The Lord's Omnipresence and Omniscience

Selection from
Apocalypse Explained
According to the spiritual sense
 in which the arcana there predicted
but heretofore concealed are revealed.

Emanuel Swedenborg

How the Lord can be present with all who are in heaven and throughout the whole earth, and can know all things, even the most particular things connected with them, both present and future, can be comprehended only by means of the following truths:

(1) In the natural world there are spaces and times, but in the spiritual world these are appearances.

(2) Spaces and times must be removed from the ideas before the Lord's omnipresence with all and with each individual, and His omniscience of things present and things future connected with them, can be comprehended.

(3) All angels of heaven and all men of the earth who constitute the church are as one man, and the Lord is the life of that man.

(4) Consequently as there is life in the particular and most particular things of man and it knows the entire state of these, so the Lord is in the particular and most particular things of the angels of heaven and of the men of the church.

(5) The Lord, by the intellectual faculty that each man has, or by its opposite, is also present with those who are out of heaven and out of the church, that is, those who are in hell or who are to come into hell, and knows their whole state.

(6) From the omnipresence and omniscience of the Lord thus perceived it can be understood how the Lord is the all and is in all things of heaven and the church, and that we are in the Lord and He is in us.

(7) The omnipresence and omniscience of the Lord can be comprehended also from the creation of the universe; for it was so created by Him that He is in things first and in things last, in the center and at the same time in the circumferences, and that the things in which He is are uses.

(8) As the Lord has the Divine love and the Divine wisdom, so from these He has the Divine omnipresence and the Divine omniscience; but omnipresence is chiefly from the Divine love, and omniscience chiefly from the Divine wisdom.

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(Apocalypse Explained 1217)