“committing adultery” to mean contaminating the good things taught by
the Word and falsifying its truths. A heavenly angel takes “committing
adultery” to mean denying the Lord’s divinity and desecrating the Word.
[ 3 ] The seventh commandment,“You will not steal.” We take “steal-
ing” to mean stealing, cheating, and using any excuse to take our neigh-
bor’s possessions. A spiritual angel takes “stealing” to mean using things
that are false and evil to deprive others of the true and good things in
their faith. A heavenly angel takes “stealing” to mean attributing to our-
selves what belongs to the Lord and claiming his justice and merit for
ourselves.
[ 4 ] The eighth commandment,“You will not testify falsely.” We take “tes-
tifying falsely” to include lying and libeling. A [spiritual] angel takes “testify-
ing falsely” to mean saying and convincing people that falsity is truth and
evil is good, and the reverse. A heavenly angel takes “testifying falsely” to
mean slandering and blaspheming the Lord and the Word.
[ 5 ] This shows how spiritual and heavenly meanings are unfolded from
and drawn out of the Word’s earthly meaning, which contains them. An
astounding thing is that the angels receive their meanings independently of
their knowing what we are thinking. Yet the angels’ thoughts and ours are
united through correspondences like a purpose, its means, and its result. In
fact, purposes actually exist in the heavenly kingdom, means actually exist
in the spiritual kingdom, and results actually exist in the earthly kingdom.
That is how we now associate with angels through the Word.237 A spiritual angel draws out and extracts spiritual things from the
Word’s literal meaning, and a heavenly angel draws out and extracts heav-
enly things, because these things agree with their nature and are compatible
with it. To illustrate the truth of this, I can use similar situations in nature’s
three kingdoms—animal, plant, and mineral. In the animal kingdom,
when food has become chyle, blood vessels draw out and extract their
blood from it, nerve fibers derive their sap from it, and so do the structures
from which the [nerve] fibers branch out. In the plant kingdom, a tree,
including trunk, branches, leaves, and fruit, stands upon its root. Through
the root it draws out of the ground and extracts a relatively crude sap for
the trunk, branches, and leaves, a more refined sap for the flesh of the fruit,
and a most refined sap for the seeds inside the fruit. In the mineral king-
dom, here and there in the womb of the earth there are raw minerals preg-
nant with gold, silver, copper, and iron. As a result of exhaled gases and the
flow of liquid from the rocky substance, gold extracts its own irreducible
element, silver its own, copper its own, and iron its own; and a watery
effluvium conveys them from one place to another.