309. 'The flame of a sword turning itself this way and that' means self-love together with its insane desires and persuasions, which are such that people do indeed wish to enter in but are in fact led away from there towards bodily and earthly interests. This may be confirmed by so many examples from the Word as to fill up page after page. Take simply the following verses in Ezekiel,

Prophesy and say, Thus said Jehovah, Say: A sword, a sword has been sharpened and also polished for a great slaughter, sharpened to flash like lightning. Let the sword be repeated a third time, the sword of their slain, ¹ the sword of the great slaughter, penetrating the inmost parts of their dwellings that their heart may melt. And it will multiply offences in all their gates; I have given the terror of the sword. Ah! It has become as lightning. Ezekiel 21:9-10, 14-15.

'The sword' here stands for the desolate condition of a person so that he sees no good or truth at all, but sheer falsities and things that are contrary, meant by 'multiplying offences'. And the phrases in Nahum about the horseman mounting, and the flame of a sword, and the lightning-flash of a spear and a multitude of slain, ¹ Nahum 3:3, refer to people who wish to enter into the arcana of faith.

Poznámky pod čarou:

Time is an aspect of the physical world, but it is not an aspect of the spiritual world. The same is true of space: There is no space in heaven. This is hard for us to grasp or even visualize, because we live in physical bodies with physical senses that are filled with physical elements existing in time and space. Our minds are schooled and patterned in terms of time and space, and have no reference point to imagine a reality without them. Consider how you think for a second. In your mind you can immediately be in your past or in some speculative future; in your mind you can circle the globe seeing other lands and faraway friends, or even zoom instantly to the most distant stars. Such imaginings are insubstantial, of course, but if we could make them real we would be getting close to what spiritual reality is like. Indeed, the mind is like a spiritual organ, which may be why physicians and philosophers have had such a hard time juxtaposing its functions to those of the brain. What this means in the Bible is that descriptions of time -- hours, days, weeks, months, years and even simply the word "time" itself -- represent spiritual states, and the passing of time represents the change of spiritual states. Again, we can see this a little bit within our minds. If we imagine talking to one friend then talking to another, it feels like going from one place to another, even though we're not moving. The same is true if we picture a moment from childhood and then imagine something in the future; it feels like a movement through time even though it's instantaneous. Changing our state of mind feels like a physical change in space and time. The Bible simply reverses that, with marking points in space and time representing particular states of mind.