent is saying that out of love for the child not getting hurt, but the child hears it as the parent being angry because they don’t understand the consequences of touching a hot stove.
Thanks,
-Brian Lauthen
Hi Brian,
Good example about the hot stove. It’s one that I’ve used from time to time as well. Glad you’re enjoying the books, and finding new ideas and inspiration in them.
I do not have a definite timeline for the remaining three volumes of reprinted articles. In recent months I’ve been diverted from the blog and the reprint volumes by some other publishing projects. And before I can publish volume 3, on Spiritual Rebirth, there are at least two more articles I want to write for inclusion in it: one on the meaning of salvation, and the other on the meaning of the Old Testament sacrifices in relation to the New Testament motif of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb.
However, I do hope to have all three remaining volumes in print within a year’s time. Thanks for asking. Knowing there are readers eagerly awaiting the rest of the books will put that project a notch higher on the priority list.
Congratulations Lee on getting published! For epub kindle formats I use the Sigil editor, its free, but you have to know a bit about HTML and the internal format
Hi Doug,
Thanks! The books are actually self-published using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Print On Demand (POD) service, which is free if you have print-ready PDFs and Kindle-ready files. Since I am able to do the typesetting, layout, and editing, KDP provides an easy, cost-free way of making the books available in paperback and Kindle formats. I may take a look at the Sigil editor. Currently I do not have a very elegant way of formatting the Kindle versions.
In addition to the four books I’ve written so far and the one I’ve translated, I have edited a number of Swedenborg-related books and gotten them back into print via KDP. For the full list, plus a few extras, please follow this link:
https://amzn.to/32T4YmC
Merry Christmas, Lee.
I have been trying to find an article written by you on who God is and who Jesus is. But I am not able to find one.
If you don’t mind, could you please help me understand something that has been confusing me for the longest time ever?
My grandfather who is a Baptist member tells me that Jesus is not good but instead the son of God. He shows me various verses supporting his position, such as Jesus saying God is greater than he ( Jesus), and that Jesus prays to the Father.
However, other Christians claim that Jesus is God in the flesh, but my grandfather says there is no biblical support for such a claim. However, he believes only through the son we have eternal life.
I happen to lean more towards what gramdpa says because of verses like these:
“And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Matthew 3:17
It seems God, rather than Jesus, was speaking from the clouds when he got baptized. My brain comprehends this to be two separate “people”, and the person 1 who spoke from the cloud was introducing person 2 who got baptized.
After Jesus was rose from the dead, this was what he said:
“Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” John 20:17
Again, my brain reads this to be that Jesus was going back to person 1 ( God the Father) as being person 2 ( the son of God)
For example: I tell my mother that I am going to Pastor Lee’s home.
Can you please explain why most Christians believe Jesus is God in the flesh? Like why do people believe God transformed into a human being and gave himself a new name “ Jesus”?
Thank you very much for reading. I hope I can come to a final conclusion on this matter, as this has been so programatic for me for years.
Hi Samson,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours as well!
Here is the article you are looking for:
Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What about that Holy Spirit?
This is also the first article in the book God and Creation, highlighted in the above post. I would certainly recommend that you get yourself a copy if you want to understand the nature of God.
The Trinity is a complicated matter. That’s why so many people have so many different ideas about it.
First, people who think more materialistically than spiritually will tend to separate God into different “persons.” This is what happened in traditional Christianity starting just a few centuries after the life of Jesus. However, God is not a material being, but a divine being. Therefore when applied to God, words like “Father” and “Son” should not be taken literally, as if they refer to human fathers and sons that are distinct people, but rather should be seen as metaphors or symbols for different parts or aspects of God.
Second, during Jesus’ lifetime on earth, he was not fully God. Though he was conceived from the spirit of God, and therefore had an infinite divine side, he also had a finite human side from his human mother Mary. Therefore it would not have been correct for his followers to call him “God” during his earthly lifetime. However, during his lifetime on earth he progressively replaced the finite human part or nature that he had gotten from his mother with an infinite divine humanity that flowed from the “Father,” meaning the infinite divine being that was his own deeper self.
This is why, in the Gospels, Jesus never calls Mary “mother,” but rather “woman.” He did not recognize her as his mother, because ultimately, she no longer was his mother.
This is also why Jesus was never called “God” in the Gospels, until after his resurrection. Then Thomas did address him as “my Lord and my God,” and Jesus did not correct him, but chided him for his difficulty in believing this. By the time of Jesus’ resurrection, he was fully divine, meaning he was then simply God. There are a number of Gospel passages in which Jesus makes it clear that he is one with the Father, and that he is indeed God with us. Some of them are quoted in the articles I’m linking for you.
This second point is not something traditional Christianity has recognized or understood. That’s because once again, its view of the Trinity, and of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is materialistic, not spiritual.
Here are some articles that provide a fuller understanding:
You might also find this article helpful in understanding why God came to earth in human form as Jesus:
The Logic of Love: Why God became Jesus
I hope this explanation and these articles are helpful to you. If you have further questions as you read, please don’t hesitate to ask.
In the writings of Swedenborg, he says that phenomenon like the emergence of the fetus, how seeds germinate, and how bees know how to do bee stuff have spiritual origins, and confirm the Divine in nature.
But as the Industrial Age went on, things like egg cell division, DNA code and protein synthesis, and emergent complexity (or emergence) were discovered, which seems to make the natural world work entirely naturally. Can there still be said to be spiritual influence in such things, even if such is via correspondence only and not direct action from the spiritual?
Hi K,
It’s a tricky question. Earlier religious appeals to divine intervention did purport to explain things that we now explain through natural science, such as lightning and the sun traveling across the sky.
However, when it comes to biological processes, the scientific picture is nowhere near so clear. Although we can describe many biological processes with considerably accuracy, we still don’t know on a scientific basis exactly what life itself is. We can see its effects, but we can’t explain it. From a spiritual perspective, that’s because life is not a physical phenomenon, but a spiritual one. As long as a biological organism is alive, it is inhabited by a more or less organized spirit. When the spirit departs, life ceases.
In other words, right in front of our noses, it is actually spiritual action and influence that is powering all the processes of life.
This does not, however, conflict with scientific inquiry. Under the principle of correspondences, everything in the material world is a specific expression of some spiritual reality, object, or process. And since spiritual things operate according to definite laws, so do material things—once again, by correspondence. This means that scientifically, we can depend upon physical and biological laws operating consistently on the material plane, making science itself possible.
Another way of saying this is that spirit operating into matter does not abrogate material laws such as the laws of physics because those material laws are themselves an expression of spiritual laws, and remain consistent precisely for that reason. The spiritual laws themselves are expressions of divine laws, which never change. This is the entire basis for the consistency of physical laws that science itself depends on.
So like I guess, there’s no “God of the gaps” when considering nature itself (even with stuff science does not yet understand), but nature can be seen as an expression of the spiritual?
Hi K,
Yes. It’s not God of the gaps. It’s just the way the physical world exists and unfolds as an expression of the spiritual world, and ultimately of God. Everything we see in nature, including all of its orderly following of natural laws, is an expression of God and spirit via correspondences. There are no gaps. Everything is a seamless whole.
Hi K,
I know you’ve read it before, but for those reading in, here is an article that deals with some of these issues, from a philosophical perspective:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
Supposedly no one is a copy of anyone else according to Swedenborg, but it looks like there’s only a finite – vast but still finite – number of combinations for faces and DNA code. If the universe is infinitely big, or if creation continues indefinitely, wouldn’t that mean there would be “twins” here and there and now and then anyway (even if separated by eons or vast light years)?
Hi K,
Our particular human DNA is only one kind. Every animal has a somewhat different pattern of DNA. Human life on other planets wouldn’t have a copy of our DNA pattern. They would have their own distinctive pattern. There would be no end to the possible variations upon variations.
Further, DNA by itself doesn’t determine everything about a human being’s appearance and structure. Consider that “identical twins” really aren’t identical. They are very close, but those who know them well can tell the difference even if they dress and groom themselves the same. Where do those differences come from? Clearly it must be from something other than their DNA, because their DNA started out as identical copies of each other. How exactly this works I don’t have enough genetic knowledge to say. But I seem to recall from my high school science classes many years ago that there are other elements of the cell, such as RNA, that also have an influence on the organism.
Further, I have my doubts that even the 100,000 or so genes in human DNA would be able to direct the exact development, appearance, and function of everything about a human body. For one thing, humans are estimated to have thirty trillion cells, which is orders of magnitude more than the number of genes in the human genome. Something more than DNA is telling all those cells what to do.
Finally, even if every human did have identical DNA, no two humans have the exact same environment and experience. These affect a person not only intellectually and emotionally, but physically as well. Two people with identical DNA could eat differently, or get more or less exercise than one another, or be in a cleaner or more polluted environment, and so on. There are so many variables affecting the appearance, function, health, and character of a person that it simply wouldn’t be possible for them all to be identical and produce two identical people. DNA is as important factor, but it is not the only factor.
Long story short, no, there could not ever be two people who are completely identical. In fact, there can be no two of anything that are completely identical, even if time and space are infinite (which they probably aren’t).
Even without DNA, there’s only a finite number of combinations for the look of a human face though.
But like you said, even then two with the same face would still be different beyond that.
Hi K,
Why do you think that there is only a finite number of combinations for the look of the human face? I don’t see why that would be so.
I guess an easy way to think of it is a really high resolution image: there’s a vast number – but still a finite number – of configurations of human face within that image.
(of course real life isn’t a raster image made of pixels, but there’s still configurations so close they’d be indistinguishable)
If God intends to keep creation going forever, there’s going to be repeat designs sooner or later, or at least that’s how I see it.
Hi K,
I’m not convinced that the material world is digital, or pixelated. Maybe it is. But no matter how closely we look at a human face, we will not see pixels. Even under the most powerful microscopes, it will still be analog, not digital.
Material things probably aren’t capable of true infinity of the sort that exists in God. But for all practical purposes, the number of human variations that are possible even in the material world are endless within the available frame of time and space.
The genetic design of Homo sapiens has multiple serious flaws, a number of which can even be fatal. So if that design more or less mirrors a spiritual design which is supposedly in the image of God, I guess such serious flaws are somehow not major issues in the spiritual anymore?
And why would God permit such serious flaws to be part of the Homo sapiens design in the first place, especially if such is supposed to be in the image of God?
more info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design#In_humans
Hi K,
Even after reading the Wikipedia article, I wouldn’t say that the genetic design of Homo Sapiens has “multiple serious flaws.” If that were the case, it would be hard to explain why Homo Sapiens is the dominant life form on our planet. In practical reality, the human organism has proven to be a highly successful one exactly as it currently exists. Perhaps it isn’t perfect, but it is amazingly good at what it does.
It would be more realistic to say that in a certain number of individuals there are multiple serious flaws that impair functionality and shorten the individual’s life.
We should also have a certain amount of humility about our knowledge of human anatomy and physiology. As the Wikipedia article itself points out, although the appendix was once thought to have no function, and therefore to be expendable with no effect upon the body, further study has shown that it does indeed have some useful functions for our immune system. I remember thinking even as a teenager that after doctors have cut out all those appendixes as an almost routine procedure, they’re probably going to discover that it actually does have a function, and that it shouldn’t be cut out unless it’s really necessary to do so. Heck if I didn’t turn out to be right!
The idea that God created the material universe to operate by its own laws, and to develop life in its own way, is mentioned in passing in the article. There is a more robust development of this idea in some of the articles here, especially these two:
Another concept that I haven’t delved into much here, but that is present in Swedenborg’s writings, is that the material universe is naturally resistive to spiritual influence as part of its nature.
Think of the skin, which holds the organs of the body in place by resisting their outward pressure on it. It is necessary for the skin to resist that pressure, or the body would have no firm boundary or integrity. According to Swedenborg, the material world serves a similar function for the spiritual world. Its very resistance to spiritual inflow is part of its essential nature and function in providing fixed containers for spiritual things, so that they can have some form and definition.
Moving on to a more spiritual analog and development of this idea, a perfect material world would not be a good arena for humans to go through the process of regeneration, which is necessary for us to move on to eternal life in heaven. Since we are born naturally self-centered and greedy, we must crash up against limitations, flaws, pain, and suffering in this world to bring us up short and cause us to rethink our life and priorities. If everything were perfect all the time, we would just skate over the surface of life, and never move beyond a self-centered and hedonistic lifestyle.
Is it the movie “Wall-E” in which people have created such an easy lifestyle for themselves that they are all big fat blobs who require special mechanical chairs to ferry them around here and there? A “perfect” world would give us nothing to flex our moral and spiritual muscles against. The result would be fat, flabby, useless human spirits.
What about spirits who passed away as babies? How do they avoid being so-called fat, flabby, useless human spirits if they only live in the material realm for a short time, and grow up in Heaven?
And if babies who pass away can live without much suffering of the material and still grow up to be angels, why did God not design existence differently so everyone could somehow grow up that way?
Hi K,
According to Swedenborg, we do take a thin “envelope” (Latin: limbus) of “the finest things in nature” with us when we die, and this provides the fixed boundaries we need to hold together and have definite boundaries in the spiritual world. No one really knows how this works, and Swedenborg doesn’t go into any detail about it. So it’s a bit of a mystery. But apparently the physical realm still serves a “containment” function for us even in the spiritual world. This does raise all sorts of questions, some of which you’ve already brought up here, about what happens if the physical universe ends in heat death and so on. But I figure that God has this figured out, and that Swedenborg simply didn’t have advanced enough scientific knowledge to deal with these questions. Plus, our current science is not the last word. We don’t really know for sure what the distant future of the universe will be.
Babies who die have had a physical body. They will therefore have whatever is necessary for their continued existence in the spiritual world just as adult human beings do. They will grow up in heaven, and their childhood will be just as active both physically and mentally as that of children who group up on earth.
It’s a good question about why, if all babies and children who die go to heaven, God doesn’t just let us all grow up without pain and suffering and go directly to heaven. My general answer on the practical side is that although all babies and children who die do go to heaven, they have lived a rather sheltered life, and are not capable of doing all of the jobs that need to be done in heaven—especially the more difficult ones. More on that later.
On a spiritual level, though, our humanity resides in our will and understanding, and more specifically, in our freedom and rationality. These are not fully developed and operational until we become adults and are emancipated from our parents or guardians, so that we are living a self-responsible life. God must give us the ability to choose evil over good because without that choice we would be mere extensions of God, not distinct beings in our own right who can have a relationship with God and with each other.
However, developing a being who has those capabilities is a highly complex process. Physically, it takes a vast universe and unimaginably long and complex processes to produce planets capable of supporting intelligent life. Biologically, it takes billions of years of evolution to arrive at an organism sufficiently complex to house and express a human soul. Mentally and emotionally, it takes a couple of decades to have enough experience and learning to be able to think and feel semi-independently as adult human beings.
It is that twenty years in which things get really tricky. We must go through those years in order to become self-responsible adult human beings who have human freedom and rationality. And yet, before that, we are still human beings who have human thoughts and feelings. We can’t just be thrown away if we die. And in the real world, there is no way to guarantee that all children born will grow up to adulthood.
The provision that all babies and children who die before reaching adulthood will go to heaven is a matter of God’s love, mercy, and fairness. It would be cruel to cut off a thinking, feeling human being just because she or he has not yet reached adulthood. And it would be cruel to send these human beings to hell when they have never even had a chance to intentionally, of their own free will, untethered to parents or guardians who are responsible for them and their behavior, choose to live an evil and selfish life rather than a good and loving life. What else could God do but provide for them to continue growing to adulthood in heaven, and live there to eternity?
There, they will have a very happy life. The infants and young children will even form a substantial part of the residents of the highest heavens.
However, I still believe that it would have been better for them to have grown up to adulthood here on earth. That would open up possibilities for them to direct their life in a way of their own choosing, and in this way engage in work that provides useful services that would not be possible for children who grow up in heaven.
Even here on earth, children who grow up in very sheltered environments commonly have real trouble when they reach adulthood. They are unprepared for the challenges and complexities of life in the outside adult world. They commonly flounder. For example, children of wealthy self-made entrepreneurs and captains of industry commonly have a pampered childhood and don’t accomplish much as adults. Many of them crash and burn because they get sucked into drugs, alcohol, sex, and so on. Others live a decent life, but never amount to much. They just haven’t been prepared for the realities of life in the unsheltered environment of the wider human society.
Today many parents attempt to shelter their children from any real risks and dangers. Universities are even attempting to shelter college students from any kind of hurtful speech or encounters they might have. The result is young adults who can’t handle any conflict, can’t make it in the tough world of business, and have to be coddled along even as adults in order to get any useful work out of them at all. Even then, they tend to think that the world owes them something, and get all bent out of shape when it doesn’t give them what they want. They grew up thinking that they are special and that the world revolves around them, and can’t handle the reality that the world doesn’t really care about them, and doesn’t consider them special at all. See:
Self-Esteem is Made to be Broken
Of course, angel parents are wiser than these helicopter parents and universities on earth. But still, children who die grow up in a very warm and nurturing environment in heaven. They do still have to face and overcome the selfish parts of themselves. But they don’t have to face any real existential hardships as people on earth commonly do. They therefore can’t develop the toughness and resilience of people who grow up on earth and face all the struggles and hardships of adult life. This means that they don’t have the strength and definition of character to do the harder jobs required to keep heaven, the world of spirits, and hell running in proper order.
In terms of human physiology, maybe they could be heart cells or brain cells, which of course are essential to the running of the human body. But being a liver or a kidney or the skin or a white blood cell or a bone or a knuckle or a heel or a toe would be too rough for them. They haven’t had the opportunity to develop the toughness of character that would be required for these functions of the body. And without these functions, the body would collapse into an amorphous pool of jelly. There would be nothing to shelter and support the heart and the brain in their vital functions, and the whole body would die.
These are some of my thoughts on that thorny question. I should mention that these are my own thoughts on the subject. I’m not aware that Swedenborg himself takes up this question. But they are my thoughts based on Swedenborg’s teachings about humanity and the spiritual world.
Thanks again for reply.
you said:
[It would be cruel to cut off a thinking, feeling human being just because she or he has not yet reached adulthood.]
But could it also be cruel to allow people to grow up knowing they will choose hell?
Also where again does Swedenborg mention this limbus of the finest things in nature?
Hi K,
Keep in mind that hell is a choice. People choose it because they prefer hell over heaven. Evil spirits from hell could go to heaven if they wanted to, but they don’t want to, because they like being in hell better than being in heaven. There they can engage in their evil pleasures at least to some extent, whereas in heaven that is impossible. For them, heaven is torture, whereas in heal they can breathe easy.
That statement about the limbus or border, is in True Christianity #103.
However, there is a mistranslation in the linked New Century Edition version. Where it says “sperm” it should say “seed.” Swedenborg did not know the function of the sperm. He thought they were minor players in the seminal fluid, probably meant just to keep it moving along. The Latin word is semen, which means “seed.” It is unclear exactly what Swedenborg thought this “seed” was, but it was either the seminal fluid itself (“semen” in today’s English) or something carried along by the seminal fluid.
Also, this is one of the places where Swedenborg says that the soul comes from the father and the body from the mother. This idea came from Aristotle, and was still the common belief in Swedenborg’s day. In light of today’s knowledge of DNA and genetics, I do not think Aristotle’s view of the origins of the soul can be maintained any longer. But that will be a subject for a future post.
Another question: Can spirits who live longer (and tougher) lives on this somewhat hellish planet still go to the innermost Heaven? Is that easier for people who passed away as babies?
Hi K,
Yes, it is very possible for people who live long and difficult lives to go to the innermost heaven. What’s required for that is that eventually they reach a point at which their good deeds for other people in the course of their work lives and their lives in the community are motivated by love for God and the neighbor. Not by mere obedience to commandments. Not because they know it is the right thing to do. But because they care about people from the heart, and they want to do whatever they can to make people’s lives better and happier, while not wanting to do anything that would cause pain and suffering for anyone else. This kind of love can certainly develop out of a life of personal hardship and seeing the hardship of others.
People who pass away as babies do go to the highest heaven because the highest heaven is the heaven of innocence, and babies are innocent. But as I said in a previous reply, I think that people who die as babies are somewhat limited in the jobs they can take on. For example, I do not think they could handle welcoming into the spiritual world the spirit of someone who had a very rough and even criminal life. They would be too horrified by what they found in that person’s mind, and could not maintain a constant love for the person, which is something everyone is given during their passage from this world to the next, even if they later reject it and head toward hell.