Fwd: Revelation 22: The Brief Spiritual Meaning of vs. 3-6 (corrected); AR 937 - The Process of Conjunction With the Lord

AR 937-943 (portions)

And nothing accursed shall be there,
but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it,
and His servants shall serve Him.

They shall see His face,
and His name shall be on their foreheads.

There shall be no night there:
They have no need of a lamp or light of the sun,
for the Lord God gives them light.

And they shall reign forever and ever.

Then he said to me,
"These words are faithful and true."

And the Lord God of the holy prophets
sent His angel to show His servants
the things which must shortly take place.
(Revelation 22:3-6)

In the church that is the New Jerusalem,
people will not live apart from the Lord,
because the Lord Himself will reign there,
and people who are governed by truths
acquired from Him
through the Word
and keep His commandments
will abide with Him, being conjoined with Him.

They will turn to the Lord and the Lord to them,
being conjoined by love.

In the New Jerusalem there will be no falsity in its faith,
and the people in that church
will not acquire their concepts of God
from any natural sight,
namely from their own intelligence,
or out of a desire for glory springing from conceit,
but they will acquire those concepts
from the Lord alone
in a state of spiritual light from the Word.

They will be in the Lord's kingdom
and live in conjunction with Him to eternity.

People may know this for certain,
because the Lord Himself
as attested to it and said it.

The Lord who gave the Word
contained in both Testaments
has revealed through heaven
to people who posses truths from Him
what must surely come to pass.

AR 937 [3]

The Lord loves everyone
and wills to be conjoined with them,
but He cannot be conjoined with a person
as long as the person is caught up in the delight of evil,
such as the delight of hating and taking revenge,
the delight of committing adultery
and behaving licentiously,
the delight of thieving
or of stealing under some pretext,
the delight of blaspheming and lying,
and the lusts of the loves of self and the world.
For everyone caught up in these
is in the company of devils who reside in hell.
The Lord, indeed, loves those who are there, too,
but He cannot be conjoined with them
unless the delights of these evil are removed,
and the Lord cannot remove them
unless a person examines himself
so as to know his evils,
acknowledge them and confess them before the Lord,
and wish to desist from them and so repent.
This a person must do as though of himself,
because he has no sensation
that he does anything from the Lord.
And it is granted to a person to do so,
because for the conjunction to be real,
it must be a reciprocal conjunction
of the person with the Lord,
and of the Lord with the person.

To the extent, therefore,
that evils with their delights are thus removed,
to the same extent the Lord's love enters,
which, as we said, is universal toward all,
and the person is then withdrawn from hell
and introduced into heaven.

This process is something
the person must accomplish in the world,
for the character of a person in the world
in respect to his spirit
remains the same to eternity,
the only difference being that if he has lived rightly,
his state becomes more and more perfect,
because he is then
not encompassed by a material body,
but lives as a spiritual being in a spiritual body.