504. Where also our Lord was crucified. This symbolizes a failure to acknowledge the Lord's Divine humanity, and thus a state in which He is rejected.

It is a saying in the church that people who blaspheme the Lord, crucify Him, and that so, too, do those who, like the Jews, deny that He is the Son of God.

People who deny that the Lord's humanity is Divine are like Jews because everyone views the Lord as a person, and anyone who views His humanity as on par with the humanity of any other person is incapable then of thinking of His Divinity, no matter how often this is called the Son of God, born from eternity, coequal with the Divinity of the Father. When he is told this or hears it read, it penetrates his hearing, indeed, but not at the same time his belief, since he thinks of the Lord as being a material person like any other man, retaining the same properties of the flesh. And because he then sets the Lord's Divinity aside and pays it no attention, he is therefore in the same state as he would be if he denied it; for he denies that the Lord's humanity is the Son of God, even as the Jews did also, for which reason they crucified Him. That the Lord's humanity is nevertheless the Son of God is something plainly said in Luke 1:32, 35, Matthew 3:16-17, and elsewhere.

[2] It is apparent from this why people in the church turn directly to God the Father, and many also to the Holy Spirit, and rarely anyone directly to the Lord.

Since the Jews crucified the Lord owing to their denial that He was the Messiah, the Son of God, therefore their Jerusalem is also called Sodom (Isaiah 3:9, Jeremiah 23:14, Ezekiel 16:46, 48). And the Lord says,

On the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:29-30)

What the fire and brimstone are may be seen in no. 452, 494.

Ships were used in the ancient world -- as they generally are now -- to carry freight from nation to nation for trade. The various valuable items in the cargo represent desires for specific good things and individual ideas about how to accomplish good things. The ships, then, represent containers for those good desires and true ideas -- they represent doctrinal systems, large collections of good desires and true thoughts woven into a whole and working as one. For instance, if we believe that we need to turn to the Bible to learn about right and wrong, need to compel ourselves to do what's right even if we don't want to, and need to trust that the Lord will help us come to love doing what's right, that would be a doctrinal system -- a bunch of ideas and desires for good all working together. Specific ideas -- we should read the Bible, we should pray, we can trust that the Lord is helping us -- are like cargo that is carried along by that larger doctrine.