1. Every Religion Is a Way of Life, and Its Life Is the Doing of Good

Everyone with any religion knows and acknowledges that someone who lives right is saved, and that someone who does not live right is damned. For he knows and acknowledges that someone who lives right, thinks right, not only about God, but also about the neighbor; but not so someone who does not live right.

A person’s life is his love, and what a person loves he not only freely does, but also freely thinks. We say therefore that his life is the doing of good, because doing right accompanies his thinking right. If these two do not go together, they do not constitute a person’s life.

But this we will show in the following pages.

87. Insofar as Someone Refrains from Every Form of False Witness as Being a Sin, So Far He Loves Truth

In the natural sense to bear false witness means not only to perjure oneself in court, but also to lie and slander. In the spiritual sense to bear false witness means to say and persuade that falsity is true, and evil good, and the converse. And in the highest sense to bear false witness means to blaspheme the Lord and the Word.

These are what it is to bear false witness in its three levels of meaning.

That they go together in a person swearing falsely, lying and slandering can be seen from what we demonstrated in The Doctrine Regarding the Sacred Scripture 5-7ff., and no. 57, 58, regarding the three levels of meaning of everything in the Word.

58. The Word shines and is translucent with them because every particular in the Word contains in it a spiritual and celestial sense, and these senses exist in the light of heaven. Consequently the Lord flows through these senses and their light into the natural sense and its light in a person. As a result, the person acknowledges truth from an inner perception, and so sees it in his thought, and this whenever he is prompted by an affection for truth because it is true. For perception springs from affection, and thought from perception, and this produces the acknowledgment we call faith.

But we will say more on this subject in the next section on the conjunction of the Lord with a person by means of the Word.