True Christianity: The Portable New Century Edition, Volume 1

meaning, and the heavenly meaning. You can see that this is the nature of
the Word from the things I have shown above in the chapter on Sacred
Scripture, or the Word, §§ 193 – 208.
If people were not told what the Word is like, none of them could 290
have any idea that there is an infinity in the Word’s least details, meaning
that it contains things beyond number that not even the angels could
ever fully draw out. Everything in it is comparable to a seed that has the
capability of growing out of the ground to become a huge tree, which
produces a tremendous number of seeds that are capable in turn of pro-
ducing similar trees that together make up a whole grove, whose seeds in
turn lead to many groves, and so on to infinity. This is the nature of the
Lord’s Word on a detailed level; it is especially true of the Ten Com-
mandments. Because they teach love for God and love for our neighbor,
they are a brief synopsis of the entire Word.
In fact, the Lord used a similar analogy to explain that this is the
nature of the Word:

The kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed that someone took
and sowed in a field. It is the least of all seeds, but when it has grown, it
is bigger than all other plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of
the air come and nest in its branches. (Matthew 13 : 31 , 32 ; Mark 4 : 31 , 32 ;
Luke 13 : 18 , 19 ; compare also Ezekiel 17 : 2 – 8 )
If you think about angelic wisdom, you can see that the Word has
this infinity of spiritual seeds, or truths. All angelic wisdom comes from
the Word and grows inside the angels to eternity. The wiser they become,
the more clearly they see that wisdom has no end, and the more clearly
they perceive that they themselves are only in its front hall; they could
never in the least touch the Lord’s divine wisdom, which they call a bot-
tomless depth. Since the Word comes from this bottomless depth, in that
it is from the Lord, clearly all its parts have a kind of infinity.

The First Commandment

There Is to Be No Other God before My Face

These are the words of the first commandment (Exodus 20 : 3 ; Deuteron- 291
omy 5 : 7 ). In their earthly meaning,which is their literal meaning, the

§291 the ten commandments 359