1024. The symbolism of with you as a spiritual person who has been reborn is established by a plethora of earlier statements to the effect that Noah and his sons symbolize a spiritual church that took the place of the earliest, heavenly church [§§597-598, 605, 726, 765, 788:1, 851]. Since they symbolize a church, they symbolize every member of that church and so a spiritual person who has been reborn.
Secrets of Heaven #32
32. Love and faith are first called the great lights, then love is called the greater light and faith the smaller light. It says that love will rule during the day and that faith will rule during the night. Because this information is unknown and less accessible than ever at this time — the end of an era — the Lord in his divine mercy has allowed me to lay open the true situation.
It is especially well hidden in these final days because the close of the age has arrived and almost no love exists, consequently almost no faith. 1 The Lord himself predicted this event in words recorded in the Gospels:
The sun will go dark, and the moon will not shed light, and the stars will fall down from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. (Matthew 24:29)
The sun here means love, which has gone dark. The moon means faith, which is not shedding light. The stars mean religious concepts (the powers and forces of the heavens), which are falling down from heaven.
[2] The earliest church acknowledged no faith besides love itself. Heavenly angels 2 too have no idea what faith is if it is not a matter of love. The entirety of heaven gives itself over to love, because no other kind of life than that of love exists in the heavens. Love is the source of all their happiness, which is so immense that not a bit of it can be put into words or grasped in any way by the human mind.
People who dwell in love do love the Lord with all their heart, but they know, say, and perceive that all love comes from the Lord and from nowhere else, as does all life (which is the product of love alone) and so all happiness. Not the smallest measure of love, life, or happiness do they claim to possess on their own.
In the Lord's transfiguration, the great light — the sun — represented the fact that he is the source of all love, since
His face shone like the sun, while his clothes became like the light. (Matthew 17:2)
The face symbolizes the deepest levels of being, while clothes symbolize the things that issue from those levels. So the sun (love) means the Lord's divinity, and light (the wisdom that rises out of love), his humanity.
Footnotes:
1. "The close of the age" (consummatio saeculi, in the Latin) is a scriptural term referring to a time of final judgment on the world. The concept pervades Daniel, Revelation, and parts of Matthew; see Matthew 13:39-40 for a specific example of the term. In Swedenborg's system the Last Judgment does not refer to the end of the earth as we know it; rather to a purgation of the spiritual world that makes it possible for a "new church" to be established on earth. It also marks the commencement of an era when spiritual truths that were formerly hidden are to become accessible to human minds. Swedenborg regarded his own works as a crucial component of this new revelation. In his 1758 book Last Judgment, he states that this event took place in the spiritual world in 1757, the year after the last volume of Secrets of Heaven was published. For more on the Last Judgment, see note 4 in §931. [LHC, RS]
2. These are angels of the heavenly kingdom rather than the spiritual kingdom; see note 1 in §30. [LHC]
