3161. 'Behold, Rebekah is before you; take her and go, and let her be your master's son's wife, as Jehovah has spoken' means consent inspired from the Lord. This too could be shown by an explanation of all the individual words, the general import of these in the internal sense being the meaning that has just been stated. The implications are as follows: When the Lord lived in the world He made the Human within Himself Divine by His own power, the human with everyone having its beginnings in the inmost part of the rational, 2106, 2194. This verse describes how He made it Divine, that is to say, already so as of good and of truth. The good there came from His essential Divinity, that is, from Jehovah the Father from whom He had been conceived; but the truth there had to be acquired by the ordinary way, as with every other human being.

[2] It is well known that nobody is born rational but merely into the ability to become so, and that he becomes rational by means of factual knowledge, that is to say, by means of cognitions which divide up into many genera and species, the first of which are the means leading on to those next to them, and so on in order to the last of all which are cognitions of the spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom and are called matters of doctrine. These latter cognitions are learned in part from the doctrine of faith, in part directly from the Word, and in part therefore by a person's own efforts, as is also well known. As long as these matters of doctrine remain solely in the memory they are merely factual truths and have not as yet been made over to the individual as his own. They first become made over to him when he starts to love them for the sake of life, and more so when he applies them to life. When this happens truths are raised up from the natural memory into the rational part of the mind and are there joined to good. And when they have been joined they are no longer matters of knowledge but of life, for in that case a person is no longer learning from truths how to live but actually living by them. In this way truths come to be his own and become matters of the will. He accordingly enters the heavenly marriage, for the heavenly marriage consists in good and truth joined together in the rational. With men these things are accomplished by the Lord.

[3] But in Himself the Lord did this by Himself, unaided. From the Divine itself He not only begot the Rational as regards Good, but also through this the Natural as regards Truth, which He joined to Good. For it is good that chooses truth for itself and also gives form to it, for good acknowledges nothing else as truth but that which is compatible with it. Thus Divine good that was the Lord's moulded Truth for itself. Nor did it acknowledge as Truth anything else than that which would be compatible with Divine Good, that is, which would be Divine of Itself. Thus He achieved every single thing by His own power. These are the things that are meant by 'acknowledgement that it was the Lord's alone' and by 'consent inspired from the Lord'.

2021. 'For an eternal covenant' means conjunction with these people. This is clear from the meaning of 'a covenant' as conjunction, dealt with already in 665, 666, 1023, 1038; and that this conjunction is with those called 'the seed' is clear from the fact of its coming immediately after a reference to that 'seed', and of its being a second mention in this verse of a covenant. Thus the first mention of 'a covenant' has reference to the union of Jehovah with the Human Essence, and the second to the conjunction with those who are 'the seed'. To allow a clearer idea of the union of the Lord's Divine Essence with the Human Essence and of the conjunction of the Lord with the human race by means of the faith that inheres in charity, let the term union here and from now on be used to describe the first of these, and conjunction the second. Indeed the bond between the Lord's Divine Essence and Human Essence really was a union, but that between the Lord and the human race by means of the faith that inheres in charity is conjunction. From this it is clear that because Jehovah or the Lord is Life, His Human Essence became Life as well, as shown above. It was a union of life with life. Man however is not life but a recipient of life, as also shown already. When life flows into a recipient of life conjunction takes place, for life accommodates itself to the recipient as active does to passive or as that which in itself is living does to that which in itself is dead but made living from that which in itself is living. In the case of the principal and the instrumental, as they are called, they do indeed seem to have been joined together to exist as one. Nevertheless they are not one, for each exists by itself. Man does not live of himself, but the Lord in His mercy links him to Himself and in so doing causes him to live for ever. And because the Lord and man are distinct and separate from each other the term conjunction is used.