Why it is So Important to Know the Spiritual Sense of the Word
or
The Bible: Literally a Dreadful and Disturbing Book

a sermon by Rev. Michael Gladish
Dawson Creek, BC, September 16th, 2007

 
"Then the people went up into the city (of Jericho), every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword." - Joshua 6:20-21

This brief passage from the book of Joshua in what we call the Old Testament is in many ways a very mild example of the horrible, crude and sometimes even disgusting things that are discussed throughout the Bible. And the problem isn’t just that they are discussed, but that they are so often celebrated as good and necessary, fulfilling the will of God.

In this case we have a classic example of genocide and devastation. Not only were the fighting men killed in battle but the women and children were ruthlessly destroyed as well, and every useful thing in the city was laid waste.

But it gets worse. Much worse. A little later in the same book (8:25) a man named Achan is found to have sinned against the Lord by taking some of the condemned things from Jericho and hiding them in his tent. As a consequence not only was he stoned to death but his sons and daughters, his oxen, donkeys and sheep, his tent even, and all that he had were both stoned to death and burned with fire. This is just one of many similar stories of sweeping judgments....

And then there is the famous verse in Psalm 137 relishing the most cruel form of vengeance as it says, "O daughter of Babylon, who is to be destroyed, happy shall he be who repays you as you have served us! Happy shall he be who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock." -- Not that the Lord in this case endorses that sentiment, but it is recorded as a prayer to the Lord and it is not, at least in that context, qualified.

Yes, of course there are other passages in other parts of the Scripture that very much qualify such an attitude. For example, the prophet Isaiah roundly condemned all the traditional festivals and animal sacrifices, calling the people to repentance in the name of the Lord, saying, "Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow," etc. (Isa 1:16-17). Micah did the same, concluding "He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to humble yourself to walk with God?" (Micah 6:8).

But the fact remains that the Old Testament is filled with vengeance, bloodshed and gratuitous sex, much of it supposedly endorsed and even commanded by God. For example God Himself is said to have been so angry with the human race that he destroyed every living thing except a few specimens of each in the Ark of Noah. It's a great story as far as Noah is concerned, but what about everybody else? And Jacob, the polygamist, was quite content to cheat his brother, Esau, not once but twice in the matter of his inheritance, for which God blessed him and made him prosper! Joshua wreaked havoc where-ever he went, the judges were harsh and often brutal, the kings almost all cruel and violent, even the earlier prophets, like Elijah, were inclined to wipe out whole populations in the name of the Lord, and we're not even going to begin to discuss the horrible events in stories like that of Shechem and Dinah or Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis.

The point is, without a deeper understanding of the spiritual meaning of all these stories we are literally lost in a sea of mean and contradictory "lessons" that portray God as angry, jealous and vindictive while at the same time tolerant of some incredible perversions, all certainly more than enough to cause many people to reject the book as hateful and irrelevant to their lives.

Now this is plain talk, not intended to inflame but to be clear, and realistic. You can read this sort of analysis in popular current books like "The God Delusion," or "God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything." While it is true that the writers of such books are not very fair and clearly have an axe to grind, they are also correct that if you take a literalistic view of the Bible you are not going to get much help from it. Indeed, if you have such a faith in the Bible you are almost inevitably going to see God as somehow factored into TWO distinct, contradictory personalities, a "Father" (Jehovah) who is stern, harsh and relatively unforgiving, and a "Son" (Jesus Christ) who is patient, loving, merciful and kind. But then again, even Jesus can be pretty stern in His requirements and harsh in His judgments (e.g., Matthew 10:34-39 & 23, passim).

So what is the answer?

The answer, short of simply discounting or disregarding certain things the Bible says, is to find a way of interpreting what is written so that it makes sense and communicates an idea of God that is intelligent, consistent and free of human prejudice. And there are, it seems, really only two basic ways of doing this: either we must take everything that is said with a grain of salt, bearing in mind that it was all written according to the finite and fallible perceptions of those who wrote it, or we must find a metaphorical or spiritual meaning within much of what is said so that we can see beyond the primitive stories -- however historical they may be -- and derive some personal application that works in our more enlightened age. Since the first alternative essentially dismisses the Bible as human and fallible, and leaves us to our own devices, we prefer the second approach. But even then we have two options: we can try to interpret everything according to our own perceptions (really only a variation of what we just rejected), or we can "search the Scriptures" for their own key to an internally consistent and ultimately Divine interpretation. This, finally, is what we actually have in the teachings of this "New Church."

It is called the science -- or knowledge -- of correspondences.

In this framework (or paradigm) every literal event or thing is an image of something spiritual to which it "corresponds." And it corresponds by representing the same use or function on a natural level as its likeness or analogue does on a spiritual level. For example, water corresponds to truth. What water does for us in natural life, truth does in spiritual life. But when it becomes a destructive force it corresponds to truth perverted, or turned to falsity. So in the story of creation all the references to water call us to reflect on the truth that is so necessary in the "creation" or development of our spiritual life. But in the story of Noah and the ark the references to water call us to reflect on the inundation of falsity that will destroy us if we do not take refuge in a properly constructed framework of thought that will allow us to rise above it, and "ride it out."
And so it is in all the most difficult and challenging stories of the Old or New Testament. True, the ancient peoples of the near east were vindictive and they did portray God according to their own perceptions, but the point is that within their stories, Divinely in spired as they were, there lies a spiritual sense that is beautifully instructive for our own lives -- on a spiritual level.

Thus the story of Noah and the ark is not really about God's frustrated, vindictive condemnation of the whole earth except for one family and a few of each of all living things in a boat of impossible dimensions, rather it is about His plan for our salvation, including the restoration of good, clean thoughts and affections in the face of the consuming flood of falsities just mentioned. And what is that plan? " Build an ark..." just so, with beams of a certain wood, in certain dimensions with three levels, a window in a certain place, sealed with pitch, and so on. And what does it mean? -- It's all about how our spiritual lives are preserved through learning, understanding, and believing in the things that the Word teaches. The main chambers or rooms of the ark correspond to the human faculties of will and understanding; the three levels correspond to the three degrees of the mind (natural spiritual and celestial); the window through which light may come corresponds to the intellect, the door to hearing or obedience, and so on.

Sure, most living things on the earth die in the story, but it is not really about death in the literal sense, it is about the rejection or reformation of our own worldly attitudes and the repopulation of our minds with more spiritual goods and truths as we follow the instructions of the Word.

Again, the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, and the intended subjugation or annihilation of all of its indigenous people, corresponds to our own need to overcome the hereditary inclinations to evil and falsity that we all possess. These are the selfish, materialistic thoughts and affections that "inhabit" the land of our unregenerate minds, and they really do have to be rooted out and replaced with more spiritual thoughts and affections, which are of course represented by the Israelites -- not that the Israelites were more spiritual than the indigenous peoples, but what they represented was.

As for Achan and the spoils of Jericho that he took for himself, his name in Hebrew literally means "trouble," and the trouble is that he represents our own desire to have things our way rather than as the Lord's way, specifically to harbour those false ideas and selfish attitudes that we suppose will be useful to us despite the Lord's command to destroy them. For Jericho with its imposing walls represents just the first and most external of the evils and the falsities we use to defend them that have to be overcome if we are to enter into spiritual life. But then, if we attack and overcome them thinking we can take credit, or that we can have the victory our own way rather than the Lord's way, we just set ourselves up for big disappointments later.

So in Psalm 137 about dashing the little ones of Babylon against the rock, what we really have here is not about killing children literally (though without a doubt that was what the Psalmist meant); rather it is about getting rid of the seemingly innocent evils of the love of ruling or controlling others that are represented by "the little ones of Babylon." You know, it's like "the little white lie" that leads to other lies, that lead to a total lack of integrity. If you excuse and condone even the simplest, most innocent looking evil, especially contempt, the next thing you know it's all grown up and causing you all sorts of grief. How much better to "nip it in the bud," or in the spiritual sense of the story, smash it against the rock of truth.

Now of course we can't eradicate all selfishness, misunderstanding and corruption within ourselves all at once, and we can't feel overwhelmed by every little thing we do wrong, but the point is that we need to recognize the wrong for what it is, and deal with it as effectively as we can, according to the Lord's instruction from His Word. Regeneration, or spiritual growth, is a process, not an event, and it takes a lifetime to work through the issues.

So, again, in the books of Judges and the Kings, what we are reading about is not just a pathetic history of primitive laws, clannish conflicts and cruel judgments, but rather the government of the Lord's Divine Providence in relation to our own spiritual lives as we learn the truth and then vacillate back and forth in the effort to apply it.

Finally, for today, let's look at the story of Jacob and Esau. How does cheating your brother get you ahead in spiritual life? Well, of course, it doesn't -- though it may get you ahead in this world, as it did Jacob. The point of the story is that Jacob represents the intellectual and Esau the affectional aspects of the natural mind, or, in modern psychological terms, Jacob is the cognitive and Esau the affective or emotional mind. Now we are all born with both faculties, that is, both understanding and will, but in the beginning the will -- what we call the old or native will -- is corrupt and basically self-centred. So it has to be exchanged for a new, improved will, which can only be done through the disciplines of learning, understanding and living according to the truth, whether we like it or not. In order for this to be done the intellectual mind must take the lead, and it does so in a way that seems quite hurtful and unfair.

We'll explain this more another time, but the basic idea is that the understanding simply takes over, and sort of pushes the will aside. We are compelled by conscience or other outside pressures to do things we don't really like because we have to, or we know we should, and the things we enjoy then have to take second place, at least for awhile. Like when you want to practice a certain trade, skill or profession. You have to go to school first, and maybe slog your way through a lot of academic stuff before you are really free to act on your love -- to do what you want successfully and with real satisfaction.

All these are just a few of the hundreds of illustrations from the Old Testament that we could list clearly demonstrating the critical need for an understanding of the spiritual sense of the Word if we are to get anything truly meaningful out of it. And it's the same in the New Testament! Jesus, for example, didn't preach "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," but He did say that "If your (own) right eye offends you, pluck it out! And if your right hand offends you, cut it off!" What could these things mean if they are not references to some aspects of our spiritual lives? But that's exactly what they are: -- references to a bad understanding or a bad intention to act.

So now, what are we to do with all this information? Simple: read. Read and review the stories of the Word with the knowledge that they do contain these deeper meanings, and that through the correspondences that are built into them they actually connect the reader inwardly with the angels of heaven and with the Lord Himself who's heart and mind is revealed there in all its love and wisdom. Read and reflect on them with a real desire to understand them according to the correspondences you already know. And read them in the context of the heavenly doctrines that will teach you more and more, not just about the spiritual sense but about all the psychological and spiritual principles you need to grasp the concepts that are embedded in the Word.

In short, don't just read to try to solve some particular problem in your life without first establishing a clear frame of reference through regular meditation on what is written there; you might come to all sorts of odd conclusions. Instead get in the habit of contemplating the Word on a regular basis so that you can appreciate what the Lord is really saying there, and not just what you see or hear on the surface. Then when you go with a particular problem He can speak to you in terms you will understand, and He can help you, and He can support you, and He can provide for you the particular insights that you need to make sense of your world -- your hopes, your pain, your joys, your disappointments -- in general your whole experience of life as a preparation for the spiritual world.

Then the words of our recitation today (Psalm 119:33-40) will come true. For the Lord will teach us and give us understanding that we may walk in the path of His commandments and take real
delight in doing so.

Amen.


Lessons: Psalm 78:1-8
Children’s talk on the spiritual sense of the Word (showing a geode...)

John 4:1-15
True Christian Religion #200:1-4