The sun in the Bible represents the Lord, with its heat representing His love and its light representing His wisdom. “Daytime,” then, represents a state in which we are turned toward the Lord, receiving His love and being enlightened by His truth. And “nighttime,” obviously, represents states in which we are turned away from the Lord, left cold and blind to the truth. The most common word used for it in the New Christian theology is “obscurity.” The darkness is not absolute, of course. The light of the moon represents the understanding we can have based on facts and our own intelligence. But while the moon reflects some of the sun's light, it offers almost no heat, so this kind of understanding is a cold one, without the warmth of love. And at its darkest and coldest, night represents a state of judgment. This happens when a person -- or a church -- becomes so mired in evil and falsity that there is no light or heat. The Lord can then step in, separate the good from the evil, consign the evil to hell and begin rebuilding based on the remnant that is still good. Drastic as that sounds, it is something that we all go through repeatedly in various aspects of our loves, so that we can be rid of what is evil and let the Lord rebuild us as angels.

1713. 'He and his servants' means the Rational Man and those things in the External Man that were obedient. This is clear from the meaning of the pronoun 'he', that is, of Abram, as the Interior Man, dealt with above, and from the meaning of 'servants' as things that are obedient. All things in the external man, before this has been set free and reclaimed, are called 'servants' or 'slaves', for they are wholly obedient to the interior man. For example, present with the exterior man there are affections and there is factual knowledge. The former originate in the goods of the interior man, the latter in the truths of the same. When these are made to act so that they conform with the interior man they are said to 'serve and obey'. Here therefore 'servants' means nothing else than the things in the External Man that were obedient.