30. Verses 14-17 And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens, to make a distinction between the day and the night; and they will be for signs, and for set times, and for days and years. And they will be for lights in the expanse of the heavens, to give light upon the earth; and it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to have dominion over the day, and the lesser light to have dominion over the night; and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.

No one can have an adequate understanding of what 'the great lights' are unless he knows what the underlying essence of faith is and how it develops in people who are being created anew. The very essence and life of faith is the Lord alone. In fact it is impossible for anyone who does not believe in the Lord to have life, as He Himself has said in John,

He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not believe in the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God will rest upon him. John 3:36.

[2] With people who are being created anew faith develops as follows: First of all they have no life, for life does not exist in anything evil and false but in what is good and true. Then they start to receive life from the Lord by means of faith - first by faith existing in the memory, which is factual faith, then by faith existing in the understanding, which is conceptual faith, and after this by faith existing in the heart, which is loving or saving faith. Factual faith and conceptual faith are represented in verses 3-13 by the inanimate, but faith made alive by means of love is represented in verses 20-25 by the animate. Consequently this is the first point at which love and faith deriving from it, which are called 'lights', are dealt with. Love is 'the greater light which has dominion over the day', and faith deriving from love is 'the lesser light which has dominion over the night'. And because they ought to make one the verb in the phrase 'let there be lights 'is singular and not plural.

[3] Love and faith have their place in the internal man as warmth and light do in the external, bodily man, and for this reason love and faith are represented by warmth and light. Therefore it is said that 'the lights' were set in the expanse of the heavens, that is, in the internal man - the greater light in his will and the lesser in his understanding. Yet they make their appearances in the will and understanding only as sunlight does in the objects it strikes. To the Lord alone belongs the mercy which moves the will with love and the understanding with truth or faith.

6438. From these things foretold by Israel regarding Joseph it may again be seen that every detail contains an inner meaning and that without that meaning scarcely anything is intelligible. The person who fixes his attention solely on the literal meaning may think that these things which were stated regarding Joseph were going to happen to his descendants from Manasseh and Ephraim, because in verse 1 Israel says that he was going to tell them what would happen to them at the end of days. But in the historical accounts concerning those descendants in the Books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, or Kings, one does not find anything of the sort happening to them. They were no more greatly blessed than any other tribe; rather, like all the others they were taken away into captivity and scattered among the nations. From all this it is evident that the real meaning is not what presents itself in the sense of the letter but something else contained in the internal sense. Furthermore without the internal sense one cannot begin to know what all the things said about Joseph imply, namely these:

The son of a fertile one is Joseph, of a fertile one beside a spring; daughters, each one of whom marches onto the wall.

They exasperate him and shoot at him and hate him, do the archers.

He will sit in the strength of his bow, and the arms of his hands will be made strong by the hands of the powerful Jacob; from there is the shepherd, the stone of Israel.

The blessings of his father will prevail over the blessings of his ancestors, even as far as the desire of the everlasting hills.

They will be on the head of Joseph and on the crown of the head of the Nazirite among his brothers.

Every single one of these statements is of such a nature that no one can ever know what it really means except from the internal sense.