dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, that seduceth the whole world."
By Michael, Swedenborg tells us, is meant the ministry of a great society of heaven "who confirm from the Word that the Lord Jesus is the God of heaven and earth, and that men ought to live according to the commandments of the Decalogue," and, doing so, they have love to the neighbor and, also, that heavenly perception which is called faith. Faith thus comes into being when people have the Divine love in their hearts. Any other kind of faith is spurious faith.Faith, Swedenborg tells us, is not believing what we cannot see to be true, but believing, from, the Divine love in our hearts, what spiritually we perceive as real, just as one who believes in the reality of things which his natural eyes see. "Spiritual things are spiritually discerned."
But we have noted that the Great Red Dragon was cast out of heaven by the opposing belief held by Michael and his angels. This is a picture of what we are told actually took place in the spiritual world in 1757; but the heaven from which the Dragon and his crew were cast out was not the true heaven, instead a false heaven created by illusion. The earth into which they fell was not our earth, but a low plane of the world of spirits. For those who are interested in reading Swedenborg's description of the Last Judgment, which he witnessed in 1757, his book entitled "The Last Judgment" and "Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment" should be read. They can be found in the larger public libraries of the country.
When this Last Judgment was effected, we read in Revelation: "I heard a great voice in heaven, saying, Now is come the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ." This expresses the joy of the angels of heaven at the overthrow of this monstrous belief and the firm and everlasting setting up of the true Christian religion, which is the acknowledgment of the Lord Jesus Christ as the only God and Saviour, and the life according to the commandment of love to God and the neighbor embraced in the Ten Commandments and in the Two Great Commandments.
