5360. 'And the seven years of famine began to come means the subsequent states of desolation. This is clear from the meaning of 'years' as states, dealt with in 482, 487, 488, 493, 893; and from the meaning of 'famine' as an absence of cognitions of truth and good, dealt with in 1460, 3364, and consequently a desolation. The reason 'famine' means that absence of them, or a desolation, is that celestial and spiritual food consists in nothing else than goodness and truth. These are the food with which angels and spirits are fed and which they long for when they are hungry and thirst for when they are thirsty, and to which also material kinds of food therefore correspond. Bread corresponds to celestial love, wine to spiritual love, as does everything else which is a form of 'bread', meaning food, or of 'wine', meaning drink. When therefore these kinds of nourishment are lacking a famine exists, which in the Word is called desolation and vastation, desolation being when there is a lack of truths, vastation when there is a lack of forms of good.
[2] Such desolation and vastation are spoken about in many places in the Word, where they are described as a desolation of the earth, kingdoms, cities, nations, or peoples. The same condition is also referred to as an emptying out, a cutting off, a bringing to a close, a wilderness, or a void, while the actual state is called the great day of Jehovah, the day of His wrath and vengeance, the day of darkness and thick darkness, of cloud and obscurity, the day of visitation, also the day when the earth will be destroyed, and so the last day or judgement day. But because people have not understood the internal sense of the Word they have imagined up to now that this is a day when the earth will be destroyed, at which point the resurrection and the judgement will begin to take place. Such people do not know that 'day' in this case means a state, and 'the earth' the Church, so that 'the day when the earth will be destroyed' means a state when the Church will pass away. In the Word therefore, when this passing away is referred to, a new earth is also mentioned, by which a new Church is meant, regarding which new earth together with a new heaven, see 1733, 1850, 2117, 2118 (end), 3355 (end), 4535. That final state of a Church which comes before the state of a new Church is meant and described in the Word, strictly speaking, by vastation and desolation. But desolation and vastation are also used to describe the state which comes before a person's regeneration; and that is the state meant here by 'the seven years of famine'.
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