We hear it said in the church that the Word is holy, but this is because Jehovah God spoke it. However, because people do not see anything holy about it from the letter alone, once they begin to have doubts about its holiness for this reason, then when they read the Word, there is much they can find to justify this attitude. That is, they think, “Is this Holy? Is this divine?” To prevent this kind of thinking from spreading to more and more people and then gaining strength and so destroying the Lord’s union with the church where the Word is, it has now pleased the Lord to unveil the spiritual meaning so that we may know where in the Word that “holy material” lies hidden.
But let me illustrate this too with some examples.
Sometimes the Word talks about Egypt, sometimes about Assyria, sometimes about Edom, Moab, the Ammonites, Tyre and Sidon, and Gog. If we do not know that these names mean matters of heaven and the church, we may be misled and believe that the Word has a lot to say about nations and peoples and only a little about heaven and the church–a lot about earthly matters and not much about heavenly ones. However, if we know what is meant by these nations and peoples or by their names, we can come out of error into truth.
By the same token, when we see in the Word the frequent mention or gardens, groves, forests, and their trees, such as olive, grapevines, cedar, poplar and oak; when we see mention of lambs, sheep, goats, calves, and cattle, as well as mountains, hills, valleys, and their springs, rivers, waters, and so on; if we know nothing about the spiritual meaning of the Word, we can only believe that these and nothing else are the things that they mean. We would not know that garden, grove, and forest mean wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge; that the olive, grapevine, cedar, poplar, and oak mean heavenly, spiritual, rational, earthly and sensory types of goodness and truth in the church; that lambs, sheep, goats, calves, and cattle mean innocence, caring, and earthly feelings; that mountains, hills, and valleys mean the higher, lower, and lowest forms of the church; and that Egypt means knowledge, Assyria reasoning, Edom what is earthly, Moab the corruption of what is good, Ammonites the corruption of what is true, Tyre and Sidon the knowledge of what is true and good, and Gog outward worship with no inner content. Once we know this, though, we can think that the Word is about nothing but heavenly matters and that these earthly things are only the vessels that contain them.
But let me illustrate this with another example from the Word. We read in David:
The voice of Jehovah is upon the waters; the God of glory thunders; Jehovah is upon great waters. The voice of Jehovah breaks the cedars. Jehovah shatters the cedars of Lebanon. He makes them leap like a calf, and Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn. The voice of Jehovah comes down like a flame of fire. The voice of Jehovah makes the wilderness quake; it makes the wilderness of Kadesh quake. The voice of Jehovah makes the deer give birth and strips the woodlands bare, but in his temple, everyone says, “Glory!” (Psalms 29:3-9)
Anyone who is strictly earthly-minded and does not realize that the details, including every single word here, are holy and divine may say, “What is all this–Jehovah sitting on waters, breaking cedars with his voice, making them leap like a calf and Lebanon like a young unicorn, making deer give birth, and so on?” Such people do not realize that spiritually understood, these statements serve as a description of the power of divine truth or the Word.
When understood in this way, the “voice of Jehovah” (which here speaks in thunder) means divine truth or the Word in its power. The great waters on which Jehovah sits mean its truths; both the cedars that it breaks and [the cedar of] Lebanon that it shatters mean distortions produced by human reasoning; the calf and the young unicorn mean distortions produced by the earthly and sense-centered self; the flame of fire means the urge to distort; the wilderness and the wilderness of Kadesh mean the church where there is nothing true and nothing good; the deer that the voice of Jehovah cause to give birth mean people who are engaged in doing good on an earthly level; and the woodlands that he strips bare mean the facts and concepts the Word makes accessible to them. That is why it goes on to say that everyone in his temple says, “Glory!” This means that there are divine truths in the details of the Word, since the temple means the Lord and therefore the Word, as well as heaven and the church, and glory means divine truth.
We can see from all this that there is not a single word in this passage that is not describing the divine power of the Word against all kinds of false beliefs and perceptions in earthly people, and the divine power to reform people.
from Sacred Scripture–White Horse, Section 18
Secrets of Heaven 