because of the Nicene Council’s decisions and decrees about three divine
persons from eternity and the person of Christ being the Son of Mary
rather than the Son of Jehovah God. This led [in turn] to the modern-
day faith that by going to three gods, one after the other, we are justified.
All aspects of the modern-day church depend on this faith the way our
body parts depend on our head. Since people applied everything in the
Word to this mistaken faith, its spiritual meaning could not be revealed.
If it had been, they would have applied its meaning to their faith, and
thereby desecrated the true holiness of the Word. By doing that they
would have completely closed heaven to themselves and would have
removed the Lord from the church.207 The study of correspondences that yields the Word’s spiritual meaning
has been revealed today because now the divine truths of the church are
coming forward into the light. These truths are what the Word’s spiritual
meaning consists of. When these truths are in us, the Word’s literal mean-
ing cannot be perverted. The Word’s literal meaning is capable of being
bent this way and that, but if it is bent in the direction of falsity, its inner
holiness is destroyed, and so is its outer holiness. If it is bent in the direc-
tion of truth, it stays holy. (More will be said about this in what is to come
[§§ 260 , 508 ].)
The opening of the spiritual meaning at this day is what is meant by
John’s seeing heaven opened and seeing a white horse, and seeing and
hearing an angel standing in the sun calling all people to a great feast
(Revelation 19 : 11 – 18 ). The fact that the spiritual meaning would not be
acknowledged for a long time, however, is what is meant by the beast and
the kings of the earth who were going to make war against the One sitting
on the white horse (Revelation 19 : 19 ) and by the dragon that first pursued
the woman who had given birth to a son, then went out into the desert and
cast water like a river out of its mouth to drown her (Revelation 12 : 13 – 17 ).
208 5. From this point on, the spiritual meaning of the Word will be given
only to people who have genuine truths from the Lord.The reason for this is
that none of us can see the spiritual meaning except with the help of the
Lord alone, provided we have divine truths from him. The Word’s spiri-
tual meaning deals solely with the Lord and his kingdom. The spiritual
meaning is the one with which his angels engage in heaven. It is his
divine truth there.
It is possible for us to violate the Word’s spiritual meaning if we are
involved in the study of correspondences and we try to explore that mean-
ing with our own intelligence. With just a few correspondences we know,