4267. 'And he commanded the first, saying, When Esau my brother meets you and asks you, saying, To whom do you belong; and where are you going; and whose are these in front of you? then you shall say, They belong to your servant Jacob; it is a gift sent to my lord Esau; and behold, he also is behind us' means submission. This likewise is clear from the internal sense of individual words, from which this general meaning emerges. Submission and what goes with submission is clearly the meaning, for Jacob commanded his servants to call his brother 'lord' and himself 'servant', and to say that the gift was being sent as if to a lord from his servant. It has been shown many times that in relation to each other good is 'lord' and truth 'servant', and also that they are nevertheless called 'brothers'. They are called 'brothers' because when good and truth have been joined together, good manifests itself within truth as in an image, and after that they act conjointly to bring about the effect. But good is called 'lord' and truth 'servant' before they have been joined together, the more so when there is argument over which one has priority over the other.

“Servant” literally means “a person who serves another," and its meaning is similar in reference to its spiritual meanings of the Bible. Our lives in their most outward form -- the physical actions we take and the thoughts and feelings directly connected to them -- are in a way “servants” to our deeper, more hidden, internal thoughts and desires. So in most cases, “servants” in the Bible represent things we're doing and thinking on that outward, external level. Servants can have good masters or evil ones, obviously, and a servant doing good work in service of an evil master is actually making the world a more evil place. So the precise meaning of a given servant in the Bible depends on the nature of the master he or she is serving. Finally, when the Bible is addressing the Lord's own spiritual development, “servant” represents the Lord's most outward aspect: the human body he inherited from Mary, with all its frailties and potential for temptation.