244. And the fourth living creature was like a flying eagle. This symbolizes the Divine truth of the Word in respect to its concepts and the understanding they afford.

Eagles have various symbolic meanings, but flying eagles symbolize concepts which lead to understanding, since when they fly, they recognize and see. They also have sharp eyes so as to see keenly, and eyes symbolize the intellect (nos. 48, 214).

To fly means, symbolically, to perceive and teach, and in the highest sense, which has the Lord as its subject, it means to foresee and provide.

That this is the symbolic meaning of eagles in the Word is apparent from the following passages:

Those who wait on Jehovah shall renew their strength; they shall mount up on wings like eagles. (Isaiah 40:31)

To mount up on wings like eagles means to be raised into concepts of truth and goodness and so into intelligence.

Does the hawk fly by your wisdom...? Does the eagle mount up at your command...(and) spy out its food? Its eyes observe from afar. (Job 39:26-27, 29)

The eagle here describes a faculty for recognizing, understanding, and foreseeing, and the fact that this does not result from one's own intelligence.

(Jehovah,) who satisfies your mouth with good, so that you are renewed in your youth like an eagle. (Psalms 103:5)

To satisfy the mouth with good means to give understanding by means of concepts. Thus an analogy is made with an eagle.

A great eagle with large wings and long pinions... came upon Lebanon and took from the cedar a little branch... Then it took some of the seed of the land and planted it in the field of a growing crop..., and it grew and became a vine... But there was another great eagle..., to which the vine bent its roots... (Ezekiel 17:1-8)

The two eagles here describe the Jewish and Israelite churches, each in respect to its concepts of truth and consequent intelligence.

In an opposite sense, however, eagles symbolize false concepts, by which the intellect is corrupted, as in Matthew 24:28, Jeremiah 4:13, Habakkuk 1:8-9, 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.