4. God alone--the Lord--is love itself, because he is life itself. Both we on earth and angels are life-receivers. I will be offering many illustrations of this in works on divine providence and life. Here I would say only that the Lord, who is the God of the universe, is uncreated and infinite, while we and angels are created and finite. Since the Lord is uncreated and infinite, he is that essential reality that is called Jehovah and is life itself or life in itself. No one can be created directly from the Uncreated, the Infinite, from Reality itself and Life itself, because what is divine is one and undivided. We must be created out of things created and finite, things so formed that something divine can dwell within. Since we and angels are of this nature, we are life-receivers. So if we let ourselves be misled in thought so badly that we think we are not life-receivers but are actually life, there is no way to keep us from thinking that we are God.

Our sense that we are life and our consequent belief that we are life rests on an illusion: in an instrumental cause, the presence of its principal cause is only felt as something identical to itself. The Lord himself teaches that he is life in itself in John: "As the Father has life in himself, so too he has granted the Son to have life in himself" (5:26); and again in John (11:25; 14:6) he teaches that he is life itself. Since life and love are one and the same, as we can see from the first two sections above, it follows that the Lord, being life itself, is love itself.

986. And they repented not to give him glory. That this signifies that they were not willing to turn by living according to the Lord's precepts, is evident from the signification of repenting, as denoting to turn from evils and the falsities therefrom; in the present case, before the Last Judgment comes upon them, and also condemnation and punishment; and from the signification of giving glory to the Lord, as denoting to live according to His precepts (concerning which see above, n. 874).

Continuation concerning the Sixth Precept:-

[2] Because all the delights which a man has in the natural world are turned into corresponding delights in the spiritual world, so are the delights of the love of marriage and the delights of the love of adultery. The love of marriage is represented in the spiritual world as a virgin, whose beauty is such as to inspire the beholder with the delights of life; but the love of adultery is represented in the spiritual world by an old woman, whose hideousness is such as to inspire the beholder with coldness and torpor in every delight of life. This is why, in the heavens, the beauty of the angels is according to the quality of their conjugial love, and that, in the hells, the hideousness of the spirits is according to the quality of their love of adultery. In a word, with the angels of heaven, according to conjugial love, there is vitality in their faces, their bodily gestures, and in their speech; but with the spirits of hell, according to the love of adultery, there is deadliness in their faces. The delights of conjugial love in the spiritual world are sensibly represented by the fragrance of fruits and flowers of various kinds. But the delights of the love of adultery are there sensibly represented by the foul smells exhaling from dunghills and putrid substances of various kinds. The delights of the love of adultery are also actually turned into such things, because all the delights of adultery are spiritual filth. This is why the brothels in the hells exhale stenches that excite vomiting.