1. The Sacred Scripture, or Word, Is Divine Truth Itself

Everyone says that the Word comes from God, is Divinely inspired, and so is holy. But even so, no one has known before this wherein the Divinity in it lies. For in its letter the Word appears as though written in the ordinary way, in a foreign style, neither as sublime or nor as lucid as writings of the present age seem to be.

As a result, a person who worships nature as God, or in preference to God, and so thinks prompted by self and his own self-interest, and not prompted by heaven in response to the Lord, may easily fall into error regarding the Word, and into scorning it, and when reading it, saying to himself, “What is this? What is that? Is this Divine? Can God, whose wisdom is infinite, speak so? Where is the holiness in it, and what makes it holy, other than some teaching of religion and so conviction?”

8. Since the Word is inwardly spiritual and celestial, it has therefore been written solely in terms of correspondences, and something written solely in terms of correspondences is written in its outmost sense in the kind of style found in the Prophets and Gospel writers. Even though this style seems to be an ordinary one, still it conceals in it Divine wisdom and all the wisdom of angels.

41. Since that is the nature of the Word in its literal sense, it follows that when people read the Word in a state of enlightenment from the Lord — people who possess Divine truths and a belief that the Word at its core has a holy Divinity within it, and still more, people who believe that that is the nature of the Word because of its spiritual and celestial senses — they see Divine truths with their natural sight. For the light of heaven, the light in which the Word’s spiritual sense exists, flows into the person’s natural sight, in which the Word’s literal sense exists, and enlightens the person’s intellectual faculty called reason, enabling him to see and acknowledge Divine truths, both where they are evident and where they lie concealed.

In some cases these truths flow in with the light of heaven even at times when the people are unaware of it.