1106. Spiritual Devastation

THERE are many people who in their naiveté and ignorance soaked up falsities about religion while they were in the world, developed a certain brand of conscience harmonizing with the principles of their faith, and, unlike some others, did not live a life of hatred, revenge, and adultery. In the next world, they cannot be admitted into heavenly society as long as their ideas remain false, because if they were, they would contaminate it. So they are kept in an underground region for some time in order to slough off their false assumptions there. The period of their stay in that place is longer or shorter, depending on the nature of their false thinking and the kind of life it led them to adopt, and depending also on the degree to which they have cemented such principles in their minds. Some people suffer rather harshly there, some not so harshly.

This is what is called devastation, and mention of it comes up quite often in the Word. ¹

When their period of devastation has ended, they are lifted into heaven, where as novices they receive instruction in religious truth. The angels who welcome them are their teachers.

Фусноти:

937. The above also shows what the Lord's Word is like in its inner meaning. In its literal sense it seems so unsophisticated that we necessarily see it as speaking only of sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, when in reality these details involve secrets that were known to the ancient or spiritual church. The actual, literal words act in just this way — as extremely ordinary containers, so to speak, whose finer details hold heavenly secrets in such great number and of such great importance that not one millionth of them could ever be fully explored. When angels look with the Lord's eyes at those common, everyday words, drawn from an earthly vocabulary, they can see the whole process of regeneration and also the condition of both a regenerating and a regenerate person, in all their boundless variety. Humankind, on the other hand, sees hardly anything.