In many cases, the spiritual meaning of "own," both as a verb and as an adjective, is relatively literal. When people are described as the "Lord's own," however, it specifically means those people who know Him and have His Word. This has taken various forms since the dawn of humanity; in the prehistoric church known as the "Most Ancient Church" the Lord's truth -- the direct expression of His love -- flowed into people directly. In the Ancient Church the Lord's Word was recognized in nature and in the form of deeply representative stories, some of which were passed on to us in the early chapters of Genesis. Among the Children of Israel the Lord's Word was expressed through the Ten Commandments, the laws of Moses, the very history of the nation of Israel and the various psalms and prophecies. The early Christians had those stories along with the teaching and inspiration of Jesus himself. We now have the whole Bible, including the teachings of Jesus, and can understand the Bible's true meaning. Each of these churches, then, was at some point the Lord's own.

805. 'Everything which had the breath of the spirit of life ¹ in its nostrils' means people belonging to the Most Ancient Church who had the breath of life ¹ in their nostrils, that is, the life of love and of faith deriving from love. This is clear from what has been stated already in 96, 97. Life is what the most ancient people meant by 'breath in the nostrils' or breathing, which is the life of the body corresponding to spiritual things, just as the motion of the heart is the life of the body corresponding to celestial things. Here because the subject is the people before the Flood who from what they inherited from their forefathers had within them seed from a celestial origin, though that seed had been annihilated or suffocated, the statement 'everything that had the breath of the spirit of life ¹ in its nostrils' is used.

[2] These words also conceal something quite deeply hidden, which has been dealt with already in 97. It is this: The member of the Most Ancient Church possessed internal breathing, and so possessed breathing that accorded with and was similar to the breathing of angels, which will in the Lord's Divine mercy be described later on. The nature of that breathing varied according to every one of the states of the internal man; but it was altered in the process of time among their descendants down to this final generation of them in whom everything angelic perished. At that point they were no longer capable of breathing in company with the angelic heaven. This was the real reason for their annihilation, and why it is now said that 'they breathed their last' and that 'they died in whom there was the breath of the spirit of life ¹ in their nostrils'. After those times internal breathing came to an end, and with it communication with heaven, and consequently celestial perception; and external breathing took its place. And since communication with heaven came to an end in this way, members of the Ancient or new Church were no longer capable of being celestial men, as the most ancient people had been, but spiritual. These matters however will in the Lord's Divine mercy be dealt with later on.

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