1097. Canaan will be slave to him means that the type of individual who identifies worship exclusively with the outward show of it is among those who are able to serve people of the church in lowly ways. This can best be seen from the things that people in the Jewish church represented. ¹

In the Jewish church, Judah and Israel represented the inner church. Judah represented a heavenly church; Israel, a spiritual one; Jacob, the outer church. But people who identified worship exclusively with the outward show of it were represented by non-Jews, whom they called foreigners. These were their slaves, who performed menial tasks in that church. In Isaiah, for example:

Strangers will stand and pasture your flock, and the children of a foreigner will be your farmers and your vinedressers. And you will be called Jehovah's priests, attendants of our God; it will be said to you, "The wealth of the gentile nations you will eat, and their glory you will glory in." (Isaiah 61:5-6)

Heavenly kinds of people are called Jehovah's priests; spiritual ones, God's attendants. Those who see worship as consisting only in outward appearances are called children of a foreigner, destined to serve in the fields and vineyards.

[2] In the same author:

The children of a foreigner will rebuild the walls, and their monarchs will tend to you. (Isaiah 60:10)

This verse too mentions their labor as slaves. In Joshua, concerning the Gibeonites:

"A curse on you! And the slave will not be cut off from you, ² or those chopping wood and drawing water for the House of my God." Joshua on that day made them choppers of wood and drawers of water for the assembly — particularly for Jehovah's altar. (Joshua 9:23, 27)

A pact was made with the Gibeonites, though. What kind of people they therefore represented may be seen elsewhere [§§3058, 4431, 6860], but they were among those who would act as servants in the church.

A law was laid down for foreigners, stating that if they accepted peace and opened their gates they would serve as tribute in the form of slave labor (Deuteronomy 20:11; 1 Kings 9:21-22).

Each and every thing written about the Jewish church in the Word represented the Lord's kingdom — a kingdom that by its very nature requires everyone, of whatever identity or character, to do something useful. Nothing but usefulness is regarded by the Lord in his kingdom. Even people in hell have to be useful, but the uses they fill are very lowly. Some of the people doing menial work in the other world are individuals whose worship had been completely external, disconnected as it was from any inner content.

[3] Furthermore, representative meanings in the Jewish church were such that they imply nothing about the person filling a role but only about the phenomenon that the person represented. Jews, for instance, were anything but heavenly people, and yet that is the kind of people they represented. ³ By the same token, Israel was anything but a spiritual person, and yet that is what he represented; and the same for Jacob and all the others — including the monarchs and priests, who nonetheless represented the Lord's royal power and holiness. The point is illustrated even more clearly by the fact that inanimate objects also filled a representative role. These included Aaron's vestments, the altar itself, the tables holding the loaves, the lamps, and the bread and wine, not to mention adult cattle, young cattle, he-goats, sheep, she-goats, lambs, pigeons, and turtledoves. ⁴

The children of Judah and Israel merely represented the internal and external worship that takes place in the Lord's church, while more than any other people they considered worship to consist only in outward acts. Consequently they more than any others are the ones who can be called Canaan, in view of his symbolism here.

Footnotes:

259. The meaning of the heel as what is bottommost on the earthly level, or the bodily dimension, cannot be known without information on the way the earliest people viewed the various levels inside us. They connected heavenly and spiritual qualities in us with the head and face. They connected the effects of those qualities — charity and mercy, for instance — with the chest. Things on the earthly level they connected with the lower leg. Those that rank fairly low they associated with the foot, and the very lowest earthly and bodily concerns, with the heel. In addition, not only did they connect such attributes with those body parts, they even called them by those names.

The heel also means the bottommost things in the rational mind, which are the facts we know. They are involved in Jacob's prophecy concerning Dan:

Dan will be a snake on the path, an asp on the track, biting the horse's heels, and its rider falls off behind. (Genesis 49:17)

They are also meant in David:

The wickedness at my heels has surrounded me. (Psalms 49:5)

Genesis 25:26 says that when Jacob came out of the womb, he was grasping Esau's heel (which is why he was called Jacob) and the meaning here is the same. The name Jacob comes from [the Hebrew word for] "heel" because the Jewish church, symbolized by Jacob, was to wound the heel. ¹

[2] Snakes are able to hurt only the lowest things on the earthly plane. Unless they are a species of viper, they cannot harm the more interior things we have on the earthly plane, still less those on the spiritual plane, least of all those on the heavenly plane. All these things the Lord protects, and he stores them away without our awareness. (What the Lord stores away is called "a remnant" [or "survivors"] in the Word.) ²

The pages to come, though, by the Lord's divine mercy, will reveal how the snake destroyed those lowest things in pre-Flood people through a focus on the senses and through self-love. ³ They will show how the snake destroyed them among Jews through a concern with sensory experiences, tradition, and trivialities, and through self-love and materialism. ⁴ Then they will show how the snake has destroyed and is destroying people at the present day through sensory, scientific, and philosophical matters, and once more through self-love and materialism. ⁵

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