The Bible

 

Genesis 1:15

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15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Divine Love and Wisdom #288

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288. Since God is a person, the whole angelic heaven, taken as a single unit, presents itself as a single person. It is divided into regions and districts according to our human members, organs, and viscera. There are heavenly communities that make up the district of the brain and all its components, of all the facial parts, and of all our physical internal organs; and these districts are distinguished from each other exactly the way they are in us. In fact, angels know what district of the [heavenly] person they live in.

Heaven as a whole has this appearance because God is a person; and God is heaven because the angels who constitute heaven are recipients of love and wisdom from the Lord, and recipients are images.

I have explained at the close of a series of chapters in Secrets of Heaven that heaven is in the human form in all respects.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation for the permission to use this translation.

Commentary

 

Earth

  
by Brita Conroy

Earth" is a general word that can be thought of as a container for other more specific words, as ground, field, or garden. Each of these means a person in an ascending series as that person learns truths from the Bible, thinks about them, and tries to apply them to life. The series represents the way of becoming good and wise. "Earth" and "ground" are terms that can go either way, as in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:4-8) there was both good ground and bad ground, but "field" and "garden" mean minds that are regenerating towards good. "Earth" in the Bible can mean a person or a group of like-minded people as in a church. But it refers specifically to the external of the person's mind, or of the general thought of the group. If heaven and earth are mentioned together, then both the internals and externals of the mind are meant – something to note when reading the creation story.

In Revelation the word "earth" is used both as a ground level as we use it in its natural sense and also as the sense of a group. The action in this book takes place in the great middle zone of the spiritual world, where people first go and where they are sorted out. There are both evil people and good there, and sometimes at the end of a church the evil can have great influence before a great judgment comes. This level of the spiritual realm is called the "earth" to which the dragon was cast down (Revelation 12:9) and to which the stars fell (Revelation 12:4). The "earth" that swallowed the dragon’s flood means those still-sincere people within the church who discounted the flood of the dragon's falsities (Revelation 12:15).