The Great Gospel of John
Volume 1
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
On Mount Morgenkopf near Kis
- Chapter 158 -
Spiritual interpretation and correspondence of the Genesis of Moses.
1
(The Lord continues) 'But it can nevertheless happen that the divine light is poured out over the evening light in man's heart and be so consumed or blended that it would in the end be no longer possible to know the natural light within man from the divine.
2
God then made a divide between the two waters, which bespeaks the two cognitions with which I have now adequately acquainted you, and He thus divided the two waters.
3
The division itself however is the actual heaven within man's heart expressing itself in true and living faith and not ever in a void, intellectual musing.
4
For this reason also I call him who has the mightiest and most undoubting faith a rock, which I place as a new divide between heaven and hell, and this bulwark no powers of darkness shall overcome forever.
5
When this bulwark is placed within man and his faith waxes ever mightier, then through such faith the nothingness of natural cognition becomes steadily more apparent. Natural cognition then moves to subordinate itself to the dominance of faith, and therewith, out of man's evening and the steadily brightening morning, there arises the other and by far brighter day.
6
In this second day condition man already recognises that which alone must maintain itself as ultimate truth forever; but proper order nevertheless still is lacking within him. Man still continually blends the natural with the purely spiritual, often spiritualising nature too much and hence beholding the material also with the spirit, therefore not yet being decidedly on the side of the right deed.
7
He resembles a world of water which indeed is surrounded on all sides with lucent air; not being clear however about whether his water-world came forth from the translucent air surrounding it or the latter proceeding from the water world, i.e. he is not sure within himself yet whether his spiritual cognition developed from his natural one, or whether the latter secretly came out of a possibly secretly pre-existent and secretly active spiritual cognition in man; or to put it more plainly still, he does not know whether faith proceeds from knowledge or the latter from the former, and what the difference is between them.
8
In short, he cannot work out whether the chicken was before the egg and the seed before the tree.
9
God then comes once again to help man along, provided man has done what he could from the strength loaned to him and hence his, on this second day of his spiritual education. And this additional help consists in the provision of more abundant light, which then like the sun in spring, not just by greater light intensity but the warmth effected with this, starts to fertilise all the seeds laid in man's heart.
10
This warmth however is called love, and spiritually constitutes the soil within which the seed starts sprouting and thrusting out its roots.
11
And behold, this is what is written in Moses, that God said, "Let the waters be gathered together in certain separate places, so that the dry and firm land can be seen, from which alone the seeds can grow into living and enlivening fruit!"
12
And it says, "..and God called the dry land earth, and the water, now gathered at certain places, the seas".
13
Question: for whose benefit did God call it so? - For Himself verily He would not have needed it; since it surely would sound somewhat divisive to attribute to the highest wisdom in God His special pleasure in succeeding with the naming of the dry land as 'earth' and the gathered waters as 'seas'.
14
Yet God surely could not do the naming of the dry land and the gathered waters for anyone's benefit, since there was no being besides Himself in this creation period to understand Him!
15
Such saying of Moses therefore cannot possibly have a material but only a spiritual sense, having only a potentially retrospective spiritual sense in relation to the erstwhile creation of the worlds - i.e. from the spiritual to the material - this being capable of comprehension only by the wisdom of angels. But the way it stands, it has a purely spiritual sense and indicates how initially the individual and society at large develop in time and periods from their necessary original natural state to the gradually purer spiritual.
16
Man therefore is being sorted out even in his natural state. The cognitions have their place - that is man's sea, and the love emerging from the cognitions as a soil capable of carrying fruit, washed all around by the totality of rightful cognitions, steadily renewed in its strength for the bringing forth of all kinds of select fruits ever more abundantly.'