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.

493. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands standing before the God of the earth. (11:4) This symbolizes love and intelligence, or charity and faith, both of which people have in them from the Lord.

An olive tree symbolizes love and charity, as explained below. And a lampstand symbolizes enlightenment in truths (no. 43), thus intelligence and faith, inasmuch as intelligence comes from an enlightenment in truths, and faith in turn from this. To stand before God means, symbolically, to hear and do what He has commanded (no. 366). Here, therefore, it means that these two characteristics in them come from the Lord who is God of the earth, that is, in people who possess the two essential elements of the New Church, as described above. It is apparent from this that the statement that the two witnesses were the two olive trees and two lampstands means, symbolically, that they were love and intelligence, or charity and faith. For these two form the church - love and charity forming its life, and intelligence and faith its doctrine.

[2] An olive tree symbolizes love and charity because the olive tree symbolizes the celestial church, and thus an olive, being its fruit, symbolizes celestial love, which is love toward the Lord. Because of this, that love is symbolized also by olive oil, with which all the holy accouterments of the church were anointed. The oil called holy oil ¹ was extracted from olives and mixed with spices (Exodus 30:23-24). Olive oil was also used to light the lamps of the lampstand in the Tabernacle every evening (Exodus 27:20, Leviticus 24:2).

The olive tree and olives have similar symbolic meanings in Zechariah:

Two olive trees were by (the lampstand), one at the right of the bowl, the other at its left..., (and) two olive berries... These are the two offspring of the olive tree, which stand before the Lord of the whole earth. (Zechariah 4:3, 11-12, 14)

In the book of Psalms:

I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. (Psalms 52:8)

And in Jeremiah:

Jehovah called your name, Green Olive Tree, lovely, of beautiful fruit. (Jeremiah 11:16-17)

And so on elsewhere.

[3] Since Jerusalem symbolized the church, therefore many things in it and about it also symbolized such things as are connected with the church. Near it, too, was the Mount of Olives, and it symbolized Divine love, which is why Jesus "was during the days in the temple teaching, and at night He went out and spent the night on the Mount of Olives?" (Luke 21:37, cf. 22:39, John 8:1). It is also why Jesus spoke with His disciples on that mountain regarding the end of the age and His coming then (Matthew 24:3ff., Mark 13:3ff.). It was also from that mountain that He went to Jerusalem and suffered the cross (Matthew 21:1; 26:30, Mark 11:1; 14:26, Luke 19:29, 37). Moreover, this accorded with the prediction in Zechariah:

In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. (Zechariah 14:4)

Because the olive tree symbolized the celestial component of the church, therefore the cherubim inside the Temple at Jerusalem were made of olive wood, and so, too, were the doors to the inner sanctuary, and the doorposts (1 Kings 6:23-33).

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