11. God is the essential person. Throughout all the heavens, the only concept of God is a concept of a person. The reason is that heaven, overall and regionally, is in a kind of human form, and Divinity among the angels is what makes heaven. Further, thinking proceeds in keeping with heaven's form, so it is not possible for angels to think about God in any other way. This is why all the people on earth who are in touch with heaven think about God in the same way when they are thinking very deeply, or in their spirit.

It is because God is a person that all angels and spirits are perfectly formed people. This is because of heaven's form, which is the same in its largest and its smallest manifestations. (On heaven being in a human form overall and regionally, see Heaven and Hell 59-87 [59-86], and on thought progressing in keeping with heaven's form, see 203-204 there.)

It is common knowledge that we were created in the image and likeness of God because of Genesis 1:26-27 and from the fact that Abraham and others saw God as a person.

The early people, wise and simple alike, thought of God only as a person. Even when they began to worship many gods, as they did in Athens and Rome, they worshiped them as persons. By way of illustration, here is an excerpt from an earlier booklet.

Non-Christians--especially Africans--who acknowledge and worship one God as the Creator of the universe conceive of that God as a person. They say that no one can have any other concept of God. When they hear that many people prefer an image of God as a little cloud in the center, they ask where these people are; and when they are told that these people are among the Christians, they respond that this is impossible. They are told, however, that Christians get this idea from the fact that in the Word God is called a spirit; and the only concept they have of spirit is of a piece of cloud. They do not realize that every spirit and every angel is a person. However, when inquiry was made to find out whether their spiritual concept was the same as their earthly one, it turned out that it was not the same for people who inwardly recognized the Lord as the God of heaven and earth.

I heard one Christian elder say that no one could have a concept of a being both divine and human; and I saw him taken to various non-Christians, more and more profound ones. Then he was taken to their heavens, and finally to a heaven of Christians. Through the whole process people's inner perception of God was communicated to him, and he came to realize that their only concept of God was a concept of a person--which is the same as a concept of a being both divine and human.

4832. 'And Er, Judah's firstborn, was evil in the eyes of Jehovah' means that it was immersed in falsity springing from evil. This is clear from the representation of 'Er' and from the meaning of 'firstborn' as falsity of faith, dealt with just above in 4830. Evidence that this falsity was falsity springing from evil is given in what has been stated above in 4818. But with this son the falsity springing from evil was of such a nature that not even that which was representative of the Church could be established among any who would have been descended from him, and therefore it is said that 'he was evil in the eyes of Jehovah, and Jehovah caused him to die'. Among that whole nation - right from the start, and especially from Judah onwards - falsity springing from evil was present, that is, a false teaching that resulted from evil living, though that falsity was different with one son of Judah from what it was with another. Which of these could serve a purpose was foreseen, and this was not that existing with Er the firstborn; nor was it that with Onan the secondborn, but that existing with Shelah. Therefore those first two sons were destroyed, whereas this third was preserved. The existence among that whole nation, from when it first began, of falsity springing from evil is described plainly in Moses in the following words,

Self-corrupted; not his sons; the blemish is theirs; a perverse and crooked generation. When Jehovah saw, and rejected - with more than indignation - His sons and His daughters. And He said, I will hide My face from them; I will see what their posterity will be, for they are a perverse generation, sons in whom there is no faithfulness. I will add evils upon them, I will expend My arrows on them; they will be exhausted with famine, and consumed with burning coal, and with bitter destruction. They are a nation from whom counsel has perished, in whom there is no intelligence; from the vine of Sodom comes their vine, and from the ploughed fields of Gomorrah, their grapes are grapes of gall, their dusters are bitterness. The poison of dragons is their wine, and the cruel gall of asps. Is not this stored up with Me, sealed up in My treasures? The day of their destruction is near, and the things to come upon them are hastening on. Deuteronomy 32:5, 10, 20, 23-24, 28, 32-35.

In the internal sense these words describe falsity springing from evil which existed among that nation, and the fact that this falsity was rooted deeply within them.