490. Everything God created was good, as the first chapter in Genesis makes clear. As we read there in verses 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25, "God saw that it was good. " Then in verse 31 we read, "God saw all that he had made, and yes, it was very good. " This is also apparent from the fact that human beings were originally in paradise. Evil arose from humankind, as is evident from the state of Adam after or as the result of the Fall, namely, that he was expelled from paradise.

From these points it is clear that if we had not been given free choice in spiritual matters, God himself, not us, would have been the cause of evil, and therefore both good and evil would have been created by God. It is atrocious, though, to think that he created evil. God endowed us with free choice in spiritual matters, and therefore he was not the creator of evil. He never inspires anything evil within us. This is because he is goodness itself. God is omnipresent in goodness and constantly urges and demands that he be received. If he is not received, he still does not leave, because if he were to leave, we would instantly die; in fact, we would collapse into a nonentity. Our life and the subsistence of everything we are made of is from God.

[2] God did not create evil. It is something we ourselves introduced, because we turn what is good, which continually flows in from God, into what is evil, and by means of that evil we turn ourselves away from God and toward ourselves. When we do so, the delight connected with that goodness remains but becomes a delight in evil. (Without a seemingly similar delight remaining, we would no longer be alive, because delight produces the life of our love.) Nevertheless, these two kinds of delight are completely opposite to each other. We do not realize this as long as we are alive in this world, but after our death we will recognize it and sense it very clearly. There, the delight that accompanies a love for what is good turns into heavenly blessedness, but the delight that accompanies a love for what is evil turns into something horrible and hellish.

From all this it stands to reason that all of us are predestined to heaven and none of us is predestined to hell. We devote ourselves to hell by abusing our freedom in spiritual matters; then we embrace the types of things that emanate from hell. As was noted above [475-478], we are all kept in the central area between heaven and hell, so that we are in an equilibrium between good and evil and therefore have free choice in spiritual matters.

19. 1. The one God is called Jehovah from "being," that is, from the fact that he alone is [and was] and will be, and that he is the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega. "Jehovah" means "I am" and "to be," as is generally known. We know from the Book of Creation, or Genesis, that God was called "Jehovah" from most ancient times. In the first chapter he is called "God," but in the second and subsequent chapters he is called "Jehovah God. " Later on the descendants of Abraham through Jacob forgot the name of God owing to their long sojourn in Egypt. Then in the event recorded in the following passage it was recalled to memory:

Moses said to God, "What is your name?" God said, "I Am I Who Am. So you will say to the Children of Israel, 'I Am sent me to you. ' And you will say, Jehovah, the God of your fathers, sent me to you. This is my name to eternity, and this is how I will be remembered from generation to regeneration. " (Exodus 3:13-15)

Since God alone is "I Am" and being, or "Jehovah," therefore nothing exists in the created universe that does not derive its underlying reality from him. (How this happens will be discussed below [21, 75-76, 78].) The same thing is meant by these words: "I am the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega" (Isaiah 44:6 and Revelation 1:8, 11; 22:13). This means that on every level of existence he is the one and only entity, the source of all things.

[2] God is called the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, because alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet and omega is the last; so together they mean all things as a whole.

In the spiritual world, every alphabetical letter has a meaning. A vowel, because it carries tone, means a feeling or some kind of love. Spiritual and angelic speech, and also writing, depends on these meanings - but this is a mystery that has not been known until now. There is in fact a universal language shared by all angels and spirits. It has nothing in common with any human language in our world. After death everyone inherits that language, because it is latent in everyone from creation. In the spiritual world, then, everyone can understand everyone else. I have often been allowed to hear that language. I have compared it with languages in the physical world and have ascertained that it has not even the least thing in common with any earthly language. It differs by its very origin, which is that every letter of every word has a meaning. This is why God is here called the Alpha and the Omega, meaning that on every level of existence he is the one and only entity, the source of all things. (For more on how this language and its written form flow from angels' spiritual thought, see the work Marriage Love 326-329; see also what follows in this work [280].)

475. As Long as We Are Alive in This World, We Are Held Midway between Heaven and Hell and Kept in Spiritual Equilibrium There, Which Is Free Choice

In order to know what free choice is and what qualities it has, we need to know where it comes from. Once we have learned its origin, we recognize not only what it is but what qualities it has.

Free choice originates in the spiritual world, where our minds are kept by the Lord. Our mind is the spirit within us that lives after death. Our spirit is continually in contact with people in that world who are similar to us. Our spirit is also present with people in the physical world through the material body with which it is surrounded. The reason we do not know that our minds are among spirits is that the spirits we are associating with in the spiritual world think and speak in a spiritual way, but our spirit, as long as it is in a physical body, thinks and speaks in an earthly way; and spiritual thought and speech cannot be understood or perceived by an earthly person, or the reverse. This is also why we cannot see them. But when our spirit is spending time with spirits in their world, then it uses spiritual thought and speech to communicate with them, because the inner mind is spiritual, but the outer mind is earthly. Therefore we communicate with spirits through our inner faculties, but we communicate with other people through our outer faculties. The former communication gives us perceptions and the ability to think analytically. If we did not have this inner communication, we would think no more and no differently than an animal. And if all interaction with spirits were taken away from us, we would die instantly.

[2] To make it possible to comprehend how we can be held midway between heaven and hell and kept as a result in spiritual equilibrium, which is the origin of our free choice, a few words will be said about this.

The spiritual world consists of heaven and hell. Heaven is above the head and hell there is below the feet. Hell is not, however, in the center of the earth that we inhabit. It is below the lands of the other world, which are spiritual in origin and therefore do not have extension, although they appear to have it.

[3] Between heaven and hell there is a great gap, which, to those who are in it, appears like an entire globe. Into this intervening area evil in great abundance exhales from hell, and on the other hand goodness, also in great abundance, flows in from heaven. This interspace is what Abraham was referring to when he said to the rich man in hell, "Between us and you a great gulf has been established, so that those who try to cross over from here to you cannot, and neither can those who are there cross toward us" (Luke 16:26).

The spirit of every human being is in the midst of this vast interspace for one reason: so that we will have free choice.

[4] Because this interspace is so huge and looks to those who are there like a great globe, it is called "the world of spirits. " It is also full of spirits, because every human being first comes there after death and is prepared there for either heaven or hell. There we are among spirits and in interaction with them, just the way we had previously been among people in our former world. (There is no purgatory there. Purgatory is a fable invented by Roman Catholics.) That world is specifically dealt with in Heaven and Hell (published in London in 1758), Heaven and Hell 421-535.