1. The Sacred Scripture, or Word, Is Divine Truth Itself

Everyone says that the Word comes from God, is Divinely inspired, and so is holy. But even so, no one has known before this wherein the Divinity in it lies. For in its letter the Word appears as though written in the ordinary way, in a foreign style, neither as sublime or nor as lucid as writings of the present age seem to be.

As a result, a person who worships nature as God, or in preference to God, and so thinks prompted by self and his own self-interest, and not prompted by heaven in response to the Lord, may easily fall into error regarding the Word, and into scorning it, and when reading it, saying to himself, “What is this? What is that? Is this Divine? Can God, whose wisdom is infinite, speak so? Where is the holiness in it, and what makes it holy, other than some teaching of religion and so conviction?”

3. The natural man, however, still cannot be persuaded by these considerations that the Word is Divine truth itself, containing Divine wisdom and Divine life; for he regards it in terms of its style, in which he does not see this wisdom and life.

Nevertheless, the style in the Word is the Divine style itself, with which no other style can be compared, however sublime and admirable it seems. For it is as darkness compared to light.

The style in the Word is such that there is something holy in every sentence and in every word, indeed in some places in the very letters. Because of that the Word conjoins a person with the Lord and opens heaven.

[2] There are two emissions emanating from the Lord: Divine love and Divine wisdom. Or to say the same thing, Divine goodness and Divine truth. For Divine goodness is a property of His Divine love, and Divine truth a property of His Divine wisdom. In its essence the Word is both of these. And because, as we said, it conjoins a person with the Lord and opens heaven, therefore the Word fills a person who reads it prompted by the Lord, and not by himself simply. It fills him with the goodness of love and truths of wisdom — his will with the goodness of love, and his intellect with truths of wisdom. The person has life as a result through the Word.

10. The twenty-first chapter in the book of Revelation describes the holy Jerusalem in this way, that it had in it a light “like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone, bright as crystal;” that it had “a great and high wall, and twelve gates, and over the gates twelve angels, with names written on them...of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel;” that it had a wall of “a hundred and forty-four cubits, the measure of a man, that is, of an angel;” that the construction of its wall was of jasper, and its foundations of all kinds of precious stones — jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, and amethyst; that “the twelve gates were twelve pearls;” that the city was “pure gold, like transparent glass;” and that it was square, “its length, breadth, and height...equal, ” measuring “twelve thousand furlongs.” And so on.

All of these particulars must be understood spiritually, as can be seen from the fact that the holy Jerusalem symbolizes a new church to be established by the Lord, as we showed in The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Lord 62-65. And because Jerusalem in this description symbolizes a church, it follows that everything said about it as a city — about its gates, its wall, the foundations of the wall, and about their measurements — contains a spiritual meaning. For matters having to do with the church are spiritual.

[2] We have explained the symbolic meanings of each of these particulars in The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine (London, 1758), no. 1. We therefore forgo any further explanation of them here. It is enough for it to be known from that book that there is a spiritual meaning present in each particular of the city’s description, like a soul in its body. Also, that apart from that meaning, nothing relating to the church would be understood in the depictions there, as that the city was of pure gold, with its gates of pearls, its wall of jasper, and the foundations of its wall of precious stones; that the wall was of a hundred and forty-four cubits, the measure of a man, that is, of an angel; that the city itself was twelve thousand furlongs long, wide, and high; and so on.

Someone who has a knowledge of correspondences and knows from it the spiritual sense, understands the meanings of these things — as that the wall and its foundations symbolize doctrine drawn from the Word’s literal sense, and that the numbers 12,144, and 12,000 have similar symbolic meanings, namely all the truths and goods of the church in their entirety.