PEOPLE NEED TO UNDERSTAND
REVELATION PEOPLE NEED TO UNDERSTAND
REVELATIONThe Lord's wisdom far surpasses human wisdom. This is no surprise. At birth we know nothing and have no wisdom. But this does not mean that we cannot learn. How can we have a love relationship with the Lord unless we know the Lord?
The Lord wants us to know Him very intimately and deeply. The Lord reveals Himself to us and hopes we will make the effort to understand Him in that revelation.
Before we can begin to understand revelation we first need to decide what books are from the Lord and which ones are not. We need to decide which canon we accept, which list of books we accept as a list of divinely inspired books.
In the Jewish Church people do not know. Fundamentalists in the Christian Church do not know except that the inner voice of the Holy Spirit tells them. The Catholics know it because the church tells them, and by the church is meant the Pope. For many centuries these opinions were the best that people could have. There was no better way to determine the divinity of a book.
The Lord honors all our efforts to establish a love relationship with Him, as long as we are sincere in it, and as long as they are the best we can do, and bring them into action. But today there is a way to arrive at a list of divine books in a better and more certain way. This way is given by God, again through revelation.
When a Jewish person hears this last statement, he will point at Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32 where it says:"Do not add to the word which I command you. Whatever I command you, you shall not add to it nor take away from it". From these passages the Jewish person concludes that there cannot be any revelation after the Old Testament.
Christians do accept the New Testament as a divine revelation. They do not draw the conclusion that the Old Testament is the last revelation. And yet, they then claim that the New Testament is the last revelation for they point at Revelation 22:18 and 19 where it says:"If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book. And if anyone takes away from the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life". This passage, Christians claim, clearly teaches that there will not be any revelation after the New Testament.
But when we look carefully at the Deuteronomy and Revelation passages we notice it says that "MAN" cannot add to divine revelation, but it does not say that "GOD" cannot or will not add. Jews and Christians look at the Old Testament, which was written by various people, and they agree it is divine revelation, because they believe God dictated to these writers. They look at the quoted passages from Deuteronomy, and they agree it us divine revelation. But when the Jews look at the New Testament, they believe it was written by men and not by God.
Christians do the same thing. They look at a claim that a writing is divine revelation, and they say it is impossible because of the passage in the Book of Revelation.
But nowhere in divine revelation does it say that the Lord has ceased to give new revelation after the Bible. If anyone claims there is such a revelation, then we all have to decide for ourselves what books we accept to be from the Lord.
Now let us focus on the better way to determine the canon of divine revelation. The three internal senses of the literal sense have already been mentioned. A book of the Old Testament or of the New Testament is divine revelation if it has these three internal senses continuously from beginning to end.
Once you see these internal senses, you begin to see the divinity of all books of the New Church canon. They fit together and they appear to proceed from the same God. Some people see this very quickly. Others take several years.
A very interesting sideline consequence of the internal sense aspect
of divine books is that we can have more light on the problem of translation.
The first input is from the various manuscripts that are available to us.
The second input comes from our translation experts. The third new input
comes from the internal sense aspect of a book. From the first two inputs
we may have several possible translations, but then the internal sense
input helps us choose only one possibility.
