285. We are told they "will reign upon the earth" because the earth here and elsewhere means the Lord's church in heaven and on earth. The church in both worlds is the Lord's kingdom. Therefore, lest anyone suppose that people who are redeemed by the Lord all become kings and priests who will reign upon the earth, it is important that we demonstrate from the Word that the earth or land symbolizes the church. This can be seen from the following passages:

Behold, the Lord makes the earth empty and makes (the earth) waste, and will overturn its surface... The land shall be entirely emptied... The (habitable) earth will mourn and... be turned upside down... The earth will be profaned under its inhabitants... Therefore a curse shall devour the earth... and... the inhabitants of the earth shall be burned, and few men will be left... ...in the midst of the land... it shall be like the stripping of an olive tree... ...the cataracts on high are opened, and the foundations of the earth are shaken. The earth is violently broken, the earth is utterly split open, the earth is shaken exceedingly. The earth reels to and fro like a drunkard... (Isaiah 24:1-23.)

[2] The lion has come up from his thicket... to make your land desolate... I beheld the earth (when) lo, it was empty and void... ...Jehovah has said, "The whole land shall be desolate... For this shall the earth mourn... (Jeremiah 4:7, 23-28)

How long will the land mourn...? The whole land is made desolate, because no one lays it to heart. (Jeremiah 12:4, 11-13)

The earth mourns and languishes, Lebanon is shamed and withered away. (Isaiah 33:9)

Its land shall become burning pitch...(and) it shall lie waste. (Isaiah 34:9-10)

...I have heard from the Lord... a destruction decreed upon the whole earth. (Isaiah 28:22)

Behold, the day of Jehovah comes... to lay the land desolate..., and the earth will be shaken out of its place... (Isaiah 13:9-13)

The earth shook and trembled, and the foundations of the mountains quaked... (Psalms 18:7)

...we will not fear when the earth is transformed... When He uttered His voice, the earth melted. (Psalms 46:2-3, 6, 8)

Have you not understood the foundations of the earth? (Isaiah 40:21)

O God, You have forsaken us... You have made the earth tremble...; heal its breaches, for it is shaken. (Psalms 60:1-2)

[3] The earth and all its inhabitants will melt away; I will firm up its pillars. (Psalms 75:3)

Woe to a land overshadowed by wings... Go, ...messengers, to... a nation... trodden down, whose land rivers have despoiled. (Isaiah 18:1-2)

By the wrath of Jehovah of Hosts the land is darkened... (Isaiah 9:19)

...you will be a delightful land... (Malachi 3:12)

...I have given You as a covenant of the people to restore the earth... Sing, O heavens! And exult, O earth! (Isaiah 49:8, 13)

I shall not see Yah... in the land of the living. (Isaiah 38:11)

...who caused terror in the land of the living. (Ezekiel 32:23-27)

I would not have believed I would see the goodness... in the land of life. (Psalms 27:13)

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)

I am Jehovah, who makes all things, who stretches out the heavens alone, who spreads out the earth by Myself. (Isaiah 44,24, cf. Zechariah 12:1, Jeremiah 10:11-13; 51:15, Psalm. 136:6)

Let the earth open, let them bring forth salvation... ...thus said Jehovah, who created the heavens..., who formed the earth... (Isaiah 45:8, 12, 18-19)

...behold, I create new heavens and a new earth... (Isaiah 65:17, cf. 66:22)

And in many other places as well, which, if I were to cite them, would fill a page.

[4] The earth or land symbolizes the church for the reason that it very often means the land of Canaan, which is where the church was. That is the heavenly Canaan. Moreover, when the earth or land is mentioned, angels, being spiritual, do not think of the earth or land, but of the human race dwelling upon it and its spiritual state; and its spiritual state is the state of the church.

The earth or land also has an opposite meaning, and in that sense it symbolizes damnation, since when the church is not present in a person, damnation is. The earth or land is mentioned in that sense in Isaiah 14:12; 21:9; 26:19, 21; 29:4; 47:1; 63:6, Lamentations 2:2, 10, Ezekiel 26:20; 32:24, Numbers 16:29-33; 26:10, and elsewhere.

678. And an evil and noxious sore formed. This symbolizes interior evils and falsities destructive of every good and truth in the church.

The sore here symbolizes nothing else than evil arising from a life in accordance with this chief point of the doctrine, that faith alone justifies and saves without works of the law. For we are told next that it formed in people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped its image, which symbolizes that faith and a life in accordance with it. Therefore an evil and noxious sore symbolizes interior evils and falsities destructive of every good and truth in the church. Its being noxious symbolizes its destructiveness, and evil cannot but destroy goodness, and falsity truth.

This is the symbolic meaning of the sore because sores of the body arise from a vitiated condition of the blood or some other internal malignancy. So, too, with sores viewed according to their meaning in the spiritual sense. Those sores arise from lusts and their accompanying delights, which are their internal causes. The evil itself symbolized by the sore, which in its outward expressions seems to be delightful, inwardly conceals in itself lusts, from which it arises and of which it consists.

[2] It should rightly be known, however, that the interior constituents of the human mind in everyone exist in a sequential order and in a concurrent one. They exist in sequential order from its higher or prior constituents to ones lower or subsequent. They exist in concurrent order in their outmost or final expressions, though they range in these from interior elements to outer ones, as from a center to the peripheries. The reality of this is something we showed many times in Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Love and Wisdom, nos. 173-281, in a section on degrees. It is apparent from those numbers that the outmost degree embraces all the prior ones.

It follows, therefore, that all lusts for evil exist inwardly in a concurrent order in the evil itself that a person perceives in himself. Every evil that a person perceives in himself exists in its outmost expressions. Consequently, when a person rejects evil, he at the same time rejects also its lusts, though he still does not do this on his own, but from the Lord. A person can indeed on his own reject evil, but not its lusts. Therefore, when he wishes to reject some evil and is fighting against it, he must look to the Lord, since the Lord operates from inmost elements to outmost ones. For He enters through a person's soul and purifies him.

We have said this much to make known that a sore symbolizes evil appearing in its outmost or final expressions, arising from an internal malignancy. This is the case with all people who persuade themselves that faith alone saves, and for that reason do not reflect upon any evil in themselves or look to the Lord.

[3] Sores and wounds symbolize evils in outmost expressions arising from interior ones, or lusts, also in the following places:

From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness... A wound and a scar, and a fresh blow, have not been expressed, have not been bound up, have not been softened with oil. (Isaiah 1:6-7)

...my iniquities have passed through my head... My wounds have putrefied, have decayed, because of my foolishness. (Psalms 38:4-5)

In the day that Jehovah binds up the fracture of His people... He will heal the blow's wound. (Isaiah 30:26)

...if you do not obey the voice of Jehovah..., being careful to do... His commandments... Jehovah will strike you with the sore of Egypt, with hemorrhoids and scabies, and itching... and with an evil sore upon the knees and upon the legs... from which you cannot be healed, from the sole of your foot to the top of your head. (Deuteronomy 28:15, 27, 35)

The sore of the boils that broke out on man and beast in Egypt (Exodus 9:8-11) has just this symbolic meaning; for the miracles done there symbolized the evils and falsities with which the Egyptians were taken up.

Moreover, because the Jewish nation engaged in a profanation of the Word, and this is the symbolic meaning of leprosy, therefore leprosy occurred not only in their flesh, but also in their garments, houses, and vessels. The various kinds of profanation were also symbolized by the various evil consequences of leprosy, namely swellings, the sores of the swellings, white and reddish pimples, abscesses, burning feelings, losses of skin pigmentation, scaly patches of skin, and so on (see Leviticus 13). For the church with that nation was a representational church, in which internal things were represented by external ones that corresponded to them.