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Genesis 7

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1 And the Lord said to Noah, Take all your family and go into the ark, for you only in this generation have I seen to be upright.

2 Of every clean beast you will take seven males and seven females, and of the beasts which are not clean, two, the male and his female;

3 And of the birds of the air, seven males and seven females, so that their seed may still be living on the face of the earth.

4 For after seven days I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, for the destruction of every living thing which I have made on the face of the earth.

5 And Noah did everything which the Lord said he was to do.

6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the waters came flowing over all the earth.

7 And Noah, with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives, went into the ark because of the flowing of the waters.

8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts which are not clean, and of birds, and of everything which goes on the earth,

9 In twos, male and female, they went into the ark with Noah, as God had said.

10 And after the seven days, the waters came over all the earth.

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, all the fountains of the great deep came bursting through, and the windows of heaven were open;

12 And rain came down on the earth for forty days and forty nights.

13 On the same day Noah, with Shem, Ham, and Japheth, his sons, and his wife and his sons' wives, went into the ark;

14 And with them, every sort of beast and cattle, and every sort of thing which goes on the earth, and every sort of bird.

15 They went with Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh in which is the breath of life.

16 Male and female of all flesh went in, as God had said, and the ark was shut by the Lord.

17 And for forty days the waters were over all the earth; and the waters were increased so that the ark was lifted up high over the earth.

18 And the waters overcame everything and were increased greatly on the earth, and the ark was resting on the face of the waters.

19 And the waters overcame everything on the earth; and all the mountains under heaven were covered.

20 The waters went fifteen cubits higher, till all the mountains were covered.

21 And destruction came on every living thing moving on the earth, birds and cattle and beasts and everything which went on the earth, and every man.

22 Everything on the dry land, in which was the breath of life, came to its end.

23 Every living thing on the face of all the earth, man and cattle and things moving on the face of the earth, and birds of the air, came to destruction: only Noah and those who were with him in the ark, were kept from death.

24 And the waters were over the earth a hundred and fifty days.

   

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Arcana Coelestia # 784

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784. The implications of 'Jehovah closed the way behind him' meaning that man no longer had the kind of communication with heaven that the member of the celestial Church had had are as follows: The state of the Most Ancient Church was such that men had an inward communication with heaven, and so by way of heaven with the Lord. They were governed by love to the Lord, and people who are governed by love to the Lord are like angels, the only difference being that they are clothed with a [physical] body. Their interiors were unconcealed and lay open all the way from the Lord. But it was different with this new Church. It was governed not by love to the Lord, but in and through faith, by charity towards the neighbour. They could not have, as the most ancient people had, any inward communication, only external. It would take too long however to discuss the nature of these two kinds of communication. Everybody has a communication of some kind, including the wicked, through the angels residing with them, though there are different degrees of it, from fairly close to quite remote. Without it a person could not exist. The degrees of communication are unending. A spiritual man cannot possibly have the kind of communication that a celestial man has, the reason being that the Lord dwells in love, and less so in faith. This is what the present statement means about Jehovah closing the way behind him.

[2] Since those times heaven has never been open in the way it was for the member of the Most Ancient Church. Many people in later times have indeed talked to spirits and angels - for example, Moses, Aaron, and others - but they did so in a completely different way. This, in the Lord's Divine mercy, will be dealt with later on. The reason why heaven has been closed is a very deep arcanum, as also is the reason why it is so closed nowadays that no one knows even of the existence of spirits, let alone that angels are residing with him. He imagines that when he is not with fellow men in the world and when thinking all by himself he is completely alone. In fact however he is constantly in the company of spirits who observe and perceive very accurately what a person is thinking and what he intends and devises, as accurately and clearly as if this manifested itself for all the world to see. Of this man is not at all directly conscious, so closed is heaven to him. Nevertheless it is utterly true. The reason he is not conscious of it is that if heaven were not in this way closed to him at a time when faith is non-existent with him, still less the truth of faith, and charity even less, he would stand in very great danger. This was the meaning also of Jehovah God's casting man out and causing cherubim to dwell at the east end of the Garden of Eden, with a flaming sword turning about to guard the way to the tree of life, 1 dealt with already in Chapter 3:14. See also 301-307.

Poznámky pod čarou:

1. literally, of lives

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