its state. The end of the days of that church was the time of the flood.
272. Verse 18. And the thorn and the thistle shall it bring forth unto thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. By the "thorn and the thistle," are meant curse and vastation; and by "thou shalt eat the herb of the field," is signified that he should live as a wild animal. Man lives like a wild animal when his internal man is so separated from his external as to operate upon it only in a most general manner, for man is man from what he receives through his internal man from the Lord, and is a wild animal from what he derives from the external man, which, separated from the internal, is in itself no other than a wild animal, having a similar nature, desires, appetites, phantasies, and sensations, and also similar organic forms. That nevertheless he is able to reason, and, as it seems to himself, acutely, he has from the spiritual substance by which he receives the influx of life from the Lord, which is however perverted in such a man, and becomes the life of evil, which is death. Hence he is called a dead man.
273. That the "thorn and the thistle" signify curse and vastation, is evident from harvest and fruit-tree denoting the opposites, which are blessings and multiplications. That the "thorn," the "thistle," the "brier," the "bramble," and the "nettle," have such a signification, is evident from the Word, as in Hosea:—
Lo, they are gone away because of the vastation; Egypt shall gather them; Memphis shall bury them; their desirable things of silver, the nettle shall inherit them; the bramble shall be in their tents (ix. 6).
Here "Egypt" and "Memphis" denote such as seek to understand Divine things from themselves and their own memory-knowledges. In the same Prophet:—
The lofty places of Aven, the sin of Israel, shall be destroyed; the thorn and the thistle shall come up upon their altars (x. 8),
where the "lofty places of Aven," signify the love of self; and the "thorn and thistle on the altars," profanation. In Isaiah:—
Mourning upon the paps for the fields of desire, for the fruitful vine; upon the ground of My people shall come up the briery thorn (xxxii. 12, 13).
