Mark 13:18-19 Meaning according to Swedenborg

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¹⁸ And pray ye that your flight be not in the winter. ¹⁹ For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither shall be. -Mark 13:18-19 King James Version (KJV)

 

Arcana Coelestia, by Emanuel Swedenborg, [1749-56], tr. by John F. Potts [1905-10], at sacred-texts.com

 

34.

Love and faith admit of no separation, because they constitute one and the same thing... It is permitted me to relate the following wonderful particulars. The celestial angels, by virtue of the celestial love in which they are from the Lord, are from that love in all the knowledges of faith, and are in such a life and light of intelligence that scarcely anything of it can be described. But, on the other hand, spirits who are in the knowledge of the doctrinals of faith, without love, are in such a coldness of life and obscurity of light that they cannot even approach the first threshold of the court of the heavens, but flee back again. Some of them, while not living according to His precepts, say that they have believed in the Lord, and it was of such that the Lord said in Matthew: Not everyone that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of the heavens, but he that doeth My will: many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied through Thy name (Matt. 7:21, 22, to the end).[2] Hence it is evident that those who are in love are also in faith, and thereby in heavenly life, but not those who say they are in faith, and are not in the life of love. The life of faith without love is like the light of the sun without heat, as in the time of winter, when nothing grows, but all things are torpid [or dormant] and dead; whereas faith proceeding from love is like the light of the sun in the time of spring, when all things grow and flourish in consequence of the sun's fructifying [make (something) fruitful or productive] heat. It is precisely similar in regard to spiritual and heavenly things, which are usually represented in the Word by such as exist in the world and on the face of the earth. No faith; and faith without love, are also compared by the Lord to "winter" where He foretells the consummation of the age, in Mark: Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, for those shall be days of affliction (Mark 13:18-19). "Flight" means the last time, and also that of every man when he dies. "Winter" is a life destitute of love; the "day of affliction" is its miserable state in the other life.