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.

8609. 'And they took a stone' means the lowest level of God's truth. This is clear from the meaning of 'a stone' as truth, 643, 1298, 3720, 3769, 3771, 3789, 3798, 6426, in this instance the lowest level of truth since it was put underneath him and he sat on it. An ordinary stone furthermore means a lower level of truth, while a precious stone means a higher or more internal level of truth. What the lowest level of truth is becomes clear from what has been stated above in 8603 about the levels of truth that follow one another in order; that is to say, there are interior truths and exterior truths, the lowest of which are meant by the lowest level of truth.