2116. Were circumcised by him means that the Lord makes them righteous. This can be seen from the representation and so the symbolism of circumcision as purification, which was dealt with above at §2039. The fact that they were circumcised by him (Abraham) represented something too: the fact that it was the Lord who purified them and in this way made them righteous.
As far as making people righteous is concerned, the process does not work the way popular opinion says it does. Most people think that all their evil and sin is wiped away and completely erased when they "believe," even if belief should come in the last hour before death, and even if they devoted the entire course of their life to wickedness and crime. I have been thoroughly taught that not even the slightest evil thing we have contemplated or actually committed in bodily life is wiped away or completely obliterated. Everything remains, down to its very smallest part.
[2] The truth is that people who have plotted and carried out acts of hatred, revenge, cruelty, and adultery have accordingly lived a life devoid of love for others, and the life that awaits them after death is the one they developed along the way. Every single detail of that life remains and returns to them, one after another. Such is the source of their torment in hell.
People who have lived lives of love for the Lord and charity for their neighbor also retain everything evil they have done in their lives, but it is mitigated by the good qualities they received from the Lord through living a life of charity when they were in the world. As a result, they are lifted into heaven and are withheld from the evil they have in them, so that it does not show. If any in the other world come to doubt that they still have evil in them, because it does not show, they are forced to return into it until they see that it is so. Then they are lifted back up into heaven. This, then, is to be made righteous, since under these circumstances we acknowledge not our own righteousness but the Lord's.
[3] Some say that people who have faith are saved, and this is true, but when the Word speaks of faith it actually means love for the Lord and charity for our neighbor. So it means a life based on love and charity. The doctrines and dogmas of faith are not faith itself but a part of faith. The point of each and every one of the doctrines is for us to become the kind of people they teach us to be. This is quite plain from the Lord's words that all the Law and the Prophets (the whole of theology) consists in loving God and our neighbor (Matthew 22:35-40; Mark 12:28-34).
The first two volumes show that there is no other kind of faith that is really faith, in §§30-38, 379, 389, 724, 809, 896, 904, 916, 989, 1017, 1076, 1077, 1121, 1158, 1162, 1176, 1258, 1285, 1316, 1608, 1798, 1799, 1834, 1843, 1844. They also show that heaven itself consists in love for the Lord and mutual love, in §§537, 547, 553, 1112, 2057.
