The Great Gospel of John
Volume 1
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
On Mount Morgenkopf near Kis
- Chapter 157 -
Spiritual interpretation and correspondence of the Genesis of Moses.
The Lord continues: 'Is it not written: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
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And God said, let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
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Behold, these are Moses' Words! If you were to take these in their natural sense you should have to at once see their ultimate absurdity!
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What of a truth is the heaven and earth of which Moses says all was created in the beginning? In man, heaven is the spiritual and earth the natural; this still is void and without form - as in your case. The waters are your deficient knowledge of all things, above which the Spirit of God moves indeed, but not yet within them.
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Since God at all times however sees the terrible darkness in your material world-depth, God says to you, as manifestly even now: "Let there be light!"
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It begins thereupon to dawn within your natures, and God indeed sees how good is the light upon your darkness; but it is yourselves who do not want to recognise it. For this reason therefore a division takes place within you, day and night verily are separated, and through the day within, you then recognise the former night of your hearts.
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With man, his initial natural being is late evening and hence night. Since God gives him light however, such light is to him a veritable sunrise, and out of man's evening and sunrise verily come man's first day of life.
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Hence behold, if Moses, who most certainly had been an initiate into all Egyptian science had intended in his scripture to indicate the coming into being of the first terrestrial day, then he would, with all his science and wisdom have noted that no day could ever emerge from evening and morning; night proper surely always follows evening, and day comes only after the morning.
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What therefore lies between evening and morning is night; only what lies between morning and evening is day!
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Had Moses said, "...and hence out of morning and evening emerged the first day", then you would have been entitled to take this in its natural sense; but for good reasons of correspondences he said exactly the reverse, and this signifies man's evening and night, which also is understandable since nobody has seen the highest wisdom in a child yet.
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When a child is born, its soul finds itself in utter darkness and therefore night. The child nevertheless grows, receiving all kinds of instruction, gaining all sorts of insights therewith; and behold, this is dusk comparable with evening.
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Indeed you say that it dawns also in the morning, and Moses therefore might have said: 'And from dawn and an actually bright morning emerged the first day!
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To this I say: indeed, had he availed himself of spiritual correspondences to tell mankind the crassest nonsense! But Moses knew that only evening corresponds to man's terrestrial state; he knew that it was with man's worldly-intellectual education exactly as it is with the gradually waning light of natural evening.
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The greater the pursuit of worldly things through men's intellect, the feebler the pure divine light of love and spiritual life in their hearts. Hence also Moses called such worldly light of men the evening.
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Only when God through His mercy kindles a small light of life in the heart, does man begin to comprehend the nothingness of all that he had previously acquired through the intellect - his spiritual evening, whereupon he starts to gradually see how the treasures of his evening light are as transitory as this light itself.
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The right light out of God however, kindled in the hearts of men is that morning which together with the preceding evening brings about the first true day within man.
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From this My present explanation however you must see what a vast difference there has to be between these two respective lights or rather cognitions; because all cognition from the worldly evening light is deceptive and transitory. Only Truth lasts forever and deception has in the end to come to naught.