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And Jehovah saw that he went aside to see, and God called unto him out of the midst of the bramble, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Behold me! And He said, Draw not nigh hither; pull off thy shoes from upon thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest a ground of holiness is this. And He said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses covered his faces, because he was afraid to look upon God. And Jehovah said, Seeing I have seen the affliction of My people, which is in Egypt, and I have heard their cry from before their taskmasters; for I have known their sorrows; and I am come down to liberate them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to make them come up out of that land unto a land good and broad, unto a land flowing with milk and honey, unto the place of the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.
Exodus 3: 4-8
The saving of the spiritual states in us…
Arcana Coelestia 6858… Before the coming of the Lord into the world, evil genii and spirits occupied all that region of heaven to which the spiritual were afterward taken up; for before the coming of the Lord many such roamed at large and infested the good, especially the spiritual who were in the lower earth; but after the coming of the Lord they were all thrust down into their hells, and that region was set free, and was given for an inheritance to those who were of the spiritual church. It has been frequently observed that as soon as any place is left by good spirits it is occupied by evil ones; and that the evil are driven out of it, and as soon as this is done it again passes to those who are in good.
AC 6854(2)…They who are called “the spiritual” (who are such as can be regenerated only as to the intellectual part, but not as to the will part, and in whose intellectual part therefore a new will is implanted by the Lord, which will is according to the doctrinal things of faith pertaining to their church); these, namely such spiritual men, were saved only by the Lord’s coming into the world. The reason is that the Divine passing through heaven, which was the Divine Human before the Lord’s coming, could not reach them, because the doctrinal things of their church were for the most part not true, and consequently the good which is of the will was not good (see n. 6427). As these could be saved only by the coming of the Lord, and thus could not before be raised into heaven, therefore they were meanwhile kept in the lower earth, in places there which in the Word are called “pits;” which earth was beset about by the hells where are falsities, by which they were then much infested, and yet were guarded by the Lord. But after the Lord came into the world, and made the Human in Himself Divine, then He delivered those who were there in “pits,” and raised them to heaven; and out of them He also formed the spiritual heaven, which is the second heaven. This is meant by the descent of the Lord to the lower regions, and by the deliverance of those who were bound.
AC 6826… “and the angel of Jehovah was seen by him,” signifies the Lord as to the Divine Human; “in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bramble,” signifies love Divine in the truth of memory-knowledge; “and he saw, and behold the bramble burned with fire,” signifies a noticing that the truth of memory-knowledge was full of the good of love Divine; “and the bramble was in no wise consumed,” signifies Divine truth united to Divine good in the natural
6816. The spirits of Mercury are quite different from the spirits of our earth, for the spirits of our earth care not so much for real things as for material, worldly, bodily, and earthly things. Therefore the spirits of Mercury cannot be together with the spirits of our earth, and so whenever they meet them they flee away; for the spiritual spheres which exhale from the two are almost opposite. The spirits of Mercury have a saying, that they love what is drawn out from things material, and that they do not desire to look at the sheath, but at things stripped of their sheath, thus at interior things.
Which are caught in sensuous things…
AC 6845. For the place whereon thou standest a ground of holiness is this. That this signifies that otherwise the Divine cannot enter, is evident from the signification of “place,” as being state (n. 2625, 2837, 3356, 3387, 4321, 4882, 5605), whence “the place whereon thou standest” denotes the state in which he as yet is; and from the signification of “ground of holiness,” as being the holy which proceeds from the Lord. Thus it is a state of the holy proceeding from the Lord’s Divine Human which is meant by these words. That it signifies that otherwise the Divine cannot enter, follows from what goes before, namely, that if man were not removed from sensuous things, which are the externals of the Natural, that is, if he were not elevated from these to things interior, the Divine could not flow in. The reason why the Divine cannot flow in with man so long as he is in these sensuous things, is that the influx from the Divine passes on even to those things which are last in order, thus down to the sensuous things which are the externals of the Natural with man; and if the things therein be merely bodily and earthly, the Divine things which flow in are there dissipated, because they are not in agreement. Therefore when man is about to receive the Divine, that is, the things which are of faith and love, he is elevated from sensuous things; and when he has been elevated from them, the Divine no longer flows in thither, namely, into the external Sensuous, but into the interior plane into which the man has been elevated. That this is the case it has been given me to know from much experience.
AC 6844 (2) That sensuous things, which are the externals of the Natural, are of such a nature that they cannot receive the Divine, is because they are in things worldly, bodily, and even earthly, for they proximately receive these things; hence the things that are in the memory from sensuous things derive from the light and heat of the world all that belongs to them, and but little from the light and heat of heaven, and therefore they are the last things that can be regenerated, that is, receive anything of the light of heaven. Hence it is that when a man is in these sensuous things, and is thinking from them, he thinks no otherwise of the Divine than as he thinks about earthly things, and if he is in evil he thinks from these sensuous things quite against the Divine. Therefore if when a man is thinking about such things as are of faith and love to God he is in good, he is elevated from the sensuous things which are the externals of the Natural, toward interior things, consequently from earthly and worldly things nearer to heavenly and spiritual things.
… From all this is now plain what is meant by “putting off the shoes from upon the feet.” That the Natural with man is external, middle, and internal, see n. 4570, 5118, 5126, 5497, 5649. The internal Natural is signified by the “feet,” the middle Natural by the “soles of the feet,” and the external Natural by the “shoes.”
Apocalypse Explained 355(32)… These ultimates are what are called sensual impressions [sensualia], which are the ultimates of the Natural man (of which see in The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem 50); from these, when separated from the spiritual man, stream forth all the evils and falsities that are in the church and in its doctrine.
AC 6839… He who is in sensuous things, and is engrossed by worldly ones, in no wise apprehends interior things. He desires to see the things he must believe; those which he does not see are as it were foreign, and when he is thinking from himself about them, he rejects them as matters worthy of denial, or at any rate as worthy of doubt.
Third Round posts are short audio clips taken from Round 3 comments offered in the online Logopraxis Life Group meetings. The aim is to keep the focus on understanding the Text in terms of its application to the inner life along with reinforcing any key LP principles that have been highlighted in the exchanges.
