Heaven
Heaven" and "heavens" are used many times in the Bible, with a couple of variations of meaning. Sometimes it is relatively literal, including times when the Lord is identified with it (“Our Father, who art in the heavens,” for instance), meaning heaven as the eternal home for people who chose to do what is good in this life and let the Lord lead them to a love of being good. In other references, particularly when it is paired with “earth” or other lesser ideas (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” for instance), “heaven” or “heavens” means our internal life as opposed to our external life. In a way, these two meanings are really the same. If you think about the importance of your deepest thoughts and feelings, you can see that they are the “real” you, much more so than your body is. The relationship between the spiritual world and the natural world is similar; the spiritual world is the “real” one, and controls the natural world the same way our thoughts and feeling control our actions. So in both cases, “heaven” describes a deeper reality that we will enter fully after we die.
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This video is a product of the New Christian Bible Study Corporation. Follow this link for more information and more explanations - text, pictures, audio files, and videos: www.newchristianbiblestudy.org
Arcana Coelestia #7569
7569. 'And there will be hail in all the land of Egypt' means destructive falsity in the natural mind. This is clear from the meaning of 'hail' as destructive falsity arising from evils - destructive of all the goodness and truth of the Church, dealt with in 7553; and from the meaning of 'the land of Egypt' as the natural mind, dealt with in 5276, 5278, 5280, 5288, 5301.