44 HEAVEN and HELL §82
and by evil lives. The ones who have stifl ed it by pride in their intelli-
gence prefer an invisible God, while the ones who have done so by evil
lives prefer no God at all. Because this instinct is not in them, neither
type knows that it even exists, although this is the essential heavenly
divine nature that fl ows into us fi rst and foremost from heaven because
we are born for heaven; and no one enters heaven without some concept
of the Divine Being.83 This is why people who do not share in heaven’s concept (that is, in
the concept of the Divine Being who makes heaven) cannot be raised
even to the fi rst threshold of heaven. The moment any such individuals
arrive, they feel a perceptible opposition and forceful resistance. This is
because the deeper levels of such people, levels that are intended to accept
heaven, are actually closed because they are not in heaven’s form. In fact,
the nearer such people come to heaven, the more tightly their deeper
levels are closed.
This is the lot of people within the church who deny the Lord and
who, like the Socinians, deny his divinity. The lot of people who have
been born outside the church and who have not acknowledged him or
possessed the Word will be seen below.84 We can tell that the ancients had an image of the Divine as human
from the way the Divine appeared to Abraham, Lot, Joshua, Gideon,
Manoah and his wife, and others. Even though they saw God as a per-
son, they still worshiped him as God of the universe, calling him “God of
heaven and earth” and “Jehovah.” In John 8 : 56 , the Lord himself teaches
that it was he whom Abraham had seen. We can see that it was the Lord
whom others saw from the Lord’s words “No one has seen the Father or
his appearance, or heard his voice” (John 1 : 18 ; 5 : 37 ).
85 But people who judge everything on the basis of their outward senses
have great diffi culty grasping the fact that God is a person. In fact, the
only way sense-centered people can think about the Divine Being is on
the basis of this world and what it contains, so they can think about a
divine and spiritual person only as they do about a physical and natural
one. This leads to the conclusion that if God is to be a person, he must
be as big as the universe, and if he does rule heaven and earth, it must be
through many underlings the way kings on earth rule. If such individuals
are told that in heaven there is not the kind of extended space we have in
this world, they do not grasp it at all. People who think on the basis of
nature and of its light alone cannot help thinking in terms of the kind of
extended space that lies before our eyes. However, they are sadly mis-
taken when they think the same way about heaven. The “extension” that