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