4298. En Jakob noemde de naam van de plaats Peniël; dat dit de staat van de verzoekingen betekent, staat vast uit de samenhang; oudtijds werden aan plaatsen waar iets bijzonders voorviel, namen gegeven en deze namen waren tekenend voor de zaak die daar voorviel en voor de staat ervan, nrs. 340, 2643, 3422; aan deze plaats werd een naam gegeven die de staat van de verzoekingen betekende, want de staat van de verzoekingen wordt hier beschreven door de worsteling en het kampen van Jakob; Peniël betekent in de oorspronkelijke taal ‘de aangezichten van God’ ; dat ‘de aangezichten van God’ zien, wil zeggen, de zwaarste verzoekingen doorstaan, zal in wat volgt worden ontvouwd.

10809. After this they asked me in what way the Lord appears among angels from our planet. I said that He appears in the Sun as a Human Being, surrounded there by its fiery glow, the source of all the light that angels in heaven possess. The heat which radiates from there, I said, is Divine Good and the light which does so is Divine Truth, both coming from the Divine Love, which constitutes the fiery glow appearing around the Lord within that Sun. But that Sun, I added, appears only to angels in heaven, not to spirits below, since they are too far away to receive the good of love and truth of faith as angels in the heavens do. As for the worldly sun however, it does not appear to any in the next life, though it presents itself in their minds as a black, invisible object in the opposite direction from the Sun of heaven, which is the Lord. The reason why they had been allowed to question me about the Lord and His appearance before angels from our planet was that the Lord was then pleased to make Himself present among them and to restore to order things which, as they complained, the evil [spirits] there had overturned. To the end that I might see these things was also the reason why I had been taken to that part of the planet.