7795. 'So that My wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt' means in order that they may receive corroboration that they have had no faith but are ruled by evil. This is clear from the meaning of the wonders and signs that were performed in Egypt as stages of vastation and consequent corroborations that they are ruled by evil, dealt with in 7633. For all those wonders were signs of an equal number of stages in the vastation undergone by those within the Church who had been acquainted with such things as are matters of faith and yet had led an evil life. And since these are the ones who molest the upright in the next life their state now is what is meant here, 7465. 'Multiplying these wonders means the consecutive stages of those states. The reason why there are so many stages is that they serve to corroborate for the evil that they are ruled by evil and also to enlighten the good regarding the state of those within the Church who have led an evil life, 7673. If these reasons had not stood in the way the evil could have been damned without delay and let down into hell without going through so many consecutive changes of states.

[2] The fact that the evil pass through so many states before they are damned and let down into hell is completely unknown in the world. People think that a person is either damned or saved immediately, and that this is done without his having to go through anything. But the truth of the matter is different from that. Justice reigns there; no one is damned before he himself knows and is inwardly convinced that he is ruled by evil and cannot by any means have his being in heaven. His evils are also made plain to him, as accords with the Lord's words in Luke,

Nothing has been hidden that will not be revealed, or concealed that will not be made known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light; and what you have spoken in the ear in bedchambers will be proclaimed on the housetops. Luke 12:2-3, 9; Matthew 10:16; Mark 4:11.

And what is more, that person is also warned to refrain from evil. But when he cannot do so because he is ruled by evil the power to do ill through falsifications of truth and semblances of good is taken away from him. It is removed in stages, one after another; and eventually damnation follows, and being let down into hell, which happens when he comes into the evil of his life.

[3] The evil of a person's life is evil constituting his will and consequently his thought. That is, it is what he is like inwardly, and would be like outwardly if laws did not stand in the way, or the fear that he might lose wealth, position, reputation, and even life. The life of his will and thought is what follows everyone after death, not his outward life, unless it emanates from his inward life. For outwardly a person feigns the opposite of his inner self; therefore when after death he undergoes vastation of externals, what he has been like in both will and thought made evident. This state is what every evil person is reduced to through the stages of vastation; for all vastation in the next life moves from externals to internals. All this shows what justice is like in the next life and what kind of experiences an evil person goes through before he is damned.

From this it is evident that 'multiplying My signs in the land of Egypt' means in order that they may receive corroboration that they have no faith but are ruled by evil. Regarding the absence of faith in those ruled by evil, see above in 7778.

At the inmost level, the story of Moses -- like all of the Bible -- is about the Lord and his spiritual development during his human life as Jesus. Moses's role represents establishing forms of worship and to make the people obedient. As such, his primary representation is "the Law of God," the rules God gave the people of Israel to follow in order to represent spiritual things. This can be interpreted narrowly as the Ten Commandments, more broadly as the books of Moses, or most broadly as the entire Bible. Fittingly, his spiritual meaning is complex and important, and evolves throughout the course of his life. To understand it, it helps to understand the meaning of the events in which he was involved. At a more basic level, Moses's story deals with the establishment of the third church to serve as a container of knowledge of the Lord. The first such church -- the Most Ancient Church, represented by Adam and centered on love of the Lord -- had fallen prey to human pride and was destroyed. The second -- the Ancient Church, represented by Noah and the generations that followed him -- was centered on love of the neighbor, wisdom from the Lord and knowledge of the correspondences between natural and spiritual things. It fell prey to the pride of intelligence, however -- represented by the Tower of Babel -- and at the time of Moses was in scattered pockets that were sliding into idolatry. On an external level, of course, Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt through 40 years in the wilderness to the border of the homeland God had promised them. Along the way, he established and codified their religious system, and oversaw the creation of its most holy objects. Those rules and the forms of worship they created were given as containers for deeper ideas about the Lord, deeper truth, and at some points -- especially when he was first leading his people away from Egypt, a time before the rules had been written down -- Moses takes on the deeper representation of Divine Truth itself, truth from the Lord. At other times -- especially after Mount Sinai -- he has a less exalted meaning, representing the people of Israel themselves due to his position as their leader. Through Moses the Lord established a third church, one more external than its predecessors but one that could preserve knowledge of the Lord and could, through worship that represented spiritual things, make it possible for the Bible to be written and passed to future generations.