The Lord’s "own" are those who have His Word and know him, the heart and center of His contact with humanity. This has existed in various forms since the dawn of humanity, but at the time the Lord was born as Jesus it meant the Jews, who worshiped the Lord as Jehovah and had His truth in the form of the laws of Moses, the history of their own nation and the psalms and prophets. But the Jews of the time had turned away from the Lord, practicing ritual but looking only to their own selfish ends. In fact, the evil there had grown so dire that humanity was in danger of being cut off from the Lord altogether; if He had not come as Jesus we would have been destroyed altogether.

(References: Arcana Coelestia 2531 [4], 8768; Teachings about the Lord 18 [5]; The Apocalypse Explained 745 [4])

8630. Since the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter acquire intelligence in a different way than the inhabitants of our planet, and are in addition of different disposition by virtue of their life, they cannot stay together with them. If any from our planet come near they either flee from them or drive them away. Spheres exist, which must be called spiritual spheres, which constantly emanate from, indeed well out of each community. Those spheres flow from the activity of members' affections and resulting thoughts, and so are emanations of the actual life within them. Regarding spheres, see 1048, 1053, 1316, 1504, 1505, 1507, 1508, 1510-1519, 2401, 4464, 5179, 6206, 6598-6613, 7454, 8063.

[2] Associations in the next life are determined in every instance by such spheres. Those that agree with one another are fused together in the measure that they agree, and those that disagree are driven apart to the extent that they disagree. Each province in the Grand Man, to which some member or organ in the human body corresponds, has its own sphere, distinct and separate from the sphere of another province. So it is that those who belong to the same province are linked together, and those who belong to different ones are separated. Spirits and angels who come from the planet Jupiter correlate in the Grand Man with THE ABILITY TO FORM MENTAL IMAGES, and so with the state of activity taking place in the interior parts. But spirits belonging to our planet correlate with various functions performed by the exterior parts of the body, into which the ability to form mental images cannot enter, since those spirits wish to be in control. Hence the antagonism between the spheres.