1887. To call the Word inspired is to say that everything in it, both the narratives and the other parts, contains heavenly qualities (which relate to love and goodness) and spiritual qualities (which relate to faith and truth). In other words, the contents are divine.

What the Lord inspires comes down from him through the heaven of angels and so through the world of spirits all the way to humankind. Among human beings it presents itself in its literal form, but in its first origins it is radically different. In heaven there is no such thing as a plain, ordinary narrative; instead, everything there represents something divine, and no one there perceives it any other way. This can be recognized from the fact that what it holds is inexpressible [2 Corinthians 12:4]. Consequently, unless the narratives represent divine matters and are therefore heavenly, they cannot possibly be divinely inspired.

Only the inner meaning reveals what the Word is like in the heavens, because that is what the Lord's Word in the heavens is.

1540. Inner Meaning

TRUE history in the Word started in the last chapter, chapter 12, as noted [§§1020, 1283, 1401, 1403, 1408:1]. Up to that point — or rather up to Eber's story — it was fiction.

The continuing story of Abram here symbolizes the Lord, in an inner sense. Specifically, it symbolizes his early life and what this was like before his outer self united with his inner self to form a single entity, that is, before his outer self likewise became heavenly and divine.

The historical events are what represent the Lord; the actual words symbolize the things represented.

Because it is a history, though, readers cannot help fixing their attention on those events. This is especially true today, when few if any believe that an inner meaning exists, let alone that it permeates every single word. Perhaps they will still fail to acknowledge an inner sense, even when it has been so clearly demonstrated. Part of the reason may also be that the deeper meaning appears to depart so radically from the literal meaning that it can hardly be recognized. But the reader can see [that there is such a meaning] simply by considering the fact that the historical details cannot possibly be Scripture, since in isolation from any inner meaning they contain no more divinity than other stories do. The deeper sense is what makes the narrative divine.

[2] The inner meaning is the real Word, as much of revelation discloses. One example is the statement, "Out of Egypt I called my child" (Matthew 2:15), ¹ and there are many others besides. After his resurrection, the Lord himself also taught his disciples what it was that Moses and the prophets had written about him (Luke 24:27). In doing so, he showed them that nothing is written in the Word that does not focus on him, his kingdom, and the church. These are the spiritual and heavenly subjects of the Word. What the literal meaning contains is worldly, bodily, and earthly, for the most part, and could never constitute the Lord's Word.

Modern people are such that this dimension is all they perceive; what the spiritual and heavenly dimension is they scarcely know. Not so the people of the earliest church and the ancient church. Had they lived today and read the Word, they would have paid no attention to the literal meaning (which they would view as insignificant) but only to the deeper meaning. They are stunned that anyone could perceive the Word in any other way. For this reason, all the books of the ancients were written to express something different in an inner sense than in the literal sense.

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