9152. 'He shall repay double' means restoration to the complete amount. This is clear from the meaning of 'making repayment' as undertaking restoration, dealt with in 9087, [9097;] and from the meaning of 'double' as to the complete amount, dealt with in 9103. The present verse and those that follow down to verse 14 deal in the internal sense with a person's loss of the truth of faith, and so with his loss of spiritual life, and the restoration of it; for the truths of faith are the means by which a person is brought to the good of charity and made spiritual. But these matters dealt with in the internal sense of the verses that come immediately after this are for the most part unknown to a person. The reason for this is that people do not know what spiritual life is, nor therefore that this life is life on a more internal level, distinct and separate from natural life, which is that on a more external level. Nor do people know that the Lord imparts spiritual life to a person through his acceptance of the truth of faith within the good of charity. So it is that the matters stated regarding the loss of that life and the restoration of it fall into thick darkness in a person because they are among things he knows nothing about. Yet such matters constitute angelic wisdom, for they are suited to the light in which angels live. When therefore a member of the Church in whom the good of faith is present reads the Word, the angels attach themselves to the person and take delight in him because they delight in the wisdom which flows into them from the Lord through the Word. In this way heaven is linked to mankind; and without the Word that link would not exist. For the nature of the Word is such that not even a tittle or a jot of it in the original language fails to touch angels' affections and link the angels to mankind. I can positively declare this to be so because I have been shown it from heaven.

6175. 'And the days of Jacob, the years of his life, were a hundred and forty-seven years means the state in general and its essential nature. This becomes clear if the meaning of the numbers seven, forty, and a hundred is brought out. ¹ For what seven means, see 395, 433, 716, 728, 881, 5165, 5268; for what forty means, 730, 862, 2272, 2273; and for what a hundred means, 1988, 1636, 4400. But no easy explanation of the sum of these numbers is possible, for they contain far more than anyone can calculate or explain intelligibly. In general these numbers contain the entire state of the reality represented by 'Jacob' and its essential nature. The angels can see these things in their entirety simply from that number; they can do so because with the angels all numbers in the Word pass into ideas about spiritual realities. This has also been made evident to me by the fact that on several occasions a long sequence of numbers has appeared in front of me, and whenever they have appeared the angels have told me that the numbers held, in sequence, the realities which they were talking about to one another. This in addition explains why the most ancient people who belonged to the celestial Church also had a way of calculating that consisted of numbers employed to express heavenly things which could barely be understood by the use of ideas in the natural mind. But after those people's times such evaluations perished, along with the perception of heavenly things. All that remained was a knowledge of the general meaning of the simple numbers, such as three, six, seven, and twelve, but not much knowledge of the meaning of compound numbers. At the present day however even the idea that numbers in the Word mean something more than their numerical values is quite unknown, and therefore the idea will probably be treated as one of those that are unbelievable.

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