4571. 'And God said to him' means perception from the Divine. This is clear from the meaning of 'saying' in the historical narratives of the Word as perceiving, dealt with in 1791, 1815, 1819, 1822, 1898, 1919, 2080, 2619, 2862, 3395, 3509. The Divine as the source of that perception is meant by the words 'God said', for the Divine was present within the Lord from conception; the Divine was His actual Being (Esse) since He had been conceived from Jehovah. His perception therefore was from the Divine, but the degree of perception depended on the state of reception by the Human; for He made the Human within Himself Divine in successive stages. From this it is evident that because the Divine or God was within Him, 'God said to him' means perception from the Divine.

1815. 'He said to him, I am Jehovah' means the Lord's Internal Man which is Jehovah, from whom perception came. This is clear from what has been stated in various places already, to the effect that the Lord's Internal, that is, whatever the Lord received from the Father, was in Him Jehovah - for He was conceived from Jehovah. That which a person receives from the, father is one thing, while that from the mother is another. From the father a person receives everything that is internal, the soul itself or life being from the father; but from the mother he receives everything that is external. In short, the interior man or spirit itself comes from the father, but the exterior man or body itself from the mother. This anyone may grasp merely from the consideration that the soul itself is inseminated by the father, and starts to clothe itself in the ovum with a tiny body. All else that is subsequently added to it, both in the ovum and in the womb, comes from the mother, for it receives nothing contributing to its growth from anywhere else.

[2] From this it becomes clear that internally the Lord was Jehovah. Since however the external which the Lord received from the mother was to be united to the Divine, or Jehovah - and this, as has been stated, was accomplished by means of temptations and victories - it inevitably appeared to Him that when He spoke to Jehovah, it was as if to another. But in fact He spoke to Himself, that is to say, insofar as He had become joined to Jehovah. The perception which the Lord possessed - being most perfect, far superior to that of every other who has ever been born - sprang from His Internal Man, that is, from Jehovah Himself; and this is meant here in the internal sense by 'Jehovah said to him'.