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.

11. The seventh chapter in the book of Revelation tells us that one hundred and forty-four thousand [of the servants of God] were sealed, twelve thousand out of each tribe of Israel — out of the tribes of Judah, Reuben, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Manasseh, Simeon, Levi, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin.

The spiritual meaning of this is that all people are saved who have the church in them from the Lord. For in the spiritual sense to be sealed or to have a mark placed on the forehead means, symbolically, to be acknowledged by the Lord and saved. The twelve tribes of Israel symbolize all people of the church. The numbers 12, 1,200, and 144,000 symbolically mean all people. Israel symbolizes the church. And each of the tribes symbolizes some particular aspect of the church.

People who are not aware of the spiritual content of these words may suppose that only that number of people are to be saved, and these solely from the Israelite and Jewish nations.