1661. And it happened in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar; Arioch, king of Ellasar; Chedorlaomer, king of Elam; and Tidal, king of Goiim, symbolizes just so many different categories of apparent goodness and truth (which are not good or true in and of themselves) in the Lord's outer self. This can be seen from the inner-level symbolism of all these kings, as well as from what follows. The subject is the Lord's combat with evil and falsity, and here it is about his first struggle, which took place in his adolescence and at the dawn of his adulthood. It was a struggle that he first faced and underwent after he had been trained in both secular and religious knowledge. That is why the verse says that it happened in the days of these kings.
[2] None of us can possibly fight evil and falsity until we know how to recognize them and consequently until we have been educated. We do not know what evil is, still less what falsity is, until we come into the capacities of intellect and judgment. That is the reason we do not undergo spiritual trials until we reach adult age — the age of majority in our case, of adolescence in the Lord's.
The very first weapons that any of us wield are the good impulses and true concepts we have acquired by learning about them. These we use as the basis and means for evaluating evil impulses and false concepts.
[3] When we first start to fight, we universally believe that the goodness and truth we wield are our own; we take credit for them and also for the power to resist. Such an attitude is acceptable, because at that point we are incapable of knowing any better. Until we have been reborn there is much that we cannot possibly see clearly enough to say that we know, acknowledge, and believe it. We do not see that nothing good or true comes from us, that everything good and true comes from the Lord, and that we have no power of our own to resist anything evil or false. We do not realize that evil spirits stir up the evil and falsity they flood us with. Still less do we realize that evil spirits put us in touch with hell, or that hell exerts as much pressure on us as the ocean does on each stone in a jetty — far too much pressure for us ever to resist by our own strength. Still, since until we regenerate we cannot help supposing the power is ours, we are allowed to think this way and so to be introduced into the battles of spiritual crisis. Later on, though, we start to see the light.
[4] While we are at the stage of imagining that goodness and truth come from ourselves and that the strength to resist is ours, the goodness and truth with which we fight evil and falsity are neither good nor true, even though they seem to be so. An inflated sense of self lurks inside them, and we take credit for the victory. We pride ourselves on having conquered evil and falsity, when it is the Lord alone who fights and wins. No one can see the truth of this but those reborn through times of tribulation.
[5] The Lord was introduced into fearsome struggles against evil and falsity in his early adolescence, and at that time he too could not imagine any differently. This was partly due to the divine plan — that his human side be introduced to and united with his divine side through constant battles and victories. It was also due to the fact that the goodness and truth he used in the combat with evil and falsity belonged to his outer self. So the goodness and truth were not entirely divine, which is why they are called apparent goodness and truth. For all these reasons, his divine side kept introducing his human side into the struggle in such a way that it would win by means of its own power.
The secrets hidden in all this, however, are too manifold ever to describe. To put it briefly, the goodness and truth the Lord had that he used for weapons in his early battles were saturated with his mother's heredity. To the extent that his mother's heredity saturated them, they were not divine, but as he overcame evil and falsity they were gradually purified and became divine.
