794. And the water strengthened greatly, greatly on the earth means that persuasive lies piled up in this way, as is established by statements made and evidence offered just above concerning water. They showed that flood waters symbolize falsities. Because the falsity (or the false persuasions) intensified, the current verse says that the water strengthened greatly, greatly, this being a superlative in the original language.

By falsities I mean false premises and false persuasions. These increased tremendously among the pre-Flood people, as remarks above [§§560, 562, 581, 660-661, 705:3, 736] concerning them make clear.

Self-delusion grows tremendously when it taints truth with perverted desires, that is, when it uses truth to justify self-love and materialism. In doing so, it corrupts truth and forces it to cooperate in a thousand different ways. What person is there who has either absorbed or manufactured false principles, without using a plethora of facts at his or her disposal — even from the Word — to confirm them? Is there a heresy in existence that does not seize on this kind of support? And if heresy comes across arguments that do not harmonize, it compels them to yield anyway, explaining and distorting them in a variety of ways until they no longer disagree.

[2] Take those who embrace the premise that faith alone, without the good deeds of charity, brings salvation. Are they not capable of weaving together a whole system of theology out of the Word? And yet they do not care about, they do not pay attention to, they do not even see the Lord's words that a tree is recognized by its fruit and that a tree not bearing good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire (Matthew 7:16-17, 18, 19, 20; 12:33). What could be more pleasing than to live by the desires of our flesh and still be saved? To merely know what is true without doing a single scrap of good?

Every perverse yearning that we cultivate goes into making up the life of our will, and every falsity that we adopt as a premise or as a conviction goes into making up the life of our intellect. These two kinds of life combine into one when we merge the doctrinal teachings of faith with our cravings. By this means we each form a kind of personal soul, and the quality of its life remains unchanged after death. As a result, nothing is more important for us than to know what is true. When we know what is true — and know it in such a way that it cannot be perverted — it cannot be infused with corrupt desires and do deadly harm. What should we take more to heart than our eternal life? If we destroy our soul during bodily life, do we not destroy it forever? ¹

Footnotes:

560. Inner Meaning

BEFORE going any further, let me mention the situation of the church that came before the Flood. Its situation was much like that of later churches, such as the Jewish church before the Lord's Coming and the Christian church afterward: all of them perverted and adulterated true religious knowledge.

In specific regard to the people of the church before the Flood, they conceived appalling delusions as time passed. The goodness and truth that belong to faith they merged so thoroughly with their foul desires that almost no trace of either was left to them. When they reached this point, they virtually suffocated themselves. A person lacking any remnant [of goodness or truth], after all, cannot survive. Such a remnant, as noted earlier [§530], is what lifts human life above animal life. A remnant, or rather the Lord working by means of a remnant, is what allows a person to seem human, to learn what is good and true, to reflect on particular instances of it, and so to think and reason. This remnant alone has spiritual and heavenly life in it.