497. And they have power over waters to turn them to blood. This symbolically means that people who turn away from these two essential elements falsify the Word's truths.

Waters symbolize truths (no. 50), and blood a falsification of the Word's truth (no. 379). Thus turning waters to blood symbolizes a falsifying of the Word's truths.

This has the same meaning as before, namely, that people who turn away from the two essential elements of the New Church cannot see anything but the falsities in which they are caught up, and if they use the Word to defend them, they falsify its truths.

7710. 'Stretch out your hand towards heaven' means exercising the power of God's truth in heaven. This is clear from the meaning of 'stretching out the hand' as an exercising of power, dealt with above in 7673; from the representation of Moses, the one who was told to 'stretch out his hand', as God's truth, dealt with in 6723, 6752, 7010, 7014, 7382; and from the meaning of 'heaven' as the angelic heaven. How it is that exercising the power of God's truth in heaven could bring about the new state among the molesting ones that is meant by 'thick darkness' is clear from what has been shown in 7643, 7679. There it has been shown that the Lord is continually rearranging heaven, and that He endows those in heaven, and newcomers, with celestial and spiritual good. This continual rearranging causes the vastation which the evil undergo in stages; for after rearrangement that good flows from a more immediate position towards the evil who are governed by the opposite of such good. (The inflow from God continues onwards right into what is opposed to it and in so doing keeps the hells bound and chained.) And since the evil turn all good into evil, they turn into greater evil the good that flows in from a more immediate position. The more they do so, the stronger is their resistance to what is good and true, that is, the fiercer is their molestation of it. So it is that the vastation they undergo proceeds in stages, till at length they are cast into hell, which is the final stage of it. From all this one may see that what emanates from the Lord is nothing but good, and that He does not lay waste the evil, still less cast them into hell, but that they themselves cause it to happen.