1803. But one who will issue from your belly symbolizes those who have love for him and love for their neighbor. This can be seen from the meaning of a belly and issuing from one's belly as being born. Here it refers to those who are born from the Lord.

People who are born from the Lord, that is, who are reborn, receive the Lord's life. As I have said, the Lord's life is divine love, or love for the whole human race, and the desire to save the entire race and all its members forever, if possible. ¹ Those who do not possess the Lord's love, that is, who do not love their neighbor as themselves, never possess the Lord's life, so they have never been born from him. They have not "issued from his belly." As a result, they cannot be heirs of his kingdom.

[2] This leads to the conclusion that in an inner sense, issuing from his belly here describes people who love him and love their neighbor. In Isaiah, for example:

This is what Jehovah your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, has said: "I am Jehovah your God, teaching you to profit, making you go on the path you should walk. If only you had listened to my commandments! And like a river your peace would have been, and your justice like the waves of the sea; and like the sand your seed would have been, and those issuing from your belly like the grains of it." (Isaiah 48:17-18, 19)

"Seed like the sand" stands for what is good; "those issuing from their belly like grains of it," for what is true. So it stands for those who love, because [those who are reborn] are the only ones who love what is good and true.

[3] In addition, inner organs mentioned in the Word symbolize the love that is mercy. This is because the reproductive organs — particularly a mother's uterus — represent and therefore symbolize the chaste love of marriage, so they stand for love of children. ² In Isaiah, for instance:

The stirring of your gut and of your compassions toward me have kept on. (Isaiah 63:15)

In Jeremiah:

Is Ephraim not a child precious to me? Was he not the offspring of my pleasures? Therefore my gut has churned for him; I will take utter pity on him. (Jeremiah 31:20)

[4] This shows that love itself — or mercy itself — and the Lord's compassion on the human race are what the belly and the act of coming forth from it symbolize on a deeper level. Those who have "issued from the belly," then, symbolize people who love.

To see that the Lord's kingdom is mutual love, see §§548, 549, 684, 693, 694 above.

Footnotes:

65. 5. It is also the fundamental love of all celestial, spiritual, and consequently natural loves. Regarded in its essence, conjugial love is the fundamental love of all loves in heaven and the church, because it originates from the marriage between good and truth, and from this marriage spring all the loves which form heaven and the church in a person. The good in this marriage produces love, and the truth in it produces wisdom. And when love is added to wisdom or united with it, then love becomes loving. And when wisdom conversely is added to love and united with it, then wisdom becomes wise.

Truly conjugial love is nothing but a union of love and wisdom. Two married partners who have this love between them and in them at the same time are a reflection and image of it. In the heavens, too, where the looks of their faces are genuine representations of the affections of their love, they are all likenesses of it, for it is in them in general and in every part, as we showed previously.

Now because two partners are a form of this love in image and effigy, it follows that every other love that springs from the form this love takes is a reflection of it. Consequently, if conjugial love is celestial and spiritual, the loves springing from it are also celestial and spiritual.

Conjugial love, therefore, is like a parent, and the rest of the loves are like offspring. That is why the offspring born of the marriages of angels in heaven are spiritual offspring, which are procreations of love and wisdom, or of goodness and truth. (Regarding this procreation, see above, no. 51.)