4571. And God said to him. That this signifies perception from the Divine, is evident from the signification in the historicals of the Word of “to say” as being to perceive (see n. 1791, 1815, 1819, 1822, 1898, 1919, 2080, 2619, 2862, 3395, 3509). That it was from the Divine is signified by “God said;” for the Divine was in the Lord from conception. This was His being, for He was conceived from Jehovah, and therefore His perception was from the Divine, but it was according to the state of the reception by His Human, because He made the Human in Himself Divine by successive steps. Hence it is evident that as the Divine or God was in Him, by the words “God said to him” is signified perception from the Divine.

1815. He said unto him, I am Jehovah. That this signifies the Lord’s internal man, which is Jehovah, and from which He had perception, is evident from what has been already said, namely, that the Lord’s Internal, that is, whatever the Lord received from the Father, was Jehovah in Him, for He was conceived from Jehovah. What a man receives from his father is one thing, and what he receives from his mother is another. From his father a man receives all that is internal, his soul itself or life being from the father; but he receives from his mother all that is external. In a word, the interior man, or spirit itself, is from the father; but the outer man, or body itself, is from the mother; which everyone can comprehend merely from the fact that the soul itself is implanted by the father, and this begins to clothe itself in a little bodily form in the ovum. Whatever is afterwards added, whether in the ovum or in the womb, is of the mother, for it has no increase from anywhere else.

[2] It may be seen from this that as to His internals the Lord was Jehovah. But because the external, which the Lord received from the mother, was to be united to the Divine or Jehovah, and this through temptations and victories, as before said, it could not appear otherwise to Him in those states, than that when He spoke with Jehovah it was as it were with another; when yet He spoke with Himself, that is, so far as He was in a state of conjunction. The Lord’s perception, which He had in the highest perfection above all who have been born, was from His Internal, that is, from Jehovah Himself, which is here signified in the internal sense by the words, “Jehovah said unto him.”