Though this answer is based primarily on the Bible itself, it comes from a perspective outlined in the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772).
Human spiritual ages start pristine, then fall, and finally end in corruption and destruction
In the Bible, various time periods or ages of human spiritual history are described in narrative fashion. The general pattern of these ages is that they start in a relatively pristine state, but then decline over time until they become completely corrupted and come to their end. A new period or age then begins, and it, too, goes through a similar cycle.
The earliest human spiritual era
The first such cycle starts with the creation of humankind in Genesis 1 and 2, begins its heavy decline with the Fall of Humankind in Genesis 3, and ends in destruction with the Flood in Genesis 6–9, when the state of the humans of this first period is described in this way:
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. (Genesis 6:5)
At its height, this era was characterized by a simple, innocent, heart-based dependence upon God.
Once corrupted, it fell into a state in which the human heart was wholly evil, and the people were unrestrained in their expression of that evil.
The second, clan-based era
The next general age or period is somewhat less sharply defined, but in general it starts after the Flood, as the earth is repopulated from Noah and his family (and the animal population from the animals in the ark). This initiates a time of clans and families.
Though this era does start with Noah and his sons, and the stage is set with the genealogies and the repopulation of the earth recorded in Genesis 10–11, the narrative of this period really gets underway with the stories of Abraham, the first of the three great “Patriarchs” of the Hebrew people. This is the pristine state of this era of clans, and it is often referred back to as such later on in the Bible story.
After Abraham, it goes through a general decline in his sons Isaac and Jacob, until it ends with captivity of Jacob’s descendants in Egypt. The Egyptian captivity is the final judgment on this age of clans and families, and brings it to its end.
At its height, this era was characterized by the development of a structured life based on willingly following unwritten codes that prescribed how people were to live within their clans and families, and toward the other clans and families surrounding them. It was the responsibility of the heads of the clans and families to teach and guide family and clan members in observing these codes.
In its later corrupted state, those clan and family codes broke down and were no longer observed. This resulted in brother acting against brother, as in the story of the brothers selling Joseph into captivity, and finally led to the Egyptian captivity.
The third era, of kingdoms, and the kingdom of Israel
What emerges from Egypt is not a clan or family, but a nation. And this whole time period is characterized by nations and empires ruled by kings and emperors rather than by clans and families ruled by heads-of-household and tribal leaders.
In the Bible narrative, the exodus from Egypt begins the Israelite period, which has its pristine time in the desert wanderings and the early conquest of the Holy Land, in which the people follow God in simple (if oftentimes rebellious) fashion. Their worship centers on the Tabernacle, which was a mobile, tent-like sanctuary seen as the dwelling place of God. The Israelite period is often seen as reaching its peak under King David. However, its key figure was Moses, the law-giver of Israel, under whose leadership this period began.
The Israelite era started its heavy decline under David’s son and heir, King Solomon. After Solomon’s death the nation of Israel split into two competing nations, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. First Israel, then Judah become corrupt and were conquered and taken into captivity by foreign powers. According to the Bible narrative, this was God’s judgment on the Israelite nation due to its disobedience and unfaithfulness to God.
Though there was a restoration of Judah and the temple after the Babylonian exile, in the Bible story there was never again a sovereign, independent Israelite kingdom. The Jews in the Holy Land entered a low-level holding pattern that was far from the former glory their nation had achieved under King David. In the Bible story, prophecy ceased for at least two centuries before the coming of Christ.
In short, the Israelite period had an early pristine period under its great lawgiver Moses, a peak under King David, and then declined to its final judgment in captivity and exile, never to re-establish itself as a true nation.
Only a shadow of that ancient Israelite nation existed by the time Christ came, functioning under Roman rule, and often collaborating with its Roman overseers. There was a Temple, and the Jews carried out their sacrificial worship and their religious laws, customs, and traditions. But it was a corrupted version, which Jesus denounced many times in the Gospels. And even this low-level revival of ancient Israelite religion and worship came to a permanent end not long after Jesus’ life on earth when in 70 AD the Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and dispersed the Jews into many surrounding lands.
At its height, this era was characterized by behavioral obedience to a written code of laws, pronounced at its beginning by God from Mount Sinai, and written down by Moses.
In its later corrupted state, the people had so thoroughly violated those laws that God brought about the destruction of their nation, the captivity of the Israelites, and the disappearance of the ten tribes that had formed the northern kingdom of Israel.
Jesus Christ came when humanity had fallen to its lowest point
The overall picture of the Bible story, then, is one of a pristine beginning, in which the people represented by Adam and Eve lived simply and innocently with God in the Garden of Eden, followed a progressive fall and corruption of humanity through lower and lower spiritual eras, until the time just before the coming of Christ, when the earth was ruled by brutal empires and there was little or no genuine spiritual understanding and spiritual life left on earth.
If we look at the Old Testament narrative as a whole, we find that Jesus Christ came when humankind had reached its lowest ebb, having fallen completely away from its early spiritual state of innocent closeness to God, and successively moved to lower and lower spiritual states until the earth was completely corrupt and unspiritual in God’s sight.
At that point, no priest or prophet sent by God could bring about the spiritual salvation and restoration of humankind. Only God himself, coming to earth in human form, had the power to turn the spiritual tide of human history, and begin the long, slow, and painful process of raising humanity back up to the spiritual life and closeness to God for which we were originally created.
Illustrative passages from the Bible
Here are just a few of many passages in the Bible that illustrate this picture. First from the Old Testament prophets:
Isaiah 63:1–6: I have trodden the winepress alone.
The low state to which humanity would fall by the time of Christ is described prophetically in Isaiah 63:1–6:
Who is this who comes from Edom,
in crimsoned garments from Bozrah,
he who is splendid in his apparel,
marching in the greatness of his strength?
“It is I, speaking in righteousness,
mighty to save.”
Why is your apparel red,
and your garments like his who treads in the winepress?
“I have trodden the winepress alone,
and from the peoples no one was with me;
I trod them in my anger
and trampled them in my wrath;
their lifeblood spattered on my garments,
and stained all my apparel.
For the day of vengeance was in my heart,
and my year of redemption had come.
I looked, but there was no one to help;
I was appalled, but there was no one to uphold;
so my own arm brought me salvation,
and my wrath upheld me.
I trampled down the peoples in my anger;
I made them drunk in my wrath,
and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth.”
It says, “I looked, but there was no one to help . . . so my own arm brought me salvation.” In plain language, there was no human being left on earth who could even help in bringing about the salvation of humanity. We had sunk too low. Our religion had become false and corrupt. So the time had come when only God himself could do the job. And he did so by coming as Jesus Christ, to turn the tide of human history, and bring salvation to the people of the earth.
Daniel 2: Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream
The prophet Daniel provides two metaphors for this progression of humanity from an early, pristine state to an utterly corrupted and false state.
The first is the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue in Daniel 2. The dream itself is described in the words of Daniel himself in Daniel 2:31–35:
You saw, O king, and behold, a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
Daniel then goes on to interpret the dream as a series of kingdoms, each inferior to the one before it, starting with Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom, represented by the head of gold, and ending with a kingdom of mixed strength and weakness, represented by the feet partly of iron and partly of clay. Then he says:
And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever. (Daniel 2:44)
Though there have been various attempts to identify the succeeding kingdoms, there is one thing on which Christians agree: the final kingdom that God will set up, represented by the stone that grew into a mountain, represents the kingdom of Christ.
The vision and prophecy in Daniel 2, then, presents a picture of an early “golden age” of innocence and purity, succeeded by successively lower ages represented by silver, bronze, iron, and iron mixed with clay, leading to a final glorious and eternal kingdom, which Christians interpret as the reign of Christ.
Christians may debate the specific meaning of the various kingdoms described in Daniel’s interpretation of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. But overall picture of a pristine beginning and a successive fall to humanity’s lowest point, followed by a new, eternal kingdom set up by God himself, is clear.
This scheme of ages symbolized by greater and lesser metals is also reflected in the “Ages of Humankind” in ancient Greek literature. In the Bible, we can correlate the earliest age, represented by Adam and Eve, with the Golden Age, the next age begun with Noah and encompassing the Patriarchs as the Silver Age, and the Israelite era as encompassing the Bronze Age (in its height) and the Iron Age (in its decline), ending in Daniel’s age of iron mixed with clay. The kingdom established by Jesus Christ goes beyond the classical Greek scheme of ages, but is reflected in Daniel’s vision by the stone that grew into a mountain and filled the whole earth.
Daniel 7: Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts
Another metaphor provided by Daniel for this succession of lower and lower ages of humankind is his vision of the four beasts in Daniel 7. It follows a pattern similar to Daniel 2, but instead of the imagery of a statue of successively lesser metals, it uses imagery of four progressively fiercer and more terrifying beasts:
- a lion with eagles’ wings
- a bear that was raised up on one side, and had three ribs in its teeth
- a leopard with four wings and four heads
- a terrifying, dreadful, exceedingly strong beast with great iron teeth and ten horns
In the end, it provides a similar prophecy of the destruction of all of the kingdoms represented by the four beasts, and the establishment of an eternal kingdom, which Christians also interpret as the reign of Christ. Here is how that kingdom and its king are described in Daniel 7:13–14, 27:
I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed. . . .
And the kingdom and the dominion
and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven
shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High;
his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom,
and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
Of course, Christians commonly interpret “one like a son of man” as a reference to Jesus Christ, who will rule all the kingdoms of the world in an eternal divine kingdom.
Once again, we see symbolic imagery depicting humans becoming progressively worse, and when the low point of utter corruption is reached, God breaks destroys those former kingdoms and establishes a new, eternal kingdom, which Christians see as the reign of Christ.
Jesus’ assessment of the people of his day
In the Gospels, Jesus is fiercely critical of the reigning religious authorities and the spiritual state of humanity that existed in his time. For example, he commonly calls the people of his day “an adulterous generation” (see Matthew 12:39; 16:4; Mark 8:38). His denunciations of the scribes and Pharisees are biting and utterly condemnatory, as seen in Matthew 23, culminating in these words:
“Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’” (Matthew 23:32–39, italics added)
Here Jesus sees all of the wickedness of earlier generations culminating in the generation that was currently on earth during his time, and he says that they have reached the point of desolation. So Jesus saw himself as coming at the low point of human spiritual history, when the wickedness of humankind had reached its peak. At that point, only God himself was able to save humankind from total destruction, body and soul.
Emanuel Swedenborg summed it up in this way:
By the time the Lord came into the world the whole planet had completely alienated itself from God by worshiping idols and practicing sorcery; and the church that had existed among the children of Israel and later among the Jews had been utterly destroyed by their falsifying and contaminating the Word. (True Christianity #121:2)
By “the Lord” he means Jesus Christ (see Secrets of Heaven #14). By “the Word” he means the Scriptures, which, for the ancient Jews, would mean the Hebrew Bible.
Conclusion
As long as God could reach people on earth through angels, prophets, and priests, and give them some spiritual life and renewal by those intermediaries, that’s precisely what God did, as we see throughout the Old Testament narrative.
But by the time in human history that humanity had fallen to its spiritual low point, having become utterly corrupt and violent, and having falsified all of the spiritual truth that God had provided through angels, priests, and prophets, it was necessary for God himself to come to earth as “the Word made flesh”: Jesus Christ.
This was the fullness of time mentioned in the Epistles:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son. (Galatians 4:4)
He has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (Ephesians 1:9–10)
Christ came only in the fullness of time, when we humans had fallen so low spiritually that only “God’s own arm,” Jesus Christ, could save us from the complete destruction to whose brink we had brought ourselves through our long history of falling farther and farther away from God.
(Note: This post is a very slightly edited version of an answer I originally wrote and posted on Christianity StackExchange. You can see the original question on StackExchange here, and the StackExchange version of my answer here.)
For further reading:
- The Logic of Love: Why God became Jesus
- Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What about that Holy Spirit?
- God is Love . . . And That Makes All the Difference in the World
- According to Emanuel Swedenborg, who is the man Jesus, born of a woman, who died and then was resurrected?
- Why did God Wait So Long to Come Down as Christ?
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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 
Hi Lee,
Thank you for this post.
Being raised with the interpretations of Swedenborg, I guess I would say that there was a notion that since the time of Christ, humanity is now on the upswing. That the human race as a whole is gradually doing better with the way we treat each other and our spirituality. I would truly love to believe that this is the case.
However, a lot of what we see in the news cycle would at least seem to suggest otherwise. Politics are more polarized than ever, national governments are rife with corruption, and there’s a magnitude of cultural divide not seen before. In my short 50 years of life, it even feels that the entertainment that we consume is far less innocent than what it was in my youth.
I’m wondering if this is just perception, or perhaps some sort of growing pain our world is going through at this point in time. It’s always been said that bad news travels faster than good news, and with our now ever-interconnected world of internet and smartphones, do we just hear about it more? Maybe the maturity of mankind is just a very, very long process.
I guess I’m wondering if there are hopeful things that I can say or point to when someone claims that we are in dark times or that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I’m sure people have been saying as much for literal centuries at this point. It’s just harder to see the forest for the trees while existing in our own little slice of human history. Are we, in fact, heading in the right direction?
Hi Brian,
Good to hear from you again, my friend.
Yes, I think a lot of it is growing pains. Many human evils that used to be taken for granted are now being recognized as evil. Unlike in the past, we are fighting against them and working to abolish them. But for that to happen, they have to come out in the open. And our daily news, seeking clicks and engagement for advertising dollars, gives us a steady diet of every crime or disaster that happens anywhere in the world.
This gives a very false picture of how most people live. Most people today live largely peaceful lives. Of course, we all have our daily challenges and struggles. But objectively speaking, on metrics such as infant mortality, life expectancy, poverty rate, and so on, people are living better now than they ever have in the past. This reality simply doesn’t get clicks, so the regular news media don’t report it.
Two thousand years ago, slavery existed in nearly every society around the world. It was simply taken for granted. Even in the Bible, slavery is not questioned. It’s just referred to as a fact of life. Nobody thought there was anything wrong with it. The amazing thing about recent history is not that there was slavery, but that starting in Europe, and then moving to most of the rest of the world, it was abolished, so that today, although slavery still does exist, it is officially illegal almost everywhere on earth. That is a massive change that took place only since the time in which Swedenborg said that the Last Judgment took place in the spiritual world—the time period that secular historians refer to as the Enlightenment.
In the past, though there were people who lived into their seventies and eighties, infant mortality was very high, not to mention women dying in childbirth, and average life expectancy might be only in the 40s. Today it is up in the 70s or more.
And though it’s little reported, poverty has declined dramatically almost everywhere in the world just in the past century. Look up the stats, and you’ll see. There are still holdout areas, including much of Africa, due mostly to bad government. But the world extreme poverty rate is now under 10%. This is in stark contrast to most times in the past, when a few wealthy nobles lived high off the hog, and almost everyone else eked out a subsistence living.
Even war is much less prevalent than it was in the past. Yes, we still have wars, and due to advances in technology, they have become more lethal than at any time in the past. But in the past, war was just taken for granted as something that nations and empires did—so much so that 2 Samuel 11:1 almost casually speaks of spring as the time when kings go out to war. (That’s not a literal translation of the original Hebrew, but it’s clear from the context that that’s what it’s talking about.) Today, huge numbers of people believe that war itself is wrong, and want to abolish it altogether. That’s something unprecedented in human history.
I could go on, but I think you’ll get the idea. Despite all our current trials and tribulations, people today are not only living far better than we ever have in the past, but our ideals for human society are far higher than they ever have been in the past.
For those who think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you might want to ask whether they would rather live in any past century compared to living today. If you compare how average people actually lived in those earlier centuries, there’s really no comparison.
All of this, I believe is a result of the Last Judgment that took place in the spiritual world during Swedenborg’s lifetime, and the Second Coming of the Lord that happened, not literally, but spiritually.
But yes, we humans are stubborn beasts. We don’t easily give up our old evils. It is a long, drawn-out process to face and overcome them. That’s what’s happening today. And I presume it will continue to happen for many centuries to come as we face, fight against, and overcome deeper and deeper human evils.
Here is a relevant passage from Swedenborg:
The chaos we often see around us can be flashy and scary. But it’s all part of a process of breaking the grip on society of old human evils, and ushering in a new and better order of things. This, I believe, is what’s happening today.
Lee, thank you for the detailed response!
Even though I was aware of the great strides we’ve made in the last century or so with human rights and quality of life, it was reassuring to hear you mention them here. Also, while armed conflicts persist to this day, it’s luckily been 80 years since we’ve seen anything on a global scale like WWII. Hopefully we will continue to step forward without too many steps back.
Thank you again and Happy New Year!
Hi Brian,
You’re most welcome. Happy New Year!
>By the time the Lord came into the world the whole planet had completely alienated itself from God by worshiping idols and practicing sorcery
What did Swedenborg mean by so-called sorcery there? Working with evil spirits (or thinking one is doing so)*? Using so-called magic in a way that is rebelling against God (or thinking one is doing so)*?
*(doubtful that so-called magic is even possible in the first place in the physical)
Hi K,
Today, if you are skeptical that there can be any such thing as magic and sorcery, you’re in good company. In Swedenborg’s day and earlier, that was not the case. Most people believed not only in angels, but also in demons that had real influence on the material world.
Swedenborg himself refined this a bit in saying that magic and sorcery took place via the abuse of correspondences for evil purposes. In fact, he says that this abuse of correspondences was one of the reasons the knowledge of that relationship between the spiritual and the material was gradually lost in the church. In today’s rather materialistic society, even most people who think that heaven is real commonly don’t think it can have any direct effect upon the physical world. But Swedenborg very much did believe this was possible.
Swedenborg talks about this, for example, in his commentary on the first few of the Ten Plagues in the Exodus story, which Pharaoh’s magicians were able to replicate. They did so, Swedenborg said, through a knowledge of correspondences that still existed in Egypt at that time. He also says that Jesus’ miracles were done by means of correspondences.
So whether it is miracles or so-called sorcery, Swedenborg believed that one can use correspondences to manipulate physical reality outside of what physics permits, AKA use so-called magic?
(More recent terminology for such could be scifi terms like reality manipulation or psionics. Such could also be called what author Terry Pratchett humorously called lack of reality.)
For example, assuming it really happened, a solution of water molecules ordinarily cannot suddenly be joined by alcohol molecules and the more complex organic molecules needed to become wine, as that would involve either teleporting in or conjuring up such molecules. And if it was dirty water with all the atoms needed to make wine presnet, that would still involve magically rearranging the atoms into the constituent molecules of wine.
Hi K,
Yes, Swedenborg definitely believed that.
I have heard the claim that throughout history for thousands of years, human civilization ran under extremely fanatical and what would be seen today as conservative values, and that such worked out fine (or so the claim goes).
As one who thinks both extremes (left or right) are bad, hopefully that was not always the case.
PS: Because if such were the case, it means Heaven could be full of fanatics with puritanical values (at least from Earth anyway), and puritanical values are best for humanity.
Hi K,
I would say that this claim is not really about history, but about attempting to shoehorn history into a particular ideological narrative for propaganda purposes.
Most regimes throughout history were not “fanatical.” They were about accumulating power and wealth for the rulers and the ruling class. And they were not about today’s “conservative values”—unless slavery, serfdom, high infant mortality, low life expectancy, and so on are considered to be “conservative values.”
As for “puritanical values,” for the most part sex was viewed very pragmatically, and even transactionally. If the virginity of daughters was guarded, it was not because of some societal focus on moral and sexual purity. It was because no man would accept as his bride a woman who was not a virgin. If your daughter lost her virginity before getting married, she would be worthless because she could not fetch a bride price, nor could she provide any of the social and financial benefits of intermarriage with other families. Most likely she would be disowned by her family and forced into prostitution in order to survive.
Oh, and what about the wide acceptance of polygamy in millennia past? Would today’s conservatives be happy with that? Not exactly the “family values” they tout.
No conservative today would be happy living in any regime from any previous century in recorded history compared to the life that he or she has in most countries in the world today. Painting a false and nostalgic picture of earlier history, and using that fallacious picture as an argument for “conservative values,” only shows the vast ignorance of those conservatives about what previous periods of history were really like.
As for heaven, it is not full of fanatics with puritanical values. Perhaps there are some such people there, but they will be sequestered on the fringes of heaven, and they won’t be allowed to run anything. But most of them will give up these faulty ideas before moving to heaven. And if their real motive is pride in their own rightness and a belief that they should run everyone else’s life, and they refuse to give that up, they’ll be living in hell, not in heaven.
So both history and Heaven from this world are not full of puritanical values that emphasize discipline and obedience rather than love, and where just about everything is sinful? Nor are such full of excess so-called social justice where just about everything is problematic?
Hi K,
Different eras and cultures are different. Certainly there are and were some puritanical societies. But the idea that earlier societies were generally more moral and upright than today’s society is a fallacy that stems from an ignorance of what those societies were actually like and how average people lived.
In particular, it is not the case that in most previous societies “everything was sinful.” The laws recorded in the Old Testament and in other ancient texts were mostly reflections of the social structures and practices of the people of those societies, layered on top of the basics of destructive and therefore forbidden behaviors as reflected especially in the second table of the Ten Commandments. To us the many laws in the Old Testament might look highly detailed and restrictive, but most of them simply reflected what the bulk of people in those cultures considered to be proper and improper behavior. The average person would abide by them because that’s just how people lived in those days. The laws were intended to keep blatant flouting of cultural norms in check.
The problem comes when literalists and fundamentalists today try to apply those laws, adapted to the ancient culture in which they were formulated, to people in today’s very different cultures. Then, suddenly, these laws become restrictive and “puritanical” because they do not match the cultural norms of today’s society. Part of the error in assessing the past is in not understanding that when they were written, most of these laws simply reflected how upright members of those societies believed decent people should live. They were not perceived as restrictive and puritanical in those societies.
As for “emphasizing discipline and obedience rather than love,” that’s a different matter. The culture that developed in the Old Testament from the Exodus onward was largely obedience-based. It was characterized by a written code of law that people were expected to obey, and were punished for not obeying. Again, this doesn’t mean those laws were “puritanical.” The laws reflected the cultural norms of the time. But that culture, and similar cultures elsewhere around the world, were very much based on obedience to law.
This was not the case even in earlier cultures in the Bible. The Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) had no written law. They simply knew the unwritten codes of proper behavior and followed them, and if they didn’t, they experienced the consequences of engaging in wrong behavior within their culture. These earlier cultures were not law- and obedience-based cultures. They were based on a knowledge and understanding of right behavior, and of voluntarily living according to that knowledge, or suffering the physical, financial, and social harm that came from violating their culture’s standards of right behavior.
What they weren’t based on was love. According to Swedenborg, the earliest spiritually aware culture on earth was based on love. But that’s not as easy to see in the early chapters of Genesis. There are hints of it, such as Eve eating from the tree of knowledge because it looked desirable to her. But the stories of that early love-based culture in the opening chapters of the Bible are brief, and they are metaphorical rather than literal. So as I said, it’s not as easy to see Swedenborg’s idea that this was a love-based society.
Today, because we are entering into the “new church” or New Jerusalem era, I believe we are once again entering a period in which society is love-based. This may seem ridiculous on the surface, but more and more people are “doing what they love” rather than just taking whatever job pays most, marriage love is making a comeback (though it’s had a setback recently due to the gender wars), and so on. We live in a turbulent era of change, which causes a lot of confusion in assessing just what’s going on. But I do think the change is toward acting based on love and compassion for other people and their well-being.
This wasn’t the case in most earlier societies. Jesus gave a teaching that put love at the center, but that was part of the reason he was considered so radical. And given what happened within mainstream Christianity, which quickly reverted back to an old rules-based model, human society wasn’t yet ready for a love-based culture. Only today are we inching our way toward that highest ideal of human society and life.
So although the idea that earlier societies were more puritanical than today’s society is mostly a fallacy, it is true that many earlier societies were more about obedience than they were about love.
What do you think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfnQqdYuFzI (Why Jesus Had to Come 2000 Years Ago…Not Today!)? I know, you might say it’s materialistic.
Hi World Questioner,
I don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of what this YouTuber says. However there also seems to be a lot of confirmation bias in it. For example, I suspect that there are other characteristics of gods that could be in his list, but aren’t because they aren’t things that Jesus did or was. The list is a little too tidily constructed to include all the things that Jesus was.
But more than that, the main reason Jesus came when he did was not historical or sociological, but spiritual. Jesus came at the lowest spiritual ebb of humanity, when we were in danger of being completely defeated by evil and therefore snuffed out of existence spiritually. That’s the primary reason Jesus came when he did.
Just a question for you. Luke 2:1-2 says that Jesus was born during the census. Quirinius was governor in the time of the census. That contradicts the idea that Jesus was born before Herod’s death, which was in 4 B.C. Is there spiritual meaning to these? Why can’t Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John just be historically accurate?
I found https://www.gotquestions.org/Quirinius-census.html
Hi World Questioner,
I’m far from an expert on these historical issues, and wouldn’t want to wade into that quagmire. I will only say that the linked article’s final statement, “The Bible is true history, and its details are more trustworthy than the historical writings of the Romans and Josephus,” shows just how little the people behind that website understand the nature of the Bible.
But yes, it all has a spiritual meaning, which, along with the message of salvation and eternal life, is the important issue, and represents the true nature of the Bible. The Bible is not a history book. It is a book whose purpose is to lead people toward God and eternal life. Its historical accuracy is a secondary issue, and not particularly important for its primary mission.