of wisdom and intelligence. For example, an olive tree meant good
actions that come from love, while a grapevine meant the true insights
that come from those good actions. A cedar tree meant rational goodness
and truth. A mountain meant the highest heaven, and a hill, a heaven
below it.
The study of correspondences continued among many in the Middle
East even to the time of the Lord’s coming, as you can see from the wise
ones from the Middle East who came to the Lord when he was born.
Therefore a star went before them and they brought gifts with them:
gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matthew 2 : 1 , 2 , 9 , 10 , 11 ). The star that
went before them meant knowledge from heaven. Gold meant the heav-
enly goodness; frankincense, the spiritual goodness; and myrrh, the
earthly goodness that together form the source of all worship.
There was absolutely no study of correspondences among the Israelite
and Jewish nation, although all the aspects of their worship, all the
statutes and judgments given to them through Moses, and all the details
throughout their Word were correspondences. The reason for this lack
was that at heart the people were idolatrous. They had no desire at all to
know that any aspect of their worship meant something heavenly or spir-
itual. They believed that all their rituals were intrinsically holy. If the
heavenly and spiritual underpinnings had been revealed to them, they
would have not only rejected those underpinnings but also desecrated
them. As a result, heaven was so tightly closed to them that they were
scarcely aware that eternal life existed.
The truth of this is very clear from the fact that the people did not
acknowledge the Lord even though their entire Sacred Scripture had
prophesied about him and foretold his coming. They rejected him for
one single reason: he taught them about a heavenly kingdom, not an
earthly one. They wanted a Messiah who would lift them above all the
nations in the whole world, not some Messiah who was concerned with
their eternal salvation.
In the period of history that came next, the study of correspondences 206
that yields the Word’s spiritual meaning was not revealed, because at the
time the Christian church began, Christians were so extremely simple
that it was not possible to reveal this study to them. If it had been dis-
closed, it would have been of no use to them and they would not have
understood it.
After that time, darkness came over the whole Christian world, first
because of scattered heresies on many people’s part, and soon afterward
§206 sacred scripture 285