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Ezekiel 7

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1 Moreover the word of the LORD came to me, saying,

2 Also, thou son of man, thus saith the Lord GOD to the land of Israel; An end, the end is come upon the four corners of the land.

3 Now is the end come upon thee, and I will send my anger upon thee, and will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense upon thee all thy abominations.

4 And my eye shall not spare thee, neither will I have pity: but I will recompense thy ways upon thee, and thy abominations shall be in the midst of thee: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

5 Thus saith the Lord GOD; An evil, an only evil, behold, is come.

6 An end is come, the end is come: it watcheth for thee; behold, it is come.

7 The morning is come upon thee, O thou that dwellest in the land: the time is come, the day of trouble is near, and not the sounding again of the mountains.

8 Now will I shortly pour out my fury upon thee, and accomplish my anger upon thee: and I will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense thee for all thy abominations.

9 And my eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity: I will recompense thee according to thy ways and thy abominations that are in the midst of thee; and ye shall know that I am the LORD that smiteth.

10 Behold the day, behold, it is come; the morning is gone forth; the rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded.

11 Violence hath risen into a rod of wickedness: none of them shall remain, nor of their multitude, nor of any of theirs: neither shall there be wailing for them.

12 The time is come, the day draweth near: let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn: for wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.

13 For the seller shall not return to that which is sold, although they were yet alive: for the vision is concerning the whole multitude thereof, which shall not return; neither shall any strengthen himself in the iniquity of his life.

14 They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof:

15 The sword is without, and the pestilence and the famine within: he that is in the field shall die with the sword; and he that is in the city, famine and pestilence shall devour him.

16 But they that escape of them shall escape, and shall be on the mountains like doves of the valleys, all of them mourning, every one for his iniquity.

17 All hands shall be feeble, and all knees shall be weak as water.

18 They shall also gird themselves with sackcloth, and horror shall cover them; and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon all their heads.

19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels because it is the stumbling-block of their iniquity.

20 As for the beauty of his ornament, he set it in majesty: but they made the images of their abominations and of their detestable things therein: therefore have I set it far from them.

21 And I will give it into the hands of the strangers for a prey, and to the wicked of the earth for a spoil; and they shall pollute it.

22 My face will I turn also from them, and they shall pollute my secret place: for the robbers shall enter into it, and defile it.

23 Make a chain: for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.

24 Wherefore I will bring the worst of the heathen, and they shall possess their houses: I will also make the pomp of the strong to cease, and their holy places shall be defiled.

25 Destruction cometh; and they shall seek peace, and there shall be none.

26 Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumor shall be upon rumor; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the elders.

27 The king shall mourn, and the prince shall be clothed with desolation, and the hands of the people of the land shall be troubled: I will do to them after their way, and according to their deserts will I judge them, and they shall know that I am the LORD.

   

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Ezekiel 16:14

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14 And thy renown went forth among the heathen for thy beauty: for it was perfect through my comeliness, which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord GOD.

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Arcana Coelestia # 5786

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5786. 'behold, we are my lord's slaves' means that they are to be deprived for ever of their own freedom. This is clear from the meaning of slaves' as being without any freedom of their own, dealt with in 5760, 5763. What is meant by being deprived of the freedom of one's own has also been stated in the paragraphs that have just been mentioned; however, since it is an extremely important matter, let it be restated. A person has both an external man and an internal man. The external man is the means through which the internal man acts; for the external man is merely the organ or instrument of the internal. This being so, the external man must be made wholly subservient and subject to the internal; and when the external man is subject to the internal, heaven acts on the external man by means of the internal man and makes the external man conform to things such as are of heaven.

[2] The opposite occurs when the external man is not the servant but the master. The external man is the master when a person has the pleasure of the body and the senses as his end in view, especially when the objects of his selfish and worldly love and not the things of heaven are his end - to have as his end in view being to love one and not the other. For when a person has those objects as his end he no longer believes that there is any such thing as an internal man or that within himself there is anything that will be living when his body dies. In his case the internal, since it does not hold the position of the master, is merely the servant of the external, employed to enable thought and reasoning against what is good and true to take place; for in this person's case no other kind of influx by way of the internal is available. This is also the reason why people like this utterly despise, indeed recoil from the things of heaven. From all this it is plain that the external man, which is the same as the natural man, ought to be wholly subject to the internal or spiritual man, and consequently should exist without any freedom of its own.

[3] Freedom of one's own consists in giving oneself up to every kind of base pleasure, despising others in comparison with oneself, and making them subject like slaves to oneself. Or else it consists in persecuting others, hating them, being delighted when bad things happen to them - especially things done to them by one's own designs or by the use of deceit - and wishing to see them dead. These are the kinds of things that come from indulging one's own freedom. From this one may see what a person is like when he exercises this type of freedom, namely a devil in human form. But when he loses this freedom he receives a heavenly freedom from the Lord, the nature of which is completely unknown to those exercising the freedom of their own. They imagine that if the freedom of their own were taken away from them no life at all would remain. But in actual fact this is when true life has its beginning and when true delight, blessing, happiness, and wisdom arrive, because this freedom comes from the Lord.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.