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.

7831. 'On the tenth of this month' means the state of the initiation of the interiors. This is clear from the meaning of 'the tenth' - day, that is to say - as the state of the interiors. For 'day' means state, 23, 487, 488, 493, 576, 893, 1738, 2788, 3462, 3785, 4850, 5672, and 'ten' means remnants, 576, 1906, 2284, that is, the truths and forms of good stored away by the Lord in a person's interiors, 1050, 1906, 2284, 5135, 5897, 7560, 7564. And since the remnants reside in his interiors, and they are used to prepare the person for and initiate him into receiving goodness and truth from the Lord, 'the tenth day' here means the state of the initiation of the interiors. With regard to a person's being regenerated by means of remnants, and so to his being initiated by means of them into receiving the inflow of goodness and truth from the Lord, see 5342, 5898, 6156, and with regard to his contact with heaven through them, 7560, for those forms of good and truths originate in the Lord, not in man, 7564. 'Month' is used to mean a whole state from start to finish, 7814, thus the complete state of deliverance, which the Passover in its entirety means. From all this it is evident that 'on the tenth of this month' means the state of the initiation of the interiors. This state - of the initiation of the interiors - lasted from the tenth day of that month through to the fourteenth day of it, between which days the Passover animal was to be held in safe keeping. 'The Passover animal' means the good of innocence, which is inmost; thus this good which is inmost, together with the interiors in which it resides, was in the meantime to be isolated and kept away from such things as defile it. This state is the state of the initiation of the interiors, that is, of being made ready to receive the inflow of goodness and truth from the Lord. This is the holy meaning contained in the words under consideration, for without that holy meaning deeply concealed within them no command would have been given for the Passover animal to be taken on the tenth of the month and held in safe keeping until the fourteenth day, or for it to be slaughtered after that between the evenings, and to be eaten roasted with fire and not boiled in water. Nor would they have been commanded not to leave any of it till morning, to burn with fire what remained, not to break a bone of it, and much else. These regulations, as anyone who ponders on them may recognize, have to do with things of a holy nature which no one is as yet acquainted with; and these holy things are spiritual ones that belong to the Church and heaven, and that are concerned with the Divine from whom every detail of the Word has come down.