39. Verse 20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth creeping things, living creatures; and let birds fly above the earth, upon the face ¹ of the expanse of the heavens.

After the great lights have been kindled and lodged in the internal man, from which the external man receives its light, a person starts to live for the first time. Till then he can hardly be said to have lived, for he had imagined that the good he had done he had done from himself, and the truth he had uttered he had spoken from himself. And since man functioning from himself is dead - there being nothing in him that is not evil and false - therefore whatever he brings forth from himself is not living. So true is this that of himself he is incapable of doing any good deed that is in itself good. The fact that man cannot begin to think about good or to will it, and so cannot do good, unless the Lord is the source, is clear to everyone from the doctrine of faith, for the Lord says in Matthew,

He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. Matthew 13:37.

Nor can good come from anywhere else than the one fount itself of all good, as yet again He says,

Nobody is good but one, God. Luke 18:19.

[2] Nevertheless when the Lord is revitalizing a person, or regenerating him, He does allow him, to begin with, to imagine that good and truth originate in himself, for at that point a person cannot grasp anything else, or be led to believe and finally perceive, that all good and truth come from the Lord alone. As long as he held the former opinion his truths and goods were comparable to 'a tender plant', then 'a plant bearing seed', and after that 'a fruit tree', which are inanimate. But once he has been brought to life by love and faith and believes that the Lord is at work in every good deed he does and in every truth he utters, he is compared first to creeping things from the water and to birds which fly above the earth, and then to beasts, all of which are animate and are called 'living creatures'.

Footnotes:

9009. 'And one who did not lie in wait' means when it was not contemplated beforehand by the will. This is clear from the meaning of 'lying in wait' as doing what has been thought up and so contemplated beforehand; for the ill that one lying in wait is going to do is contemplated in his mind beforehand. And since such ill done by him is contemplated beforehand it also has its origin in the will, for it comes forth from there. There are evils which come forth from a person's will but are not contemplated beforehand, and there those which come forth from his will and are contemplated beforehand. Those from the will and contemplated beforehand are far worse than those uncontemplated beforehand. For the person sees that they are evils and is therefore able to desist from them, but has no wish to; and by failing to do so he establishes them firmly within himself. And firmly established evils take on a character that makes it almost impossible for them to be rooted out afterwards. For at this time he summons spirits from hell, who after that rarely depart.

[2] Evils that come forth from one part of the mind and not at the same time from the other, such as those from the understanding part and not at the same time from the will part, do not take root and become the person's own. That alone takes root and becomes his own which passes from the understanding part into the will part, or what amounts to the same thing, from thought belonging to the understanding into affection belonging to the will, and from there into action. Things that enter the will are those which are said to enter the heart.

[3] Evils however which come forth solely from the will, thus not from prior thought about them, are those such as a person is prone to owing to heredity or owing to some previous activity resulting from hereditary inclinations. These evils are not ascribed to the person unless he has established them firmly in the understanding part of his mind, 966, 2308, 8806. But when they have been firmly established there they have been inscribed on the person, becoming properly his own; then they are attributable to him. But those evils cannot become firmly established with a person in the understanding part of his mind until he reaches adult life, that is to say, when he starts to think for himself and be wise. Till then he trusts not in himself but in teachers and parents.

All this shows what the meaning is of 'one who did not lie in wait', namely when it was not contemplated beforehand by the will.