At the inmost level, the story of Moses -- like all of the Bible -- is about the Lord and his spiritual development during his human life as Jesus. Moses's role represents establishing forms of worship and to make the people obedient. As such, his primary representation is "the Law of God," the rules God gave the people of Israel to follow in order to represent spiritual things. This can be interpreted narrowly as the Ten Commandments, more broadly as the books of Moses, or most broadly as the entire Bible. Fittingly, his spiritual meaning is complex and important, and evolves throughout the course of his life. To understand it, it helps to understand the meaning of the events in which he was involved. At a more basic level, Moses's story deals with the establishment of the third church to serve as a container of knowledge of the Lord. The first such church -- the Most Ancient Church, represented by Adam and centered on love of the Lord -- had fallen prey to human pride and was destroyed. The second -- the Ancient Church, represented by Noah and the generations that followed him -- was centered on love of the neighbor, wisdom from the Lord and knowledge of the correspondences between natural and spiritual things. It fell prey to the pride of intelligence, however -- represented by the Tower of Babel -- and at the time of Moses was in scattered pockets that were sliding into idolatry. On an external level, of course, Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt through 40 years in the wilderness to the border of the homeland God had promised them. Along the way, he established and codified their religious system, and oversaw the creation of its most holy objects. Those rules and the forms of worship they created were given as containers for deeper ideas about the Lord, deeper truth, and at some points -- especially when he was first leading his people away from Egypt, a time before the rules had been written down -- Moses takes on the deeper representation of Divine Truth itself, truth from the Lord. At other times -- especially after Mount Sinai -- he has a less exalted meaning, representing the people of Israel themselves due to his position as their leader. Through Moses the Lord established a third church, one more external than its predecessors but one that could preserve knowledge of the Lord and could, through worship that represented spiritual things, make it possible for the Bible to be written and passed to future generations.

10808. THE SIXTH PLANET OUT IN SPACE - continued

The spirits whom I talked to then were from the northern part of their planet. After that I was taken to others who were from the western part. These, having a similar wish to find out who I was and what I was like, immediately began to say that I was thoroughly evil; they thought, if they said this, that I would be deterred from coming any nearer. I sensed that this was the first thing they said to all newcomers. But I was led to reply that I was fully aware of it, and that they likewise were thoroughly evil, since everyone is born into evil, and therefore whatever comes from man, spirit, or angel - that is, from the self or proprium - is nothing but evil; for any good that resides with a person comes from the Lord. From this they realized that I was in possession of the truth; so they allowed me to talk to them. They demonstrated to me then their conception of how the evil present in a person and good received from the Lord are kept apart. They set the two next to each other, almost touching but nevertheless separated. Yet they were seemingly bound together in an indescribable way, so that good could lead evil and check it, preventing it from acting however it liked, and so that good could thereby direct evil towards what good desired, though evil would not know it. This was how they presented the rule of good over evil and at the same time the free state in which evil is led by good towards good, thus towards the Lord; for from their picture of good they had a picture of the Lord since the good comes from Him.