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 #590
590. The fact that regret has to do with wisdom, and heartfelt grief with love, cannot be explained clearly to people's understanding. It can only be explained in terms of human experience and so in terms of appearances.
Every concept in our thinking contains something of both intellect and will; to put it another way, it contains something of thought and of love for that thought. If an idea does not draw to some extent on the will, or on love in the will, it is not an idea, because without love we cannot think. There is a kind of marriage, perpetual and inviolable, between thought and will. So the contents of the will or the objects of love in the will are present within the ideas that make up our thinking, or are at least attached to them. From this human experience it seems more or less possible to know (or rather to grasp in some measure) what lies at the heart of the Lord's mercy: wisdom and love.
As a result, the prophets (especially Isaiah) almost everywhere use two terms for every concept, one involving a spiritual quality and the other a heavenly one. 1 The spiritual aspect of the Lord's mercy is wisdom and its heavenly aspect is love.
Footnotes:
1. For examples of the use in the prophets of two terms, one involving a spiritual quality and the other a heavenly, see the passages quoted in §612, which include Psalms 15:1-2; 25:21; 37:37; Isaiah 58:2; the passages quoted in §983, which include Jeremiah 3:14-16; 23:3; and the passages quoted in §1259, which include Isaiah 9:2-3; 11:10-12; 14:32; 25:7. See also note 1 in §100. (For Swedenborg's inclusion of Psalms among the prophetical books of the Bible, see note 1 in §64.) [LHC]
