10178. 'With pieces of shittim wood you shall make it' means from love that is Divine. This is clear from the meaning of 'shittim wood' as the good of merit and of righteousness, which is the Lord's alone, dealt with in 9472, 9486, 9715. The reason why love as well is meant is that when the Lord was in the world He was motivated by Divine Love to fight against all the hells and overcome them, and in so doing to save the human race, as a result of which He alone has earned merit, and has become righteousness, see 9486, 9715, 9809, 10019, 10152; and the good of merit which is the Lord's is therefore His Divine Love. The reason why 'shittim wood' has so profound a meaning is that all things which exist in earth's three kingdoms - the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms - serve to mean spiritual and celestial realities, or else their opposites. (For the whole natural order is a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom, see the places referred to in 9280.) And 'wood' means in general the good of love, and in particular the good of merit, 2784, 2812, 3720, 4943, 8354, 8740. So it is that in the highest sense 'wood' means Divine Good; for all things serving in the internal sense to mean aspects of the Church and of heaven serve in the highest sense to mean Divine realities.

2996. Though in this world a very deep arcanum, nothing is better known in the next life, known even to every spirit, than the truth that all things in the human body have a correspondence with things in heaven. So true is this that not even the smallest part in the human body fails to have something spiritual and celestial, or what amounts to the same, the heavenly communities, corresponding to it. For heavenly communities exist according to all the genera and species of spiritual and celestial things; indeed they exist in such order that all of them together represent one human being. They do so in every single detail of the human being, both interior and exterior. This is why heaven considered as a whole is also called the Grand Man, and why so many times already one community has been spoken of as belonging to this part of the body, another community to that, and so on. The reason why heaven is described in this way is that the Lord is the only Man and heaven represents Him. Also it is Divine Good and Truth received from Him that constitute heaven, and therefore as angels are in heaven they' are said to be in the Lord. Those in hell however are outside of that Grand Man. These correspond to filth and also to things full of disease.