842. The symbolism of and God made a wind pass over the earth, and the waters subsided, as putting everything in its proper place is established by the symbolism of the wind in the Word. The wind is used as a metaphor, a simile, and even a name for all spirits, both good and evil. The original language uses the same word for both spirits and the winds. 1
During our struggles — which are the waters that subsided, as shown before [§§705, 739, 790] — it is evil spirits that flood in. They crowd in on us with their delusional thinking and stir up the same kind of thinking in us. When something banishes these spirits, or rather the hallucinations they induce, the Word describes the wind (and in fact the east wind) as the agent.
[2] For an individual who is being tested, the circumstances surrounding the end of the struggle's commotions (or waters) are the same as those for a larger collection of people, as I have learned from much experience. Evil spirits in the world of spirits sometimes form gangs and cause disturbances, but they are dispersed by other groups of spirits that generally approach from the right and so from the east. These groups strike such fear and terror into the evil spirits that they cannot think about anything but running away. Though they had ganged together, they scatter in all directions, and this is the way in which such coalitions of spirits mobbing together for evil purposes are dissolved. The groups of spirits who disperse them by this method are called an east wind. Countless other ways of disbanding them exist, and these too are called east winds. With the Lord's divine mercy, they will be described below [§§1398, 2128, 4793:5, 7679:1]. When the evil spirits have scattered, and the mob and its agitation are past, a calm or silence occurs.
The case is similar for an individual during times of trial. In those periods, the person is surrounded by a crowd of the same type of spirits as above, and after they have been driven off or dispelled, there is a kind of calm — the first step in putting everything where it belongs.
[3] Before being reduced to order, it is very common for everything to fall into confusion or seeming chaos. This allows things that cling together poorly to separate, and when they have separated, the Lord arranges them in their place.
Nature offers parallels, since in it too each and every thing first falls into some degree of disorder before being put in order. If the skies did not storm, causing unlike elements to scatter, the air would never clear; destructive forces would amass and wreak havoc.
The human body displays the same characteristic. Unless all the components of the blood, whether compound or pure, were continuously and cyclically combined and pumped into a single heart first and mingled there, the fluid component would coagulate in a fatal way. The individual elements would never be distributed to perform their proper functions. 2
It is the same with a person who is regenerating.
[4] The wind — specifically the east wind — simply symbolizes the dispersal of falsity and evil (or, what is the same, of evil spirits and demons) and the organizing of them that follows. This can be seen in the Word, as, for instance, in Isaiah:
You will disperse them, and the wind will carry them off, and a storm will scatter them. And you will rejoice in Jehovah; in the Holy One of Israel you will glory. (Isaiah 41:16)
The dispersal (of evil) is compared here to a wind and the scattering to a storm. When this occurs, those who are reborn will rejoice in Jehovah. In David:
Look! The monarchs assembled; they passed by together; they saw. So they were stupefied; they were bewildered; they rushed away. Terror seized them there — pain like that of one in labor. With an east wind you will shatter them. 3
(Psalms 48:4, 5, 6-7)
This describes the terror and confusion that the east wind brings over such spirits. The description stems from things that happen in the world of spirits, because the Word's inner meaning involves such things.
[5] In Jeremiah:
It will make their land something shocking; like an east wind I will scatter them before their enemy. I will turn toward them with my neck and not my face on the day of their disaster. (Jeremiah 18:16-17)
Here again the east wind stands for the dispersal of falsity. Something similar is represented by the east wind that dried up the Suph Sea 4
to allow the children of Israel to cross, as mentioned in Exodus:
Jehovah drew back the Suph Sea by means of a powerful east wind the whole night, and he made the sea into dry land, and the water was divided. (Exodus 14:21)
The water of the Suph Sea represented something much like what the waters of the Flood do in the present verse. This can be seen from the fact that the Egyptians, who represented the wicked, drowned, while the children of Israel, who represented the regenerate (as Noah does in the present verse), walked across. The Suph Sea, like the Flood, represented damnation and also times of trial. So the east wind represented the dispersal of the water, that is, the abatement of damnation's evils or a person's trials. The parallels can also be seen in the Song of Moses, which he sang after the Israelites had crossed that sea (Exodus 15:1-19), and in Isaiah:
Jehovah will exterminate the tongue of Egypt's sea and wave his hand over the river in the fierceness of his wind and strike it into seven rivers and make way [for them as they walk] in their shoes. And there will be a path for the survivors of his people who will remain from Assyria, as there was for Israel when he went up from the land of Egypt. (Isaiah 11:15-16)
The path for the survivors of the people left from Assyria stands for the process of putting things in their proper place.
Note a piè di pagina:
