1. THE BOOK OF GENESIS

The Word of the Old Testament contains heavenly arcana, with every single detail focusing on the Lord, His heaven, the Church, faith, and what belongs to faith; but no human being grasps this from the letter. Judging it by the letter or sense of the letter, nobody views it as anything more than a record, in the main, of external features of the Jewish Church. Yet at every point there are internal features that are nowhere evident in the external, apart from the very few which the Lord revealed and explained to the Apostles, such as that sacrifices mean the Lord; that the land of Canaan and Jerusalem mean heaven, which is therefore called Canaan and the heavenly Jerusalem; and that Paradise is similar in meaning.

937. All this evidence shows the nature of the Word of the Lord in the internal sense. What appears in the sense of the letter is so gross that nothing more can be recognized than statements about seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night. Yet these phrases embody the arcana of the Ancient or spiritual Church. Such is the nature of the actual words in the sense of the letter, so that they are like very general vessels, every single one of which contains so many and such vast heavenly arcana that not even one ten-thousandth can possibly be brought to the surface. For while man can see scarcely anything, angels are enabled from the Lord to see with unending variety, in those very general words based on earthly images, the whole process of regeneration, and the state both of those who have yet to be regenerated and of those who are regenerated.

1869. SACRED SCRIPTURE OR THE WORD - continued

How many things are contained within a single expression of the Word has been demonstrated to me by an opening up to view of the ideas that comprise thought. In the next life this can be done - it being one of the marvels there - in so vivid a way that the ideas themselves may be seen in visible form, thus as coloured images so to speak. The ideas belonging to one who had led a life of charity or mutual love, and who during his lifetime had taken great delight in the Word, were opened up to view in that manner. Countless things that were beautiful were seen, together with those which were movingly delightful and pleasant. I was told that the things which are seen within such visible forms may be opened up further again as to their interiors, and once these have been opened, that still more beautiful and delightful things are manifested, together with those that constitute happiness itself. All angelic ideas are such, for they are laid open from the Lord Himself.

[2] To spirits who were surprised that in the next life the ideas comprising thought can be opened to view in such a manner, this matter was illustrated by taking as an example the sight of the eye, of which the powers of vision are so dull and dim that the smaller things of the natural world which have countless details in them are not seen except as something opaque, black, and patternless. But when the same objects are looked at under a microscope, things that are more interior are brought to view, linked one to another in a lovely sequence, and flowing in a delightful order. At the same time it was recognized that those objects too could have been opened up further still by a more powerful microscope. This illustration made clear the nature of internal sight, of which the powers of vision are nothing other than ideas; for in themselves those ideas are so gross that scarcely anything more gross is able to exist in that sphere, though man thinks otherwise. But more regarding ideas will in the Lord's Divine mercy be stated later on.