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:

1887. Inspiration implies that every detail of the Word - within its historical narratives as well as in all other parts - has within it the celestial things of love or good, and the spiritual things of faith or truth, and so has Divine things within it. For that which is inspired by the Lord comes down from Him, coming down in fact by way of the angelic heaven, then in the same manner by way of the world of spirits, down to mankind, with whom it presents itself as it exists in the letter. But in its first origins it is something entirely different. In heaven nothing belonging to the history of the world ever has a place there, but everything is a representative of something Divine. Nor is anything else ever perceived there, as may also be recognized to be so from the fact that the things existing there are indescribable. Unless therefore the historical descriptions are representative of Divine things, and so heavenly things, they cannot possibly be divinely inspired. The nature of the Word in the heavens is recognizable solely from the internal sense, for the Internal Sense is the Word of the Lord in the heavens.