Bible

 

Exodus 27

Studie

   

1 And make an altar of hard wood, a square altar, five cubits long, five cubits wide and three cubits high.

2 Put horns at the four angles of it, made of the same, plating it all with brass.

3 And make all its vessels, the baskets for taking away the dust of the fire, the spades and basins and meat-hooks and fire-trays, of brass.

4 And make a network of brass, with four brass rings at its four angles.

5 And put the network under the shelf round the altar so that the net comes half-way up the altar.

6 And make rods for the altar, of hard wood, plated with brass.

7 And put the rods through the rings at the two opposite sides of the altar, for lifting it.

8 The altar is to be hollow, boarded in with wood; make it from the design which you saw on the mountain.

9 And let there be an open space round the House, with hangings for its south side of the best linen, a hundred cubits long.

10 Their twenty pillars and their twenty bases are to be of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their bands are to be of silver.

11 And on the north side in the same way, hangings a hundred cubits long, with twenty pillars of brass on bases of brass; their hooks and their bands are to be of silver.

12 And for the open space on the west side, the hangings are to be fifty cubits wide, with ten pillars and ten bases;

13 And on the east side the space is to be fifty cubits wide.

14 On the one side of the doorway will be hangings fifteen cubits long, with three pillars and three bases;

15 And on the other side, hangings fifteen cubits long, with three pillars and three bases.

16 And across the doorway, a veil of twenty cubits of the best linen, made of needlework of blue and purple and red, with four pillars and four bases.

17 All the pillars round the open space are to have silver bands, with hooks of silver and bases of brass.

18 The open space is to be a hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, with sides five cubits high, curtained with the best linen, with bases of brass.

19 All the instruments for the work of the House, and all its nails, and the nails of the open space are to be of brass.

20 Give orders to the children of Israel to give you clear olive oil for the lights, so that a light may be burning there at all times.

21 Let Aaron and his sons put this in order, evening and morning, before the Lord, inside the Tent of meeting, outside the veil which is before the ark; this is to be an order for ever, from generation to generation, to be kept by the children of Israel.

   

Ze Swedenborgových děl

 

Arcana Coelestia # 9776

Prostudujte si tuto pasáž

  
/ 10837  
  

9776. 'And as for all the vessels of the dwelling-place, in all [its] service' means the truths and the forms of good on the level of factual knowledge which the external man possesses. This is clear from the meaning of 'the vessels' as factual knowledge, dealt with in 3068, 3079, 9394, 9544; from the meaning of 'the dwelling-place' as heaven, dealt with in 9594, 9596, 9632; and from the meaning of 'service' as the external or natural level in a person, dealt with in 3019, 3020, 5305, 7998. The external or natural level in a person is a servant because it ought to serve the internal or spiritual level in a person. For the human being has been created to conform to an image of heaven and to an image of the world, the internal or spiritual man to an image of heaven and the external or natural man to an image of the world, 9279. Just as the world ought to serve heaven, so the external or natural level in a person ought to serve his internal or spiritual. The external has also been created to be a servant; for it has no life of its own and so cannot do anything by itself. It is dependent on the internal or spiritual, that is, through this on the Lord. From this it is also evident that the external or natural level in a person is not anything unless it is a servant to the internal or spiritual, and that so far as it does serve the internal it is something. To be a servant is to be obedient, and the external is obedient when it does not take ideas stored in the understanding and use them as reasons to justify the evils of self-love and love of the world, but complies with reason and the teachings of the Church which dictate that what is good and true should be done not for selfish and worldly reasons but for goodness and truth's own sake. When all this is so, the Lord - acting through the person's heaven, that is, through the person's internal man - is the doer of those things. For all goodness and truth spring from the Lord, so much so that what is good and true in anyone is the Lord Himself. From all this it becomes clear why it is that the external man must be a servant to the internal.

  
/ 10837  
  

Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.