44. Verses 24-25 And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, beasts and creeping things and wild animals of the earth according to their kinds; and it was so. And God made wild animals of the earth according to their kinds, and beasts according to their kinds, and everything that creeps along the ground according to its kind; and God saw that it was good.

Man, like the earth, can produce nothing good unless the cognitions of faith have already been sown in him enabling him to know what to believe and do. It is the function of the understanding to hear the Word, and of the will to do it. A person who hears the Word and does not do it is one who claims to believe, but he does not live according to it. Such a person separates hearing and doing, and splits his mind in two directions; and by the Lord he is called 'a foolish man',

Everyone who hears My words and does them I liken to a wise man who built his house upon the rock; but everyone who hears My words and does them not I liken to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. Matthew 7:24, 26.

Matters of the understanding, as has been shown, are meant by 'creeping things which the waters produce', and by 'birds over the earth and over the face ¹ of the expanse'. Matters of the will are here meant by 'living creatures which the earth brings forth', and by 'beasts and creeping things', and also by 'the wild animals of the earth'.

Бележки под линия:

647. It is bound to seem strange and very far-fetched to everybody that these details have this meaning, that is to say, that the numbers three hundred, fifty, and thirty mean remnants, and in particular that they were few; also that 'length, breadth, and height' means holiness, truth, and good. But in addition to what has been stated and shown above about numbers at verse 3 of this chapter, where a hundred and twenty means the remnants of faith, this matter may also become clear to anybody from the fact that people who possess the internal sense, as good spirits and angels do, are beyond anything earthly, bodily, or purely worldly, and so beyond anything involving numbers and measurements. Yet the Lord enables them to perceive the Word fully, and to do so quite independently from such concepts. This being so, it becomes quite clear that numbers and measurements embody celestial and spiritual things. The latter however are so remote from the sense of the letter that such things cannot possibly be seen. This applies to every single celestial or spiritual thing. From this also anyone may recognize how insane it is to desire to inquire into matters of faith through sensory evidence and factual knowledge and to refuse to believe unless one grasps them by that method.