From Swedenborg's Works

 

Sacred Scripture #8

Study this Passage

  
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8. Since the Word is inwardly spiritual and heavenly, it was composed using nothing but correspondences; and when something is written by means of nothing but correspondences, its outermost written sense takes on the kind of style we find in the prophets and in the Gospels, a style that has divine wisdom and everything angelic hidden within it even though it seems to be commonplace.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation for their permission to use this translation.

The Bible

 

1 Kings 14:25

Study

       

25 And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem:

Commentary

 

King

  
Meeting of three kings in Potsdam and Charlottenburg, 1709, by Samuel Theodor Gericke

In Genesis 14:1, kings signify apparent goods and truths having the upper hand. In the next verse, they stand for the dominant evils and falsities against which the Lord fought as he passed He grew up on Earth.

In Genesis 14:3, we see that these evils and falsities were unclean; and in Genesis 14:4, that they burst forth later. (Arcana Coelestia 1661-1664).

In Genesis 14:14-15, this signifies that the Lord gained victory over them the evils represented earlier in the chapter. (Arcana Coelestia 1711-1715)

In Isaiah 33:17, a king signifies seeing genuine truth. (Apocalypse Explained 304[31])

In Revelation 9:11, a king signifies one who is in truth from an affection for what is good, and abstractly that truth itself -- here, in the opposite sense. (Apocalypse Revealed 440)