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.

4415. Recently arrived souls, or novitiate spirits - that is to say, people who a few days after death of the body have entered the next life - are utterly amazed at the existence of light in the next life, for they bring with them the uninformed idea that there are no other sources of light than the sun and material flame. Still less do they know of a light which brings light to the understanding, for they have not observed it during their lifetime; and still less that such light provides the capacity to think, and by flowing into forms which exist from the light of the world frames everything seen in the understanding. If those novitiate spirits have been good people they are raised up, for the purpose of their instruction, to heavenly communities, passing from one community to another. They are raised up to these so that they may recognize through actual experience that light exists in the next life, a light that is brighter than that which shines in the world can ever be, and that the amount of light they dwell in there determines the amount of intelligence. Some borne up into spheres of heavenly light have spoken to me from there, confessing that they had never believed in any such thing and that the light of the world in comparison was darkness. From there they also looked through my eyes into the light of the world, which they saw to be nothing other than dark cloud. And they said, doing so with feelings of pity, that such was the darkness in which men dwelt. From what has been said one may also see why in the Word the angels of heaven are called angels of light; also that the Lord is the Light, and consequently the Life, for men, John 1:1-8; 8:12.