3139. Verses 31-33 And he said, Come, O blessed of Jehovah; why do you stand outside? And I have swept the house, and there is a place for the camels. And the man came to the house. And he ungirded the camels, and gave straw and fodder to the camels, and water to wash his feet and the feet of the men who were with him. And [food] was set before him to eat, and he said, I am not eating until I have spoken my words. And he said, Speak on!

'He said, Come, O blessed of Jehovah' means an invitation to the Divine within Himself. 'Why do you stand outside?' means at some distance away. 'And I have swept the house' means all things had been prepared and filled with forms of good. 'And there is a place for the camels' means a state for all the things which were to serve Him. 'And the man came to the house' means influx into the good there. 'And he ungirded the camels' means freedom for the things that were to be subservient. 'And gave straw and fodder to the camels' means instruction in truths and goods. 'And water to wash his feet' means purification there. 'And the feet of the men who were with him' means purification of all things that were His in the natural man. 'And [food] was set before him to eat' means that [the affection for] good in the natural man wished to make Divine things its own. 'And he said, I am not eating' means refusal. 'Until I have spoken my words' means until it had received instruction. 'And he said, Speak on!' means desire for it.

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.