2. The Lord is God of Heaven

First and foremost, we need to know who the God of heaven is, since everything else depends on this. Throughout the whole of heaven, no one is acknowledged as God of heaven except the Lord. Angels say what he himself taught, namely that he is one with the Father, that the Father is in him and he in the Father, that anyone who sees him sees the Father, and that everything holy emanates from him (John 10:30, 38; 14:9-11, 16; 16:13-15). I have often talked with angels about this, and their consistent testimony has been that in heaven they cannot divide the Divine into three because they both know and perceive that the Divine is one and that this "one" is in the Lord. They have also told me that when people arrive from earth with the idea of three divine beings they cannot be admitted to heaven. This is because their thinking vacillates between one opinion and the other, and in heaven they are not allowed to think "three" and say "one." ¹

In heaven people actually speak directly from their thought, so that we have there a kind of thoughtful speech or audible thought. This means that if people have divided the Divine into three in the world and held a separate image of each one without gathering and focusing these three into one, they cannot be accepted. In heaven, there is a communication of all thoughts, so if people arrive who think "three" and say "one," they are recognized immediately for what they are and are sent away.

Still, it needs to be realized that in the other life any people who have not put "good" in one compartment and "true" in another - who have not separated faith from love - accept the heavenly concept of the Lord as God of the universe once they have been taught. It is different, though, with people who have separated their faith from their lives, that is, who have not lived by the guiding principles of true faith.

Footnotes:

4967. 'An Egyptian man' means natural truth. This is clear from the meaning of 'a man' as truth, dealt with in 3134, and from the meaning of 'Egypt' as factual knowledge in general, dealt with immediately above in 4964, 4966. And since 'Egypt' means factual knowledge it also means the natural, for all the factual knowledge present with a person constitutes his natural since it resides in his natural man, and includes knowledge about spiritual and heavenly realities. The reason for this is that the natural is the position within which and from which he sees those realities. Those which he does not see from that position are unintelligible to him. But a regenerate person, who is called spiritual, sees them in one way, an unregenerate person, who is called merely natural, in another. In the case of a regenerate person factual knowledge has the light of heaven shed upon it, but not so in the case of an unregenerate one. The light shed on the unregenerate person's factual knowledge comes by way of spirits governed by falsity and evil, a light which, it is true, begins as the light of heaven but among such spirits is reduced to a dim light like that of evening or night. Indeed spirits of this kind, and consequently men like them, see in the way owls do - clearly at night but dimly during the daytime. That is, they see falsities clearly and truths dimly, and therefore worldly things clearly but heavenly ones dimly, if at all. From this one may recognize that genuine factual knowledge is natural truth; for all genuine factual knowledge that is of the kind meant in the good sense by 'Egypt' is natural truth.

5256. 'Saying, It is not mine' means that it does not have a purely human origin. This becomes clear from the meaning of 'it is not mine' or not belonging to himself - when these words refer to the Lord, who is represented by 'Joseph' - as that it does not have a purely human origin but a Divine one; for the Divine foresees and consequently knows what something holds within it. When He was in the world the Lord possessed foresight and providence; the two were indeed present in the human, but they had their origin in the Divine. After that time however, once He was glorified, they had their origin in the Divine alone, for the Human, having been glorified, is Divine. Regarded in itself the human is nothing else than a form that receives life from the Divine; but the Lord's glorified Human, or His Divine Human, is not a form that receives life from the Divine but is the actual inner Being (Esse) of that life and so the source from which it comes forth. This is the kind of idea about the Lord that angels have. But as for members of the Christian Church at the present day who enter the next life, almost all think of the Lord as they do of any other human being. Not only do they have an idea of Him separate from the Divine, though they do attribute Divinity to Him; they also have an idea of Him separate from Jehovah. In addition they have an idea of Him separate from the holy one that goes forth from Him. They talk, it is true, about one God, yet they think of three and in practice divide the Divine into three. For they distinguish the Divine into separate persons, calling each one God and attributing a distinct property to each. Consequently Christians are said in the next life to worship three Gods, for their thoughts are of three however much they may talk about one.

[2] But those who are gentile converts to Christianity worship the Lord alone in the next life. They do so because they believed that it could have been none else than the supreme Deity who revealed Himself on earth as man and that this supreme Deity is a Divine Man. They also believed that if they did not have that idea of the supreme Deity they could not have any idea at all and so could not have any thought about God, nor consequently have any knowledge of Him, let alone love for Him.