112. Since it was foretold that at the end of the present church darkness would again arise, when the Lord was no longer known or acknowledged as the God of heaven and earth, and when faith was divorced from charity, therefore to keep a genuine understanding of the Word from perishing as a consequence, it has pleased the Lord to reveal now the spiritual sense of the Word and to show that the Word in that sense, and so in the natural sense, has the Lord and the church as its subject, and indeed these alone; and to do much else by which to restore the light of truth from the Word that has been almost extinguished.

[2] That the light of truth would be almost extinguished at the end of the present church is something foretold in many places in the book of Revelation. It is also meant by these words of the Lord in Matthew:

Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then...they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with...glory and power. (Matthew 24:39, 30)

The sun there means the Lord in relation to love; the moon the Lord in relation to faith; the stars the Lord in relation to concepts of goodness and truth; the Son of man the Lord in relation to the Word; the clouds the literal sense of the Word; and glory the spiritual sense and its shining through in the literal sense.

3. The natural man, however, still cannot be persuaded by these considerations that the Word is Divine truth itself, containing Divine wisdom and Divine life; for he regards it in terms of its style, in which he does not see this wisdom and life.

Nevertheless, the style in the Word is the Divine style itself, with which no other style can be compared, however sublime and admirable it seems. For it is as darkness compared to light.

The style in the Word is such that there is something holy in every sentence and in every word, indeed in some places in the very letters. Because of that the Word conjoins a person with the Lord and opens heaven.

[2] There are two emissions emanating from the Lord: Divine love and Divine wisdom. Or to say the same thing, Divine goodness and Divine truth. For Divine goodness is a property of His Divine love, and Divine truth a property of His Divine wisdom. In its essence the Word is both of these. And because, as we said, it conjoins a person with the Lord and opens heaven, therefore the Word fills a person who reads it prompted by the Lord, and not by himself simply. It fills him with the goodness of love and truths of wisdom — his will with the goodness of love, and his intellect with truths of wisdom. The person has life as a result through the Word.