'Works,' as in Revelation 16:11, signify falsities of faith, and the resulting evils of life.

In Revelation, 'I know thy works,' is said frequently. This makes it clear that 'works' signify, generally, every aspect of the church.

'Works,' as in Genesis 46:33, denote goods, because they are from the will, and anything from the will is either good or evil, but anything from the understanding, like spoken words, are either truths or falsities.

In Genesis 2:2, the work signifies the celestial man, the highest use of God; or the accomplishment when the spiritual man becomes celestial. (Arcana Coelestia 84, 88)

In Exodus 5:9, work signifies assault for the purpose of subjugation. (Arcana Coelestia 7120)

In Genesis 39:11, it signifies the process when the Lord was conjoining Himself with spiritual good in the natural. (Arcana Coelestia 5004)

In Genesis 47:3; Psalms 8:3; 44:1; 63:12, works concern offices and uses which are done for the neighbor, the country, the church, and the Lord's kingdom.

In Exodus 5:4, work signifies that the people were not to be exempted from things that were hard to bear. (Arcana Coelestia 6073, Arcana Coelestia 7104)

In Revelation 2:2, works signify that the Lord sees man's exterior as well as his interior things. (Apocalypse Revealed 76)

In Revelation 2:6, it signifies that people do not want to claim personal merit. (Apocalypse Revealed 86)

In Revelation 2:19, 23, 26, it signifies all things of charity and faith. (Apocalypse Revealed 138, 141)

In Revelation 9:20, it signifies that they did not shun as sins their own things, which are evils of every kind. (Apocalypse Revealed 457)

(Odkazy: Arcana Coelestia 6048)

209. The last degree embraces, contains, and is the foundation of the prior degrees. The doctrine of degrees presented in this part of the work has been illustrated so far by various phenomena that occur in one or the other worlds, as by the degrees of the heavens where angels dwell, the degrees of warmth and light in them, and the degrees of their atmospheres, and by various phenomena in the human body, and likewise in the animal and mineral kingdoms.

This doctrine, however, has a wider application. It extends not only to natural phenomena, but also to civil, moral and spiritual matters, and to each and all of their components.

The doctrine of degrees extends to these matters as well for two reasons. The first is that everything of which anything can be predicated has in it a trine called end, cause and effect, and these three are related to each other as degrees of height.

[2] The second reason is that no civil, moral or spiritual matter is something abstracted from substance, but rather they are substances. For as love and wisdom are not abstractions, but are substance (as we demonstrated above in nos. 40-43), so likewise are all matters which we call civil, moral and spiritual. One can indeed think of these abstractly from substances, but still in themselves they are not abstract.

Consider, for example, affection and thought, charity and faith, will and intellect. For the case with these is the same as with love and wisdom, namely, that they do not exist apart from the subjects of which they are predicated - subjects which are substances - but rather they are states of the subjects or substances. In subsequent discussions we will see that it is changes in these states which produce their variations.

By substance we mean also form, for substance does not exist without form.