In most places in the Word, "ten" represents "all," or in some cases "many" or "much." The Ten Commandments represent all the guidance we get from the Lord in life; the ten horns on the beast of Revelation represent all power of falsity; the ten virgins with lamps in Matthew 25 represent all people of the church.

Yet in other places, ten, or especially a "tenth," signifies representing remnants, or tiny scraps of goodness preserved for the future. These can be the remnants of a church -- a few good people that can be built up into a new church. Or they can be tiny subconscious memories of love and joy which the Lord stores in each of us in early childhood, feelings He can use later to draw us toward a life of goodness and affection.

These two meanings seem nearly opposite, but they're actually not. Love is whole and indivisible, so that the tiniest feeling buried inside someone contains all the elements of the love it can become. In a similar way, a remnant of a church that has preserved that church's knowledge has everything it needs to grow into a new church. In a sense, then, those remnants are indeed "all," they're just a version of "all" that is still in a state of potential.

5975. 'I will go and see him before I die' means the desire to be joined before what is new comes in. This is clear from the meaning of 'going and seeing' as being joined together (the reason 'seeing' is being joined together is that in the spiritual world inward seeing joins people together. Inward seeing is thought, and when in a community there many act as one, and also in organized groups, what one person thinks is also what another thinks, so that thought links them together. In addition, when someone thinks about another person, that person becomes present with him, so that again thought joins them together. Here is the reason why 'going and seeing' means a joining together; and the desire for such a joining together flows from the joy referred to immediately above in 5974); and from the meaning of 'before I die' as before what is new, that is to say, a new phase in representation comes in. For in the Word representatives succeed one another in the following way: When one person dies, then either the same representation is continued through another person or else a different representation, thus what is new comes in, a subject dealt with in 3253, 3259, 3276. When for example Abraham died, there followed a representative through Isaac; when he died, a representative through Jacob; and when he too died, a representative through his descendants. This new situation is what is meant here.