49. His feet were like fine brass, as though fired in a furnace. (1:15) This symbolizes natural Divine good.

The Lord's feet symbolize His natural Divinity. Fire or being fired symbolizes goodness. And fine brass symbolizes the natural goodness of truth. Consequently the feet of the Son of Man like fine brass, as though fired in a furnace, symbolize natural Divine good.

His feet have this symbolic meaning because of their correspondence.

Present in the Lord, and so emanating from the Lord, are a celestial Divinity, a spiritual Divinity, and a natural Divinity. His celestial Divinity is meant by the head of the Son of Man; His spiritual Divinity by His eyes and by His breast girded with a golden girdle; and His natural Divinity by His feet.

[2] Because these three elements are present in the Lord, therefore the same three are also present in the angelic heaven. The third or highest heaven exists on the celestial Divine level, the second or middle heaven on the spiritual Divine level, and the first or lowest heaven on the natural Divine level. The like is the case with the church on earth. For the whole of heaven is, in the Lord's sight, like a single person, in which those who are governed by the Lord's celestial Divinity form the head, and those who are governed by His spiritual Divinity form the trunk, while those who are governed by His natural Divinity form the feet.

For this reason, too, every person, having been created in the image of God, has in him the same three degrees, and as they are opened he becomes an angel either of the third heaven, or of the second, or of the last.

It is owing to this also that the Word contains three levels of meaning - a celestial one, a spiritual one, and a natural one.

The reality of this may be seen in Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Love and Wisdom, particularly in Part Three, in which we discussed these three degrees.

To be shown that feet, the soles of the feet, and heels correspond to natural attributes in people, and that in the Word, therefore, they symbolize natural attributes, see in Arcana Coelestia (The Secrets of Heaven), published in London, nos. 2162 and 4938-4952.

[3] Natural Divine good is also symbolically meant by feet in the following passages. In Daniel:

I lifted my eyes and looked; behold, a... man clothed in linen garments, whose loins were girded with the gold of Uphaz! And his body was like beryl, and... his eyes like torches of fire, his arms and his feet like the sheen of burnished bronze. (Daniel 10:5-6)

In the book of Revelation:

I saw... an angel coming down from heaven, ...his feet like pillars of fire. (Revelation 10:1)

And in Ezekiel:

(The feet of the cherubim) sparkled like the sheen of burnished bronze. (Ezekiel 1:7)

Angels and cherubim so appeared for the reason that the Lord's Divinity was represented in them.

[4] Since the Lord's church exists below the heavens, thus under the Lord's feet, it is therefore called His footstool in the following places:

The glory of Lebanon shall come to you..., to beautify the place of My sanctuary; ...I will make the place of My feet honorable. And... they shall bow themselves at the soles of your feet. (Isaiah 60:13-14)

Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool. (Isaiah 66:1)

(God) does not remember His footstool in the day of His anger. (Lamentations 2:1)

...worship (Jehovah) in the direction of His footstool. (Psalms 99:5)

Behold, we heard of it in Ephrathah (Bethlehem).... We will go into His dwelling places, we will bow ourselves at His footstool. (Psalms 132:6-7)

That is why worshipers fell at the Lord's feet (Matthew 28:9, Mark 5:22, Luke 8:41, John 11:32), and why they kissed His feet and wiped them with their hair (Luke 7:37-38, 44-46, John 11:2; 12:3).

[5] Because feet symbolize the natural self, therefore the Lord said to Peter, when He washed Peter's feet,

He who is washed needs only to have his feet washed, and he is completely clean. (John 13:10)

To wash the feet is to purify the natural self. When it has been purified, the whole self also is purified, as we showed many times in Arcana Coelestia (The Secrets of Heaven), and in The Doctrines of the New Jerusalem. ¹ The natural self, which is also the outer self, is purified when it refrains from the evils which the spiritual or inner self sees to be evils and ones to be shunned.

[6] Now because the feet mean the natural component of a person, and this perverts everything if it is not washed or purified, therefore the Lord says,

If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, rather than to have two feet and be cast into hell, into the unquenchable fire... (Mark 9:45)

The foot here does not mean the foot, but the natural self.

The like is meant by treading down the good pasture with the feet and troubling waters with the feet (Ezekiel 32:2; 34:18-19, Daniel 7:7, 19, and elsewhere).

[7] Since the Son of Man means the Lord in relation to the Word, it is apparent that His feet mean the Word in its natural sense as well, which we dealt with at length in The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Sacred Scripture, and also that the Lord came into the world to fulfill everything in the Word and to become thereby an embodiment of the Word, even in its outmost expressions (The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Sacred Scripture, nos. 98-100). But this is a secret for people who will be in the New Jerusalem.

[8] The Lord's natural Divinity was also symbolized by the bronze serpent that Moses was commanded to set up in the wilderness, so that all who had been bitten by serpents were healed by looking at it (Numbers 21:6, 8-9). That this symbolized the Lord's natural Divinity, and that those people are saved who look to it, the Lord Himself teaches in John:

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:14-15)

The serpent was made of bronze because bronze, like fine brass, symbolizes the natural self in respect to good, as may be seen in no. 775 below.

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233. Investigating mysteries of faith by means of facts is as impossible as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, or for a rib to control the tiniest fibres of the chest and the heart. Just as gross, indeed far more gross, is what is sensory and factual in comparison with what is spiritual and celestial. Anyone who wishes to probe merely the secrets of nature, which are countless, discovers scarcely a single one, and when he starts to probe he sinks, as is well known, into falsities. What then would happen if he wished to probe the secrets of spiritual and celestial life, where thousands and thousands of secrets exist for each one contained in the unseen parts of nature?

[2] To illustrate the point, let just one example be taken. Of himself man is incapable of anything other than doing evil and turning himself away from the Lord. Yet it is not the man who does so but the evil spirits residing with him. Yet again it is not the evil spirits who do it but the evil itself which they have made their own. All the same, man does that evil and turns himself away, and is blameworthy, even though his life comes from the Lord alone. On the other hand man of himself cannot possibly do good and return to the Lord. This is accomplished by angels. Yet the angels cannot do it, but only the Lord. All the same, man is capable as if of himself of doing good and of returning to the Lord. The truth of all this cannot possibly be grasped by the senses, formulated knowledge, or philosophy. If these are consulted they deny those things outright, even though they are inherently true. And the same applies with everything else.

[3] These considerations show that people who consult sensory evidence and factual knowledge in matters of belief plunge themselves not only into doubt but also into denial, that is, into thick darkness. And in plunging into thick darkness they also become immersed in every kind of evil desire, for in believing what is false they also do what is false. And when they believe that the spiritual and the celestial do not exist they believe that only the bodily and the worldly do so. So they love anything that belongs to self and the world, and this is how evil desires and evils themselves arise out of what is false.