630. "And worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water." This symbolically means that the Lord alone is to be worshiped, because He alone is the Creator, Savior, and Redeemer, and because the angelic heaven and the church and everything in them originate from Him alone.

To worship means, symbolically, to acknowledge as holy, as may be seen in nos. 579, 580, 588, 603 above. Consequently, when said in reference to the Lord, to worship means, symbolically, to acknowledge as God of heaven and earth and to worship. To make heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water, in the natural sense means to create them, but in the spiritual sense it symbolically means to form the angelic heaven and the church and everything in them. For heaven symbolizes, in the spiritual sense, the angelic heaven; the earth and the sea symbolize in that sense the internal church and the external church (nos. 403, 404, 420, 470); and springs of water symbolize all the Word's truths that serve the church for its doctrine and life (no. 409).

[2] The Creator, Jehovah, is the Lord from eternity, and the Savior and Redeemer is the Lord born in time, thus the Lord in respect to His Divine humanity, as can be seen from beginning to end in The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Lord.

Who cannot understand that one God is the creator of the universe, and that there are not three creators? And that creation has as its goal a heaven and church from the human race? (On which subject see Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Providence, nos. 27-45.) So it is that in the spiritual sense to make heaven and the earth means, symbolically, to form the angelic heaven and the church.

This is said for the same reason as in no. 613 above, where we explain what is symbolically meant by having the name of the Father written on their foreheads. And because that was said there, therefore it says here, "worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water."

27. The Lord's Divine Providence Has as Its Goal a Heaven from the Human Race

I have explained elsewhere that heaven did not originate in angels who were created angels at the beginning, and that hell did not originate in a devil who was created an angel of light and was cast down from heaven. Rather, both heaven and hell are from the human race. Heaven is made up of people who are involved in a love for what is good and a consequent discernment of what is true, and hell of people who are involved in a love for what is evil and a discernment of what is false. I have been given convincing evidence of this through long-term association with angels and spirits, and would refer you to Heaven and Hell 311-316, the booklet The Last Judgment 14-27, and the whole of Supplements on the Last Judgment and the Spiritual World.

[2] Since heaven comes from the human race, then, and since heaven is living with the Lord forever, it follows that this was the Lord's goal for creation. Further, since this was the goal of creation, it is the goal of the Lord's divine providence.

The Lord did not create the universe for his own sake but for the sake of people he would be with in heaven. By its very nature, spiritual love wants to share what it has with others, and to the extent that it can do so, it is totally present, experiencing its peace and bliss. Spiritual love gets this quality from the Lord's divine love, which is like this in infinite measure.

It then follows that divine love (and therefore divine providence) has the goal of a heaven made up of people who have become angels and are becoming angels, people with whom it can share all the bliss and joy of love and wisdom, giving them these blessings from the Lord's own presence within them. He cannot help doing this, because his image and likeness is in us from creation. His image in us is wisdom and his likeness in us is love; and the Lord within us is love united to wisdom and wisdom united to love, or goodness united to truth and truth united to goodness, which is the same thing. (See the preceding section for a description of this union.)

[3] However, people do not know what heaven is in general or in groups of people and what heaven is in particular or in an individual. They do not know what heaven is in the spiritual world and what it is in the physical world, either; and yet it is important to know about these matters. Consequently, I want to shed some light on this, in the following sequence.

1. Heaven is union with the Lord.

2. Our nature from creation enables us to be more and more closely united to the Lord.

3. The more closely we are united to the Lord, the wiser we become.

4. The more closely we are united to the Lord, the happier we become.

5. The more closely we are united to the Lord, the more clearly we seem to have our own identity, and yet the more obvious it is to us that we belong to the Lord.