The Last Judgement #20
20. Anyone who has learned about God's order can also understand that man was created so as to become an angel, because in him order reaches its ultimate stage (see 9 above). In this stage something of the wisdom of heaven and the angels can be formed, and it can be reconstituted and multiplied. God's order never stops half-way, and forms anything there without the ultimate stage; for it is not in its fullness and perfection unless it goes to the ultimate. But when it is there, then it takes shape and uses the means at its disposal there to reconstitute and extend itself, which it does by reproduction. The ultimate is therefore the seed-bed of heaven.
This too is what is meant by the description of man and his creation in the first chapter of Genesis:
God said, Let us make 1 man in our image, according to our likeness. And God created man in His image, in the image of God did He create him. Male and female He created them; and God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. Genesis 1:26-28.
Creating in the image of God and in the likeness of God means conferring on him the whole of God's order from first to last, and so making him an angel as regards the interiors of his mind.
Footnotes:
1. [Reading faciamus as AC for faciemus (We shall make).]
Arcana Coelestia #3252
3252. 'A hundred and seventy-five years' means the things constituting that state. This becomes clear from the fact that every number used in the Word means some real thing, see 482, 487, 575, 647, 648, 1963, 1988, 2075, 2252, and so with this particular number which consequently means the things which constitute the state that is the subject here. As long as the mind confines itself to the historical sense it seems as though numbers, such as these 1 which give Abraham's age, do not hold any interior meaning within them. The fact that they do nevertheless hold such meaning within them is evident from all that has been shown already concerning numbers, and becomes clear from the consideration that no number as to its numerical value contains anything holy, and yet the smallest detail of all in the Word is holy.
Footnotes:
1. i.e. the numbers 100, 70, and 5
