Week 4    Day 5

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The Sixth Commandment

Revelation 19:7–9

Let us rejoice and be glad, and let us give the glory to Him; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife has prepared herself. And it was given to her that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright; for the fine linen is the just deeds of the holy ones. And he said to me, Write: Happy are they who have been called to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said, These are the true words of God.

AE 996:2. As true conjugial love in its first essence is love to the Lord from the Lord, it is also innocence. Innocence is loving the Lord as one’s Father by doing His commandments and wishing to be led by Him and not by oneself, thus like an infant. As that love is innocence, it is the very being of all good. And therefore man has so much of heaven in himself, or he is so much in heaven, as he is in conjugial love, because he is so far in innocence.

It is because true conjugial love is innocence that the playfulness between a married pair is like the play of infants together. And this is so in the measure in which they love each other, as is evident in the case of all in the first days after the nuptials, when their love emulates true conjugial love. The innocence of conjugial love is meant in the Word by the “nakedness” at which Adam and his wife did not blush, and this is for the reason that there is nothing of lasciviousness, and thus nothing of shame, between a married pair, any more than between little children when they are naked together.

AE 1000:4. Those who are in true conjugial love, after death, when they become angels, return to their early manhood and to youth, the males, however spent with age, becoming young men, and the wives, however spent with age, becoming young women. Each partner returns to the flower and joys of the age when conjugial love begins to exalt the life with new delights, and to inspire playfulness for the sake of bearing offspring. The man who while he lived in the world had shunned adulteries as sins, and who has been inaugurated by the Lord into conjugial love, comes into this state first exteriorly and afterwards more and more interiorly to eternity.

As such [people] continue to grow young more interiorly, it follows that true conjugial love continually increases and enters into its charms and satisfactions, which have been provided for it from the creation of the world... arising from the love of the Lord for heaven and the church, and thus from the love of good for truth and truth for good. These loves are the source of every joy in the heavens.

A person thus grows young in heaven because he then enters into the marriage of good and truth; and in good there is the effort to love truth continually, and in truth there is the effort to love good continually. Then the wife is good in form and the husband is truth in form. From that effort a person puts off all the austerity, sadness, and dryness of old age, and puts on the liveliness, gladness, and freshness of youth, from which the effort lives and becomes joy. [5] I have been told from heaven that such then have the life of love, which cannot otherwise be described than as the life of joy itself.

AE 1000:5. ...From the marriages in the heavens, although the married pair have consociations there like those on the earth, children are not born, but instead of children goods and truths, and thus wisdom.... And this is why births, nativities, and generations in the Word, in its spiritual sense, mean spiritual births, nativities, and generations, and sons and daughters mean the truths and goods of the church, and other like things are meant by daughters-in-law, mothers-in-law, and fathers-in-law. This also makes clear that marriages on the earth correspond to marriages in the heavens; and that after death, man comes into the correspondence, that is, comes from natural bodily marriage into spiritual heavenly marriage, which is heaven itself and the joy of heaven.

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