24
And the king hath said, and they have brought those men who had accused Daniel, and to the den of lions they have cast them, they, their sons, and their wives; and they have not come to the lower part of the den till that the lions have power over them, and all their bones they have broken small.
31
`While the word is [in] the king's mouth a voice from the heavens hath fallen: To thee they are saying: O Nebuchadnezzar the king, the kingdom hath passed from thee,
10411. 'And built an altar in front of it' means worship. This is clear from the meaning of 'an altar' as the chief representative of Divine worship, dealt with in 4541, 8935, 8940, 9714, 10242, 10245, but at this point that which is representative of devilish worship since those whose interest lies in external things and not in what is internal are in contact with the hells and not with the heavens. (For a person's internal is his heaven, and his external is his world. His internal furthermore has been so created as to conform to an image of heaven, thus to receive such things as belong there, and his external to conform to an image of the world, thus to receive such things as belong here, see in the places referred to in 9279, 10156. Consequently when the internal is closed, so is heaven, and then the external is no longer ruled from heaven but from hell.) Therefore their worship is not Divine but devilish. They do, it is true, speak of the Divine and also offer Him worship, but outwardly and not inwardly, that is, with their lips but not with their heart. Nor do they worship 1 the Divine for His sake but for the sake of themselves and the world. Where the heart is, in that place there is worship. From all this it is evident that 'building an altar in front of the golden calf' means worship of the devil.
각주:
1. The Latin means And those who do otherwise do not worship. But this does not seem to make sense; nor is it what Swedenborg has in his rough draft.
후원하기:
