Men - Human Forms Receptive of Life

Selection from Apocalypse Explained ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

Life regarded in itself, which is God, cannot create another that shall be the only life; for the life that is God is uncreate, continuous, and inseparable; and from this it is that God is ONE.

But the life that is God can create forms out of substances that are not life, in which it can be, and give to them the appearance of living. Such forms are men; and since they are receptacles of life they could not when first created be anything else than images and likenesses of God; images from the reception of truth and likenesses from the reception of good; for life and its recipient are fitted to each other as the active and passive, but do not mingle. For this reason human forms, which are recipients of life, live, not from themselves, but from God who alone is life; consequently, as is well known, every good of love and every truth of faith is from God, and nothing of these is from man; for if man had the least portion of life as his own he would be able to will and do good from himself, and to understand and believe truth from himself, and thus to claim merit; and yet if he so believes, the form recipient of life closes itself above and becomes perverted, and intelligence perishes.

Good and its love and truth and its faith are the life that is God, for God is good itself and truth itself; and therefore in these God dwells in man. And from all this it follows, that man of himself is nothing, and is something only so far as he receives from the Lord, and at the same time acknowledges that it is not his own but is the Lord's; then the Lord gives him to be something; yet not from himself but from the Lord.

(Apocalypse Explained 1121:3)

The Lord Foresees and Provides

From Arcana Coelestia ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

The Lord's Providence is in the veriest singulars of all things, but not according to such an order as man proposes to himself, because things to come are both foreseen and provided; and that the case is like that of a person building a palace, who first collects materials of every kind, and lays them together in heaps, where they lie without order, while the kind of palace to be formed from them exists solely in the understanding of the architect.

(Arcana Coelestia 6486)

A Life of Faith

From a passage in Arcana Coelestia ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

... the life of faith causes a man to be spiritual, but not faith except insofar as it has been implanted in the life. The life of man is his love, and that which he loves he wills and intends, and that which he wills and intends, he does. This is the being of man, but not that which he knows and thinks and does not will. This being of man cannot in any wise be changed into another being by thinking about mediation and salvation; but by regeneration anew, which is being effected during a great part of his life; for he must be conceived, born, and grown up anew; and this is not effected by thinking and speaking, but by willing and acting.

(Arcana Coelestia 7779:3)