Sacred Scripture #14
14. When the Lord speaks to his disciples about the close of the age, which is the last time of the church, at the end of his predictions about the sequence of changes of state he says,
Immediately after the affliction of those days the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Humanity will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will wail; and they will see the Son of Humanity coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a trumpet and a loud voice, and they will gather his chosen people from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other. (Matthew 24:29-31)
[2] Spiritually understood, this does not mean that the sun and moon will be darkened, that the stars will fall from heaven, and that a sign of the Lord will appear in heaven and he will be seen in the clouds accompanied by angels with trumpets. Rather, the particular words are here used to mean spiritual events that have to do with the church, spiritual events about its state at its end. The underlying reason is that in the spiritual meaning the sun that will be darkened is the Lord as an object of love; the moon that will not give its light is the Lord as an object of faith; the stars that will fall from heaven are the knowledge of what is good and what is true that will come to an end; the sign of the Son of Humanity in heaven is the manifestation of divine truth; the tribes of the earth that will wail are a complete lack of true belief and of good actions that come from love; the coming of the Son of Humanity in the clouds of heaven with power and glory is the Lord’s presence in the Word, and a revelation - the clouds being the literal meaning of the Word and the glory being the spiritual meaning of the Word. The angels with a trumpet and a loud voice mean heaven as our source of divine truth; and the gathering of the chosen people from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other, means a new kind of church, specifically its love and faith.
[3] It is obvious from the prophets that this does not mean the darkening of the sun and the moon and the falling of the stars to earth, because things like this are said there about the state of the church when the Lord will come into the world. It says in Isaiah, for example:
Behold, the fierce day of Jehovah is coming, a day of blazing wrath. The stars of the heavens and their constellations will not shine their light. The sun will be darkened in its rising, and the moon will not make its light shine. I will execute judgment upon the world for its malice. (Isaiah 13:9-11; 24:21, 23)
In Joel,
The day of Jehovah is coming, a day of darkness and gloom; the sun and the moon will be darkened and the stars will withhold their light. (Joel 2:1-2, 10; 3:15)
In Ezekiel,
I will cover the heavens and darken the stars. I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon will not give its light. I will darken all the bright lights and bring darkness upon the land. (Ezekiel 32:7-8)
The day of Jehovah means the Coming of the Lord, which happened when there was no longer anything good or true left in the church, and there was no knowledge of the Lord.
The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings #201
201. The Lord's spiritual crises. Beyond all others, the Lord suffered the fiercest, most severe spiritual crises; they are barely touched on in the literal sense of the Word but are described extensively in its inner meaning: 1663, 1668, 1787, 2776, 2786, 2795, 2816, 9528. The Lord fought out of his divine love for the whole human race: 1690, 1691, 1812, 1813, 1820. The Lord's love was a love for the salvation of the human race: 1820. The Lord fought from his own power: 1692, 1813, 9937. Through spiritual crises and victories from his own power, the Lord alone became righteousness and merit: 1813, 2025, 2026, 2027, 9715, 9809, 10178. Through crises of the spirit, the Lord united his divine nature, which was within him from conception, to his human nature, and made this latter divine, just as he makes us spiritual through our crises of the spirit: 1725, 1729, 1733, 1737, 3318, 3381, 3382, 4286. The Lord's spiritual crises included despair at the end: 1787. Through the spiritual crises he allowed himself to undergo, the Lord gained control over the hells and brought everything there and in the heavens into proper order; and at the same time he glorified his human nature: 1737, 4287, 9528, 9715, 9937. The Lord alone fought against all the hells: 8273. This is why he allowed himself to undergo spiritual crises: 2816, 4295.
The Lord's divine nature could not have undergone spiritual crises, because the hells cannot attack anything divine. That is why the Lord took on a human nature from his mother, a nature that can undergo spiritual crises: 1414, 1444, 1573, 5041, 5157, 7193, 9315. Through his spiritual crises and victories he drove out everything he had inherited from his mother and divested himself of the human nature he had received from her, even to the point that he was no longer her son: 2159, 2574, 2649, 3036, 10830. Jehovah, 1 who was in him from conception, nevertheless seemed to be absent during his spiritual crises: 1815. This was his state of being humbled: 2 1785, 1999, 2159, 6866. His last spiritual crisis and final victory was in Gethsemane and on the cross, through which he completely overcame the hells and made his human nature divine: 2776, 2813, 2814, 10655, 10659, 10828.
Not eating bread and not drinking water for forty days [Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 9:9] means an entire state of spiritual crisis: 10686. Forty years, forty months, or forty days means a full state of spiritual crisis from beginning to end, and this state is meant by the forty-day duration of the Flood [Genesis 7:4, 17], by Moses' sojourn on Mount Sinai for forty days [Exodus 24:18; 34:28], by the Israelites' sojourn in the wilderness for forty years, 3 and by the forty-day-long crisis the Lord experienced in the wilderness [Matthew 4:2; Mark 1:13; Luke 4:2]: 730, 862, 2272, 2273, 8098.
Footnotes:
1. Following a Christian practice of his times, Swedenborg used the name "Jehovah" as a rendering of the tetragrammaton, יָהוֶה, "YHVH" (or "YHWH"), the four-letter name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. In earliest times, Hebrew was written only with consonants; a system for indicating vowels was not perfected until the eighth century of the Common Era, and even in many modern Hebrew texts, vowels are not marked. The current scholarly reconstruction of the original pronunciation of the name is "Yahweh": see Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, under "YHWH. " A strict understanding of the Second Commandment, "You are not to take the name of YHVH your God in vain" (Exodus 20:7), led pious Jews to avoid pronouncing the name aloud; instead the word y"nod]a ('ăḏōnāi, literally meaning "my lord") was read. To indicate this, vowels similar to those in Adonai were added to YHVH, creating the form Jehovah. Some modern English Bibles use the name "Jehovah," while others render the term as "LORD," so capitalized; "Lord," in capital and lowercase; "Yahweh"; "ADONAI"; or even "God. " [GFD, RS]
2. Swedenborg is here referring to the Christian theological concept denoted by the Latin word humiliatio, here translated "his state of being humbled. " The term denoted the sufferings of Jesus; or even his simply being born, living in the mortal world, and dying; or his denying himself the prerogatives of his own divinity while on earth. The term is often contrasted with Christ's exaltatio, his being raised up. See, for example,Philippians 2:5-11. [SS]
3. For statements about the Israelites' forty-year sojourn in the wilderness, see, for example, Numbers 14:33; Deuteronomy 2:7. [GFD]
