Week 4    Day 6

    Listen:

Let Your Word Be, Yes Yes, No No

Matthew 5:37

But let your word be, Yes, yes; No, no; and whatever is beyond these is from evil.

Divine Providence 219:3

Such is the speech of all in the third heaven; for they never reason about Divine things, discussing whether a thing is so or not so, but they see in themselves from the Lord whether it is so or not. Therefore, reasoning about Divine things whether they are so or not, is because the reasoner does not see them from the Lord, but desires to see them from himself; and what man sees from himself is evil. Still the Lord desires that man should not only think and speak about Divine things, but that he should also reason about them to the end that he may see that a thing is or is not so. And this thought, speech and reasoning, provided the end is to see the truth, may be said to be from the Lord in man, although it is from the man until he sees the truth and acknowledges it. Meanwhile it is only from the Lord that he can think, speak and reason; for he has this power from the two faculties, liberty and rationality, and these faculties man has from the Lord alone.

Heaven and Hell 492

For man is accustomed from childhood to maintain a semblance of friendship, benevolence, and sincerity, and to conceal the thoughts of his own will, thereby living from habit a moral and civil life in externals, whatever he may be internally. As a result of this habit, man scarcely knows what his interiors are, and gives little thought to them.

Heaven and Hell 91

What correspondence is, may be seen from the human face. In a face which has not been taught to dissemble, all the affections of the mind come to view in a natural form as in their image. This is why the face is said to be the index of the mind; that is, it is man’s spiritual world presented in his natural world. In the same way, the things pertaining to the understanding present themselves in speech, and those pertaining to the will present themselves in the movements of the body. All things, therefore, that are done in the body, whether in the face, in speech or in bodily movements, are called correspondences.

New Jerusalem and Her Heavenly Doctrine 121

The angels from the Lord’s celestial kingdom do not know what faith is, with the result that they do not even name it. But the angels from the Lord’s spiritual kingdom speak of faith, because they reason concerning truths.... The angels in the Lord’s celestial kingdom say only, Yes, yes, or No, no. But the angels of the Lord’s spiritual kingdom reason whether a thing is so or not so, when the conversation is concerning the spiritual truths which belong to faith... The celestial angels are of such a quality because they apply the truths of faith immediately to the life, and do not first store them in the memory, as is done by the spiritual angels. For this reason, the celestial angels are in the perception of all things belonging to faith....

Arcana Coelestia 1561

The celestial itself cannot possibly exist without activity. Worship is its first activity, for it puts itself forth in this way, because it perceives joy in it. All the good of love and of charity is essential activity itself.

Arcana Coelestia 202

The Most Ancient Church, which was a celestial man, was of such a character as not only to abstain from “eating of the tree of knowledge,” that is, from learning what belongs to faith from sensuous things and memory-knowledges, but was not even allowed to touch that tree, that is, to think of anything that is a matter of faith from sensuous things and memory-knowledges, lest they should sink down from celestial life into spiritual life, and so on downward.

Such also is the life of the celestial angels, the more interiorly celestial of whom do not even suffer faith to be named, nor anything whatever that partakes of what is spiritual. And if it is spoken of by others, instead of faith they have a perception of love, with a difference known only to themselves; thus, whatever is of faith they derive from love and charity.

Still less can they endure listening to any reasoning about faith, and least of all to anything of memory-knowledge about it. For through love, they have a perception from the Lord of what is good and true, and from this perception they know instantly whether a thing is so or is not so. Therefore, when anything is said about faith, they answer simply that it is so, or that it is not so, because they perceive it from the Lord....

See also Heaven and Hell 271, 278.

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