Steve Sanchez's Blog
February 14, 2018
Man’s Experience of Hell
Malina reveals the dynamics of how the society was consumed in the art of manipulation and thus spiritually vacuous. Malina writes, “The people in our period perceived God, gods, and their agents—spirits, demons, angels—as necessary to maintain equilibrium.”
Looking at Swedenborg’s description of hell in the spiritual world gives us insight to the cause of what is happening on earth at this time. In hell, spirits constantly demean and punish each other with incredibly cruel arts and intentions. This manipulation takes place to a terrible degree few of us can really stomach hearing.
When there is an imbalance, this is the kind of influence that trickles down from the spiritual world and begins to dominate people’s feelings on earth.
The compulsive need for the people to regain a sense of equilibrium is tell-tale evidence of the loss of equilibrium. But their effort in this regard is misled and futile; they are “barking up the wrong tree.” In seeking the patronage of gods in the spiritual world, they are actually seeking to appease demons and thereby playing into the hands of demons and increasing the terrible imbalance.
This effort of the people to gain equilibrium by appeasing spirits, gods, and demons is ungodly and something that should never be done. Their true need is to tether themselves to the one God, but they had long ago lost sight of this truth. More and more the people were becoming entangled in hell. The reason, at a certain point, that the people were not culpable for their actions is that once there is loss of equilibrium, there is a measure of loss of freedom. And when people are compelled to an action by others, they are not held responsible for it as their personal sin.
Get Rethinking Redemption if you want a new fresh insight of the Bible in relation to Jesus’s coming. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
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February 12, 2018
Everything You Need to Know about the Second Coming
The Second Coming is a big subject, but I will try to boil it down so that one can see how it is that the Second Coming has already happened.
As in the times of both Noah and the incarnation, the Second Coming is a time of imbalance in the equilibrium between heaven and hell. It has to do with the decline of the Christian Church that the Lord started when He was on earth. Over the course of nearly 1,800 years, this church became corrupted, became external, and was in jeopardy of destruction.
By witness from heaven, Swedenborg declares that the Second Coming occurred in 1757. He provides a cosmic view of the development and the decline of mankind and religion from the beginning of time until the Second Coming. But he did it in a way that continually appeals to the reason of the reader because he knows people are meant to form their beliefs in freedom.
During life, it is up to each person to will and choose their way as they are exposed to the influences of heaven and hell. Thus, freedom is the very means of salvation, and it is also the cause of hell. It is the cause of hell because freedom of will is total and complete, which means, therefore, the consequences of freedom are real. Otherwise, freedom would not mean anything and life would not be real.
The structure of the whole universe is based on this equilibrium between heaven and hell.
Get Rethinking Redemption if you want a new fresh insight of the Bible in relation to Jesus’s coming. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
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February 7, 2018
The Eternal Nature of the Bible
What proceeds from God is divine and eternal, and when it is performed in the material world becomes correspondences. This is why the Bible exists and why it will always exist. It is the material manifestation of divine truth, and the divine truth—in all its manifestations—is eternal by nature. The divine overcomes the world and all things bend to it in time. This is why Jesus said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) A sword represents the concise, revealing the power of the truth, and destruction is its power to reveal and subjugate evil. Divine truth is the most powerful force in the universe. The divine does not avoid as humans but addresses reality from the internal with love and without fail. In essence, the Lord does not punish; He heals, but his healing certainly feels like punishment to humans, especially the evil-minded. Humanity’s attitude toward the divine can remain hidden only for a time, so the truth was revealed through the prophets and, especially, Jesus. This is why in the Bible part of the message of each prophet was to severely reveal the disobedience of Israel. God is in no hurry, for He Knows the timing of all things. He knows the nature of humanity, and He is always working for the transformation of humanity. He is fully present in the moment to all of the past, present, and future. As the Bible says, every ‘Jot and tittle’ that His prophets spoke would come into existence in all particulars in the fullness of time, and it did so within the slow process of the natural world.
Get Rethinking Redemption if you want a new fresh insight of the Bible in relation to Jesus’s coming. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
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February 5, 2018
The Greatest Born of Woman: John the Baptist and His Mission
The Captives
The theme of the captives that were released from the false heavens is described in many places in the Word, but perhaps nowhere better than in the parable of the wheat and the chaff. The parable describes how an enemy sows chaff (weeds) with the wheat, which is where chaff does not belong. The two become inextricably tied together, and the Lord tells workers in the field not to separate the two until the time of the harvest.
Who are they?
The captives are those who were unjustly intercepted by evil spirits when they died and were held in false heavens in the world of spirits. When people first enter the spiritual world, they usually seek out loved ones. They are attended by angels that guide them, and that also discern their quality and do everything they can to urge them toward heaven. However, during the imbalance, evil spirits had undue power in the world of spirits and even infiltrated the lower parts of heaven. The evil spirits used their arts to deceive the new spirits, and, by persuasion and deception, they seduced these people to enter their own city, whether they were good or bad.
Enter John the Baptist
It is very important to realize that, when this imbalance happens, a measure of freedom in humanity is lost. Freedom on earth exists when there is perfect equilibrium between heaven and hell. When equilibrium is lost, so is a measure of freedom.
When we consider the purpose of John the Baptist, one can understand why Jesus said that he was the greatest man ever born of woman.
The Baptist’s Mission
John’s whole life seems to have been one of great focus, preparing for the brief but profound period before Jesus began his public ministry. He carried out his mission with great intensity.
John’s job was no less than to re-establish the means of conjunction between heaven and earth. This had to be done because it is a universal principle that the internal (heaven) must have a foundation (earth) upon which to rest and the connection between them is accomplished by correspondences.
With passion, John fulfilled his mission to restore what humanity had lost. John could do this because he had the gift to see the divine in Jesus and the perseverance to serve Him. Jesus called John the greatest man ever born because of what he perceived and the purpose he served. He was a man with truly phenomenal awareness.
If you would like to know more, grab a copy of my book, Rethinking Redemption. Follow me on my social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
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February 1, 2018
The Shroud of Turin
The burst of light at the resurrection is a climax of union. It is the culmination of the glorification process. This can give us great insight into the nature of the resurrection and the extraordinary markings on the cloth.
Fanti theorizes that the reason the shroud has the quality of an X-ray is that, as the body disappeared (resurrected), the cloth fell by gravity through it and picked up the internal images as it did. This assumes the body disappeared from the top down or from the outside in.
I think there is another cause for this. It would be consistent with the principle of union that the cells of His body burst into light from each cell and all parts of the body simultaneously. Because the cells of His body burst simultaneously, the images would have been deposited on the shroud at the same time.
I say the X-ray quality of the shroud is consistent with union based on the correspondences between the structure of the universe and the divine human of Jesus. The study of correspondences reveals that everything in the universe—that is, all of nature and the spiritual world—has correspondence with the divine body of Jesus.
If one were able to view the entirety of the universe, we would see that it is in the shape of the Grand Man, the divine human, which is the human of God—Jesus.
Jesus achieved perfection in the union of His body and soul by the expression of perfect love and wisdom in the natural world.
If you want to learn more, grab a copy of my book, Rethinking Redemption. I would also love to connect with you on my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. Hope to see you there!
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January 30, 2018
The Essence of the Word
It is essential to introduce two important ideas in the Bible. The first is the idea of correspondence. Correspondence operates from three universal principles: the Word, nature, and the human form.
Correspondence means that everything in the natural world is the result of its counterpart in the spiritual world; the object in the spiritual world being the first cause of what is in the natural world. Everything in nature that is connected to its counterpart in the spiritual world, yet separated by a discrete degree, is said to correspond. A “discrete degree” can most readily be understood through our experience of the separation between the earthly world and the spiritual world. For the most part, we cannot see, hear, or touch across this divide. However, we can at times sense, feel, or intuit across it.
The principle of correspondence is a universal principle through which we can confidently gain perception about the nature of the spiritual world, and, in turn, gain a fuller understanding of the earthly world. It is, if we apply it thoughtfully, a readily accessible resource that can be read forward or backward, that is from heaven to earth, and vice versa. We can gain insight into the dynamics of the spiritual world through the scientific processes we observe in the natural world.
The second concept that is important to introduce is the divine nature of the Bible.
What distinguishes the Word (the holy scripture in the Bible) from all other written material is that it contains an internal sense. The words of holy scripture have a real connection with heaven through correspondence. No other written word has or will ever have this internal sense. The Bible possesses this because it is divine truth from the will of God in heaven. Men wrote it with their hands, but it was given to them by divine inspiration or dictation from the Lord. The Bible is divine truth handed down to humanity on the earthly level.
If you want to learn more, grab a copy of my book, Rethinking Redemption. I would also love to connect with you on my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. Hope to see you there!
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January 24, 2018
What Happens in the Afterlife?
Whatever state a person is in internally on earth, they continue in that state in the spiritual world with the exception that they are a soul (in complete human form) without a physical body. Without the body, the mental and sensing faculties are many times more acute. The soul of a person is formed by what they did, believed, and loved in life.
To get a better idea of the overall picture, I should remind the reader that, in general, Swedenborg distinguishes the whole of the afterlife into three parts; heaven above, hell below, and the world of spirits between them. The world of spirits is said to be an enormous realm between heaven and hell, where people who have died are in a state similar to that which they were in on earth. They stay for a time in the world of spirits (Swedenborg writes that this period is usually anywhere between three days to thirty years), and they gradually move toward heaven or hell as they are prepared. The world of spirits is more like earth life than heaven or hell in that good and evil people live amongst each other (to a degree). However, they are gradually being prepared for heaven or hell by visitation.
Today, people who believe in the afterlife and in eternal life care passionately about the state of their souls in the heavenly realm. This was not part of the thinking of most people in those ancient times. However, there were some pockets of more enlightened groups that were exceptions to this generalization.
If you want to learn more, grab a copy of my book, Rethinking Redemption. I would also love to connect with you on my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. Hope to see you there!
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January 22, 2018
What Did Jesus Redeem Us from?
How can we fully appreciate the redemption Jesus performed unless we understand what we were redeemed? The extent and nature of the evil and darkness Jesus overcame is not sufficiently known in the Christian world.
What is known, though, is the story that the Lord was born on earth to set all things in order. He is the Hero of Heroes. If we think about it, it is a common-sense realization that there must have been an enormously important need for God to be born on earth when He did.
The spirits of heaven and hell can influence us, but they cannot compel us, so we are free to act from our self. Jesus maintains equilibrium and protects us from hell every moment of every day. He was born on earth because of the inevitable destruction from dis-equilibrium, and His mission was to put all things back into order.
He waged an enormous battle against evil far beyond our comprehension, subjugating all of its forces and restoring divine order. This is His essential work of redemption. All of these things are why He alone deserves to be worshipped.
Realizing why the Lord came, as well as the darkness He was up against, gives the observer of history and the Bible key insight into the life of Jesus. As I shared in the beginning, the greater we perceive what we were redeemed from, the greater we can appreciate the work He did of redeeming us from it.
When Jesus said the extraordinary words, “It is finished”, it is the culmination of an excruciating process that was of a rigor far beyond our ability to comprehend. ‘Rethinking Redemption’ helps us to understand the principles involved and how intense it was.
If you want to learn more, grab a copy of my book, Rethinking Redemption. I would also love to connect with you on my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. Hope to see you there!
The post What Did Jesus Redeem Us from? appeared first on Steve Sanchez.
September 11, 2017
Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship
Richmond, California. This book inspires self-examination as one understands the principles of the darkness that took place in the times of Jesus and as one sees how Jesus overcame the darkness and taught the people to have an internal relationship with God.
Rethinking Redemption investigates the causes and process behind the major themes of the Bible, such as the captives, the earthly vastation of the Jews, the glorification of Jesus, the resurrection, the magnificent difference between the Old and New Testament, and the Second Coming. Throughout the book, Sanchez provides keys to the Bible that help the reader achieve a higher level of perception and deeper understanding of the historical and spiritual meaning in the Bible and the story of Jesus.
Sanchez draws on the writings of the great Christian scientist, philosopher, theologian, and revelator Emanuel Swedenborg. From the wisdom of heaven, Swedenborg pioneered the science of correspondence and revealed the literal and internal sense of the holy scripture. Sanchez consistently articulates these concepts and processes in a down-to-earth, concise, and inspiring way that makes them accessible to the reader. He uses concrete examples from the Bible and from nature that illuminate the story.
This book is for seekers who love the truth, the Bible, and man’s inner struggle with evil inclination. It delves deep into the dark and excruciating experiences that humanity endured prior to Jesus’s incarnation. The book is not dogmatic, but appeals to the reader’s reason and spiritual perception. It is based on the premise that we can only truly appreciate the redemption Jesus provided when we see what we are redeemed from. It tells the inside story of the series of events that had to occur for Jesus to save the human race.
Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship is set to feed the soul and the mind with fresh and timely insights that will open a new perspective in the hearts of the readers. This book is now available in selected online bookstores.
Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship
Written by Pastor Steve Sanchez
Paperback | $19.99
Book copies are available at LitFire Publishing, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book retailers.
About the Author
Pastor Steve Sanchez was born in Barstow, California. He is the founder and director of Lifeline Outreach Street and Prison Ministries, which was preordained over twenty-two years ago. Earlier in his life, he received his master’s degree in divinity. He was a chaplain intern at Kaiser and studied clinical pastoral education at the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. He has been a hospice chaplain for more than seven years. This is his second book.
The post Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship appeared first on Steve Sanchez.
Fresh Insights on the Story of Redemption Revealed in Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship
Richmond, California. This book inspires self-examination as one understands the principles of the darkness that took place in the times of Jesus and as one sees how Jesus overcame the darkness and taught the people to have an internal relationship with God.
Rethinking Redemption investigates the causes and process behind the major themes of the Bible, such as the captives, the earthly vastation of the Jews, the glorification of Jesus, the resurrection, the magnificent difference between the Old and New Testament, and the Second Coming. Throughout the book, Sanchez provides keys to the Bible that help the reader achieve a higher level of perception and deeper understanding of the historical and spiritual meaning in the Bible and the story of Jesus.
Sanchez draws on the writings of the great Christian scientist, philosopher, theologian, and revelator Emanuel Swedenborg. From the wisdom of heaven, Swedenborg pioneered the science of correspondence and revealed the literal and internal sense of the holy scripture. Sanchez consistently articulates these concepts and processes in a down-to-earth, concise, and inspiring way that makes them accessible to the reader. He uses concrete examples from the Bible and from nature that illuminate the story.
This book is for seekers who love the truth, the Bible, and man’s inner struggle with evil inclination. It delves deep into the dark and excruciating experiences that humanity endured prior to Jesus’s incarnation. The book is not dogmatic, but appeals to the reader’s reason and spiritual perception. It is based on the premise that we can only truly appreciate the redemption Jesus provided when we see what we are redeemed from. It tells the inside story of the series of events that had to occur for Jesus to save the human race.
Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship is set to feed the soul and the mind with fresh and timely insights that will open a new perspective in the hearts of the readers. This book is now available in selected online bookstores.
Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship
Written by Pastor Steve Sanchez
Paperback | $19.99
Book copies are available at LitFire Publishing, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book retailers.
About the Author
Pastor Steve Sanchez was born in Barstow, California. He is the founder and director of Lifeline Outreach Street and Prison Ministries, which was preordained over twenty-two years ago. Earlier in his life, he received his master’s degree in divinity. He was a chaplain intern at Kaiser and studied clinical pastoral education at the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. He has been a hospice chaplain for more than seven years. This is his second book.
The post Fresh Insights on the Story of Redemption Revealed in Rethinking Redemption: Revitalizing Our Relationship appeared first on Steve Sanchez.
