A company might have executives setting policy and strategy, engineers designing products, managers handling personnel and others handling various functions. They all do different things -- but if they're doing them with a shared underlying purpose, the company -- and the individuals in it -- will likely be successful. The Lord wants all human society to function in a similar way. We have different skills and individual loves, but if we all share a mutual love -- a love of serving others -- then society will function as one, will be a reflection of heaven and will be a good receptacle for the Lord's love. This can also happen within each of us, as we unify our talents and ideas around a central love. And in an abstract sense, it illustrates how a wide collection of varying ideas can be unified around a shared good intention. That is the kind of love pictured when “one” is used in the Bible, either as a specific number or in the sense of several people or objects “being one.” In more casual references -- when used to identify a specific person or object -- the meaning is relatively literal, and is connected to that person or object.

1172. 'Dedan' means cognitions of lower celestial things that exist in ritual forms. This is clear from the following places in the Word: In Ezekiel,

The sons of Dedan were your traders, many islands were the merchandise of your hand; horns of ivory, and ebony they brought as your present. Ezekiel 27:15

'Horns of ivory, and ebony' in the internal sense means the exterior goods that constitute forms of worship or ritual. In the same prophet,

Dedan, she was your trader in chariot-cloaks, ¹ Arabia and all the princes of Kedar Ezekiel 27:20-21.

Here 'chariot-cloaks' ¹ in like manner means exterior goods, or those that constitute forms of ritual. In Jeremiah,

Their wisdom has become rotten. Flee! they have turned themselves away, they have taken themselves down to dwell in the deep, O inhabitants of Dedan. Jeremiah 49:7-8.

Here 'Dedan' in the proper sense stands for forms of ritual which have no internal worship, that is, no worship of the Lord from the heart within them, and which are spoken of as 'turning themselves back, and taking themselves down to dwell in the deep'. From the quotations above it is now clear that 'the sons of Cush' means cognitions of spiritual things, and 'the sons of Raamah' cognitions of celestial.

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