Secrets of Heaven, #30-#38

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SECRETS OF HEAVEN

By Emanuel Swedenborg

Sections #30-#38

These sections will be especially important for our discussions of “faith” this month.

I have highlighted in yellow those sections that are especially important for our discussions.

The ones highlighted in pink will be a focus in homilies this month.
Rev. Wilma

30Genesis 1:14, 15, 16, 17. And God said, “Let there be lights in the

expanse of the heavens to make a distinction between day and night; and

they will act as signals and will be used for seasons for both the days and

the years. And they will be lights in the expanse of the heavens, to shed light

on the earth,” and so it was done. And God made two great lights: the

greater light to rule by day and the smaller light to rule by night; and the

stars. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens, to shed light on

the earth.

We cannot understand the identity of these great lights very well

unless we first know what the essence of faith is and how it develops in

those who are being created anew.

The actual essence and life of faith is the Lord alone.

No one who lacks faith in the Lord can have life, as he himself said in John:

Those who believe in the Son have eternal life, but those who do not

believe in the Son will not see life; instead, God’s anger will rest on

them. (John 3:36)

[2] The progress of faith in those who are being created anew is as

follows. Initially such people are without any life, as no life exists in evil

or falsity, only in goodness and truth. Afterward they receive life from the

Lord through faith. The first form of faith to bring life is a memorized

thing—a matter of fact. The next is faith in the intellect—faith truly

understood. The last is faith in the heart, which is faith born of love, or

saving faith.

In verses 3–13 the things that had no living soul represent factual faith

and faith truly understood. Faith brought alive by love, however, is represented

by the animate creatures in verses 20–25. Consequently this is the

point at which love and the faith that rises out of it are first dealt with,

and they are called lights. Love is the greater light that rules by day; faith

springing from love is the smaller light that rules by night.49 And because

they must unite as one, the verb used with “lights” is singular, “let it be”

rather than “let them be.”50

[3] Love and faith work the same way in our inner being as warmth

and light work in our outer flesh and are therefore represented by

warmth and light. This is why the lights are said to be placed in the

expanse of the heavens, or our inner being, the greater light in our will and

the smaller in our intellect.51 But they only seem to be present there, just

as the light of the sun only appears to be in physical objects. It is the

Lord’s mercy alone that stirs our will with love and our intellect with

truth or faith.

The fact that the great lights symbolize love and faith and that they 31

are named sun, moon, and stars can be seen in many places in the

prophets. In Ezekiel, for instance:

When I blot you out I will cover the heavens and black out their stars; the sun I will cover with a cloud, and the moon will not make its light shine. All the lamps of light in the heavens I will black out above you, and I will bring shadow over your land.52 (Ezekiel 32:7, 8)

This passage is directed at Pharaoh and the Egyptians. In the Word, these

people stand for sensory evidence and factual information, and the idea

here is that they used both things to blot out love and faith. In Isaiah:

The day of Jehovah [comes] to make the earth a desolation, since neither

the stars of the heavens nor their Orions53 will shine their light.

The sun has been shadowed over in its emergence, and the moon will

not radiate its light. (Isaiah 13:9, 10)

In Joel:

The day of Jehovah has come, a day of shadow and darkness. Before

him the earth trembles, the heavens shake, the sun and moon turn

black, and the stars hold back their rays. (Joel 2:1, 2, 10)

[2] The following passage in Isaiah discusses the Lord’s Coming and the

light brought to the nations—in other words, a new church, and specifically

the individuals who are in shadow but welcome the light and are

being reborn.

Rise, shine, because your light has come! Look—shadows cover the

earth, and darkness, the peoples. And Jehovah will dawn above you;

and the nations will walk toward your light, and monarchs, toward the

brightness of your rising. Jehovah will become an eternal light to you.

No longer will your sun set, and your moon will not withdraw, because

Jehovah will become an eternal light to you. (Isaiah 60:1, 2, 3, 19, 20)

In David:

Jehovah makes the heavens with understanding; he spreads the earth out

on the waters; he makes the great lights—the sun to rule during the day

and the moon and stars to rule during the night. (Psalms 136:5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

In the same author:

Give glory to Jehovah, sun and moon! Give glory to him, all you shining

stars! Give glory to him, heavens of heavens and waters above the

heavens! (Psalms 148:3, 4)

In all these places the sources of light symbolize love and faith.

[3] Because lights represented and symbolized love for and faith in

the Lord, the Jewish church54 was commanded to keep a light burning

perpetually, from evening to morning, since every activity that was

required of that church represented the Lord. The command for the perpetual

light was as follows:

Command the children of Israel to take oil for the light, to make [the

fire of ] the lamp go up continually. In the meeting tent, outside the veil

that is by [the ark of ] the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall arrange it

before Jehovah, from evening till morning. (Exodus 27:20, 21)

This symbolizes love and faith, which the Lord kindles and causes to

shine in our inner self, and through our inner into our outer self, as will

be shown in its proper place [§9783], with the Lord’s divine mercy.

32Love and faith are first called the great lights, then love is called the

greater light and faith the smaller light. It says that love will rule during the

day and that faith will rule during the night.Because this information is

unknown and less accessible than ever at this time—the end of an era—

the Lord in his divine mercy has allowed me to lay open the true situation.

It is especially well hidden in these final days because the close of the

age has arrived and almost no love exists, consequently almost no faith.55

The Lord himself predicted this event in words recorded in the Gospels:

The sun will go dark, and the moon will not shed light, and the stars

will fall down from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be

shaken. (Matthew 24:29)

The sun here means love, which has gone dark. The moon means faith,

which is not shedding light. The stars mean religious concepts (the powers

and forces of the heavens), which are falling down from heaven.

[2] The earliest church acknowledged no faith besides love itself.

Heavenly angels56 too have no idea what faith is if it is not a matter of

love. The entirety of heaven gives itself over to love, because no other

kind of life than that of love exists in the heavens. Love is the source of all

their happiness, which is so immense that not a bit of it can be put into

words or grasped in any way by the human mind.

People who dwell in love do love the Lord with all their heart, but

they know, say, and perceive that all love comes from the Lord and from

nowhere else, as does all life (which is the product of love alone) and so

all happiness. Not the smallest measure of love, life, or happiness do they

claim to possess on their own.

In the Lord’s transfiguration, the great light—the sun—represented

the fact that he is the source of all love, since

His face shone like the sun, while his clothes became like the light.

(Matthew 17:2)

The face symbolizes the deepest levels of being, while clothes symbolize

the things that issue from those levels. So the sun (love) means the Lord’s

divinity, and light (the wisdom that rises out of love), his humanity.

Anyone can see perfectly well that no hint of life ever exists without 33

some kind of love and that no trace of joy ever exists unless it results from

love. The nature of the love determines the nature of the life and of the joy.

If you were to take the things you love—the things you long for

(since longings are bound up with love)—and set them aside, your

thought processes would come to an immediate halt and you would be

like a corpse. I have learned this through experience.

Self-love and materialism produce an imitation of life and an imitation

of joy, but since they are diametrically opposed to genuine love—

that is, loving the Lord above all and loving our neighbor as ourselves—it

stands to reason that they are not forms of love but of hatred. Notice that

the more we love ourselves and worldly goods, the more we hate our

neighbor and therefore the Lord.

Genuine love, then, is love for the Lord, and genuine life is a life of

love received from him. True joy is the joy of that life.

Only one genuine love can exist, so only one genuine life can exist,

and it gives rise to true joy and happiness, like that felt by angels in

heaven.

34Love and faith can never be separated, because they make a single unit.

This is why the sources of light when first mentioned are treated as grammatically

singular in the statement, “Let there be lights in the expanse of

the heavens.”57 Let me report some surprising facts in this connection.

Because the Lord gives heavenly angels this kind of love, love reveals

all religious knowledge to them. Love also gives them such a living and

shining intelligence that it can hardly be described.

For spirits who learn the doctrinal tenets of faith but lack love, on the

other hand, life is so chill and the light so dim that they cannot even

approach the near side of the threshold to heaven’s entrance hall without

fleeing in retreat.

Some say that they had believed in the Lord; but in actuality they

had not lived as he taught. The Lord speaks of them this way in

Matthew:

Not everyone saying “Lord! Lord!” to me will enter the kingdom of the

heavens, but the one doing my will. Many will say to me on that day,

“Lord! Lord! Haven’t we prophesied in your name?” (Matthew 7:21, 22)

See also what follows there, up to the end of Matthew 7.

[2] All this makes it clear that people who have love also have faith

and consequently heavenly life. The same cannot be said of those who

claim to have faith but do not lead a loving life.

A life of faith without love is like sunlight without warmth—the type

of light that occurs in winter, when nothing grows and everything droops

and dies. Faith rising out of love, on the contrary, is like light from the sun

in spring, when everything grows and flourishes. Warmth from the sun is

the fertile agent. The same is true in spiritual and heavenly affairs, which

are typically represented in the Word by objects found in nature and

human culture.

Nonbelief and belief without love are in fact compared to winter by the

Lord in Mark where he made predictions concerning the close of the age:

Pray that your flight not occur in winter, as those will be days of distress.

(Mark 13:18, 19)

The “flight” refers to the final days and to an individual’s final days

before death as well. “Winter” is a life devoid of love. The “days of distress”

are the person’s wretched condition in the other life.

Humans have two basic faculties: will and intellect. When the will 35

regulates the intellect, the two together make one mind and as a result

one life; under those circumstances, what we will and do is also what we

think and intend. When the intellect is at odds with the will, though, as

when we act in a way that contradicts what we claim to believe, our single

mind is torn in two. One part wants to rise up to heaven while the

other leans toward hell. And since the will drives everything, we would

rush into hell heart and soul if the Lord did not take pity on us.

People who have separated faith from love do not even know what 36

faith is. When they try to picture it, some see it merely as thought. Some

view it only as thoughts about the Lord. A few equate it with the teachings

of faith.

But faith is more than the knowledge and acknowledgment of all

that is encompassed in the teachings of faith. First and foremost it is obedience

to everything that faith teaches; and the primary thing faith

teaches and requires our obedience to is love for the Lord and love for

our neighbor. No one who lacks this possesses faith. The Lord teaches

this so clearly in Mark that no one can doubt it:

The first of all the commandments is “Listen, Israel: The Lord our God is

one Lord. Therefore you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart

and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your powers.”

This is the first commandment. A second, similar one, of course, is this:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment

greater than these. (Mark 12:28–34)

In Matthew he calls the former the first and great commandment and

says that the Law and the Prophets depend on these commandments

(Matthew 22:35–40). “The Law and the Prophets” are the teachings of

faith, all-inclusively, and the whole Word.58

The words the lights will act as signals and will be used for seasons both 37

for the days and for the years contain more hidden information than can

be spelled out in the present work, even though none of it appears in the

literal meaning. The only thing to be said at this time is that spiritual and

heavenly things—as a group and individually—go through cycles, for

which the daily and yearly cycles are metaphors. The daily cycle begins in

the morning, extends to midday, then to evening, and through night to

morning. The corresponding annual cycle begins with spring, extends to

summer, then to fall, and through winter to spring.

These changes create changes in temperature and light and in the

earth’s fertility, which are used as metaphors for changes in spiritual and

heavenly conditions. Without change and variation, life would be monotonous

and consequently lifeless. There would be no recognition or differentiation

of goodness and truth, let alone any awareness of them.

The celestial cycles are called “statutes” in the prophets, as in Jeremiah:

The word spoken by Jehovah, who gives the sun as light for the day,

the statutes of moon and stars as light for the night: “These statutes

will not depart from before me.” (Jeremiah 31:35, 36)

And in the same prophet:

This is what Jehovah has said: “If my compact with day and night

should cease, if I should cease to set the statutes of heaven and earth . . .”

(Jeremiah 33:25)

But the subject will be explored further at Genesis 8:22 [§§933–936], the

Lord’s divine mercy permitting.

38Genesis 1:18. . . .59 and to rule during the day and during the night, and

to make a distinction between light and darkness; and God saw that it was

good.

Day means goodness and night evil, so in common parlance the good

things people do are associated with the day, while the bad things they do

are called deeds of the night.

Light means truth and darkness falsity, as the Lord says:

People loved darkness more than light. One who does the truth comes

to the light. (John 3:19–21)

Genesis 1:19. And there was evening and there was morning, the

fourth day.