Wine played a key role in the ancient world, where safe, reliable water sources were scarce. It could be stored for long periods of time; if lightly fermented it was rich in sugar content; it was high in mineral content; it tasted good and generally had intoxicating qualities. Thus it was a valuable commodity and treated with reverence.

Wine is, of course, made from grapes. Grapes – sweet, juicy, nutritious and full of energy-rich fructose – represent the Lord's own exquisite desire to be good to us. That's powerful stuff! But grapes have a short shelf life; you might eat a bunch for a burst of energy, but you can't exactly carry them around with you for long-term sustenance. And so it is with desires for good: They tend to come to us in energizing bursts, but fade away fairly quickly. We need something more stable and lasting.

At some point in the distant past people figured out that if you squeeze the juice from the grapes and let it ferment, the result is a liquid that offers that stability: wine. The spiritual meaning works the same way; if we examine our desires for good, try to understand and think about how to apply them, what we will get are concepts about what good really is, how to recognize it and how to make it happen. And just like the wine, these ideas offer stability and portability. For instance, finding a wallet full of cash on the sidewalk might severely test our desire to be honest, but the idea that "you shall not steal" is pretty hard to shake.

Wine, then, on the deepest level represents divine truth flowing from divine goodness – the true principles that arise from the fact that the Lord loves us and desires everything good for us.

Wine comes in many varieties, though, and is used in many ways. Depending on context it can represent truth that arises from a desire for good on much more mundane levels. You want your children to be healthy so you make them brush their teeth even though they complain and it's a pain in the neck; the truth that brushing their teeth is good for them is wine on a very day-to-day level.

In some cases wine can also actually represent good things that arise from true ideas, something of a reverse from its inmost meaning. This happens when we are in transitional stages, setting higher ideas and principles above our less-worthy desires in an effort to reshape our actions. In that case our principles are the things being squeezed, with good habits the result.

There is also, of course, a darker side to wine. There is a good deal of debate about just how much alcohol wine had in Biblical times, and some of it may indeed have been more like concentrated grape juice. But there are also many references to wine and drunkeness, so some of it, at least, was fairly potent.

On a spiritual level, getting drunk on wine represents relying too much on our ideas, taking logic to such an extreme that we forget the good things we were trying to achieve in the first place.

(Odkazy: Apocalypse Explained 376 [1-40], 1152; Apocalypse Revealed 316, 635; Arcana Coelestia 1071 [1-5], 1727, 3580 [1-4], 5117 [7], 6377, 10137 [1-10]; The Apocalypse Explained 329 [2-4]; The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 219)

7502. 'behold, the hand of Jehovah will be on your livestock that are in the field' means the laying waste of the truth and good of faith which they had acquired from the Church to which they had belonged. This is clear from the meaning of 'the hand of Jehovah being on someone' as a plague or punishment, for 'hand' means power, 4931-4937, 6292, 6947, 7188, 7189, and 'the hand of Jehovah' almighty power, 878, 3387, and since those who are confined to the superficial things of the Church are led by appearances to believe that every plague or punishment comes from Jehovah (for they attribute all things to His power), 'the hand of Jehovah being on someone' means punishment, in this instance laying waste or vastation (for the stages In the vastation of those who molested were punishments); from the meaning of 'livestock' as forms of the truth and good of faith, dealt with in 6016, 6045, 6049; and from the meaning of 'the field' as the Church, dealt with in 2971, 3310. 'The field' is the Church because 'seed' which is cast onto the field means the truths of faith, and also because 'the products of the field', such as wheat, barley, spelt, and forms of the good of charity, and truths of faith, thus the kinds of things that belong to the Church.

[2] To understand why it is that hellish spirits who molest the upright in the next life undergo vastation in respect of the truths of faith taught by the Church, it should be recognized that those who molest the upright belonged to the Church. Those who have not belonged to the Church cannot molest others who do belong to it. They cannot do so because falsities, which are opposed to the truths of faith taught by the Church, are what spirits use when they molest, and those who have been outside the Church cannot molest anyone by means of such falsities because they have never come to know them. It is those who have claimed to be believers but have lead an evil life that turn to falsities in the next life and molest the upright with them, see 7097, 7127, 7317. Therefore to prevent the truth of faith which they had acquired from the teachings of their Church while they were living in the world from affording them any light at all from heaven (for they take with them into the next life everything they have come to know in the life of the body; nothing whatever is missing), and to prevent them from using things seen in the light of heaven to lend support to the falsities and evils belonging to hell, everything like that is taken away from them, and they are left finally with the evils forming their life and with the resulting falsities. This vastation is the subject at present.

[3] The reason why those who have belonged to the Church but led an evil life are devastated in stages in this way before they are cast into hell is that they had come to know the truths of faith, which put them in contact with heaven. The heavenly communities with whom they were in contact in the world, and with whom they are still in contact in the next life, cannot be separated from them except in stages. For in heaven such is the nature of order originating in the Lord that nothing is carried out in a violent manner. Everything people do they do in freedom, of their own accord so to speak. Therefore those communities are not wrenched away from them, but separated gradually, so that those people may seem to depart of their own free will and accord. From this one may now see what vastation is like for those who have known the truths of faith taught by the Church and yet have led an evil life.

[4] Without revelation no one can be aware of what such vastation is like; for without revelation people have no knowledge of things that take place in the next life. And since people show little concern to find out from the Word about the truths and forms of the good of faith, because they have no affection for truth for its own sake, let alone for life's sake, neither are such things revealed to them. Yet these things are discernible in the Word; indeed the whole sequence in which they occur and the course they take is presented in its internal sense. Since therefore people in the Church have no affection for knowing truth from the Word, only an affection - for worldly reasons - for substantiating the teachings of their Church, whether true or false, they know nothing whatever about the state after death, nothing about heaven, and nothing about hell. They do not even know what makes heaven or what makes hell with a person. In fact their ignorance is such that they teach and believe that anyone can be admitted into heaven, some believing that a person can be admitted by the power which they have arrogated to themselves, others by the Lord's mercy, irrespective of the life the person has been leading. Scarcely any know that heaven is given to people while they live in the world, through a life of charity and faith, and that this life is enduring. These matters have been stated in order that people may know what members of the Church are like who advocate faith alone but are unconcerned about the life of faith; for these are the ones who are represented by the Egyptians here and in what follows below.