9472. 'And pieces of shittim wood' means good deeds worthy of merit that proceed from the Lord, and so are the Lord's alone. This is clear from the meaning of 'pieces of wood' as the good of merit, dealt with in 1110, 2784, 2812, 4943, 8740. The good of merit is good proceeding from the Lord's Divine Human, which is Christian good, or spiritual good present with a person. This good is the one by means of which a person is saved; for good which proceeds from any other source is not good since it has nothing of God in it, nor thus of heaven, nor therefore any health or salvation in it. Shittim wood was the wood of the most excellent kind of cedar, and 'the cedar' means the spiritual Church. The fact that shittim wood was a species of cedar is clear in Isaiah,

I will plant ¹ in the wilderness the cedar of shittah, and the myrtle, and the oil tree. ² Isaiah 41:19.

Here 'the cedar of shittah' stands for spiritual good, 'the oil tree' for celestial good. Since the good worthy of merit, which is the Lord's alone, is the one and only good that reigns in heaven and makes heaven, that wood was the one and only wood that was used in the construction of the tabernacle, by which heaven was represented. It was used for example to make the actual ark, which had the Testimony in it; its poles; the table on which the loaves of the Presence were laid, and its poles; the boards for the dwelling-place; the poles and the pillars of the covering; and also the altar and its poles, as is clear from verses 10, 13, 23, 28, of the present chapter, and from Exodus 26:15, 26, 37; 27:1, 6.

Фусноте:

1110. People who have assumed that righteousness and merit lay in their good works and so have attributed the power of achieving salvation to themselves, not to the Lord and to His righteousness and merit, and who in thought and life have confirmed themselves in this idea, have their assumptions converted in the next life into delusions in which they seem to themselves to be cutting wood. This is exactly how it appears to them. I have spoken to them. When they are doing their work and are asked whether they are not tired out, they reply that they have not yet done enough work to be able to merit heaven. While they are cutting pieces of wood it seems as though something of the Lord is underneath the wood, so that the wood appears as merit. And the more something of the Lord seems to be in the pieces of wood the longer they remain in that condition. But when this delusion starts to fade they are getting nearer the end of vastation. At length they become such that they too are able to be admitted into good communities, though they still waver for a long time between truth and falsity. Because they have led a conscientious life the Lord takes great care of them, and is sending angels to them time and again. These are the people who in the Jewish Church were represented by 'hewers of wood', Joshua 9:23, 27.