249 Without revelation from the divine, we could not know anything about eternal life or God, still less about loving and believing him. We are born in complete ignorance, and then, from the things in the world around us, we learn everything that shap es our understanding. Also, right from birth we inherit everything harmful, which comes from selfish and materialistic loves. The pleasure that comes from loving these things controls us all the time, and this encourages the kinds of things that are compl etely against the divine. This is why we do not know anything about eternal life. So there had to be revelation for us to learn about it.
250 You can see clearly from the Christians that the harmful things that come from selfishness and materialism bring about this kind of ignorance about anything that has to do with eternal life. Christians know from revelation that there is a God, a h eaven and a hell, that there is eternal life, and that we can gain this eternal life through the good things that come from love and faith. Still, both educated and uneducated Christians lapse into a denial of these things. So once again, you can see how ignorant we would be if there were no revelation at all.
251 We do live on forever after death, and a life in harmony with our love and faith is in store for us there. So the Lord, because he loves the human race, revealed the things that would lead us into that life and would contribute to our spiritual we ll-being. The Bible is what the Lord has revealed.
252 Since the Bible is a divine revelation, every single part of it is divine. Anything that comes from the divine could be no other way. Everything that comes from the divine goes down through the heavens all the way to people on earth. In heaven it is adapted to the wisdom of the angels there, and on earth it is adapted to the understanding of the people there. So the Bible has an inner, spiritual meaning for angels and an outer, material-level meaning for people on earth. That is why our connection to heaven happens through the Bible.
253 The Bible's real meaning can be understood only by people who are enlightened. And only people who love and believe in the Lord are enlightened, since their deeper parts are lifted up into heaven's light by the Lord.
254 We can understand the Bible's literal meaning only if we have a religious philosophy that an enlightened person has obtained from the Bible. The literal meaning is adapted to people's understanding-even the understanding of simple-minded people. So we need a religious philosophy from the Bible to give us light.