—­True Christian Religion, n. 201

“And behold a ladder set on the earth, and its head reaching to heaven:  and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.  And behold Jehovah standing above it.”  The ladder set between earth and heaven, or between the lowest and the highest, signifies communication.  In the original tongue the term ladder is derived from an expression which signifies a path or way, and a path or way is predicated of truth.  By a ladder, therefore, one extremity of which is set on the earth, while the other reaches to heaven, is signified the communication of truth which is in the lowest place with truth which is in the highest, indeed with inmost good and truth, such as are in heaven, and from which heaven itself is an ascent as it were from what is lowest, and afterward when the order is inverted, a descent, and is the order of man’s regeneration.  The arcanum which lies concealed in the internal sense of these words is, that all goods and truths descend from the Lord, and ascend to Him, for man is so created that the Divine things of the Lord may descend through him even to the ultimates of nature, and from the ultimates of nature may ascend to Him; so that man might be a medium uniting the Divine with the world of nature, and uniting the world of nature with the Divine, that thus, through man, as through the uniting medium, the very ultimate of nature might live from the Divine, which would be the case had man lived according to Divine order.

—­Arcana Coelestia, nn. 3699-3702

ITS FUNCTION

Divine truth, in passing from the Lord through the three heavens to men in the world, is written and made the Word in each heaven.  The Word, therefore, is the union of the heavens with one another, and of the heavens with the Church in the world.  Hence there flows in from the Lord through the heavens a holy Divine with the man who acknowledges the Divine in the Lord and the holy in the Word, while he reads it.  Such a man can be instructed and can draw wisdom from the Word as from the Lord Himself or from heaven itself, in the measure that he loves it, and thus can be nourished with the same food with which the angels themselves are fed, and in which there is life, according to these words of the Lord: 

     “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they
     are life.”

     “The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of
     water springing up into everlasting life.”

     “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which
     proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

—­Apocalypse Explained, n. 1074

HOW TO USE IT

They who, in reading the Word, look to the Lord, by acknowledging that all truth and all good are from Him, and nothing from themselves,—­they are enlightened, and see truth and perceive what is good from the Word.  That enlightenment is from the light of heaven.