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Both Isaiah and Luke intentionally use the word “mercy” as the essential nature of God. The Hebrew word for mercy is racham, which means “to love or to have compassion.” In Greek, the word for mercy is oikkos, which also means “to pity or to have compassion on.”

When our ancestors began to make metal weapons around 3,300 B.C., their main target was no longer forces in nature, but other humans. Ever since, humanity has never been free of wars and thus, the pain, sadness, and sorrow caused by wars fills our history.

How could God, who loves humans, stay angry forever and the condemnation was final until the sacrificial death of Jesus?

In my experience, having and raising a child requires almost unconditional sacrifice of the mother as the one who would carry the child in her womb for nine months and then breastfeed the child for many months after.

For us, it is natural to only believe in physical reality because we are born into such a condition. But according to Swedenborg, the first humans were endowed with the ability of perceiving and experiencing spiritual reality as well as physical reality.

Swedenborg did not believe that the Bible is a historical book based on or inspired by facts at all, but an illustration of our spiritual cultivation and journey written in a symbolic language which he calls correspondences.

There is a critical difference between what Jesus proclaims as “to be born from above” and what the evangelical churches emphasize as “born-again.” What Jesus meant by “to be born from above” is to live a life of charity and love to others. Meanwhile…

According to Swedenborg, truth is the way love becomes real in the most effective and appropriate way. In other words, where there is true love, there is also truth.

An unfortunate fact regarding religions of the world is that the institutionalized system of beliefs was formed by followers, especially by those who were in the ruling class, rather than the teachings of the founder of the religion.

Most of the time, the Israelites were left to live freely without a demanding ruler over them. However, when the Israelites demanded a human ruler, God said to troubled Samuel, “they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.”