44. Verses 24-25 And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, beasts and creeping things and wild animals of the earth according to their kinds; and it was so. And God made wild animals of the earth according to their kinds, and beasts according to their kinds, and everything that creeps along the ground according to its kind; and God saw that it was good.

Man, like the earth, can produce nothing good unless the cognitions of faith have already been sown in him enabling him to know what to believe and do. It is the function of the understanding to hear the Word, and of the will to do it. A person who hears the Word and does not do it is one who claims to believe, but he does not live according to it. Such a person separates hearing and doing, and splits his mind in two directions; and by the Lord he is called 'a foolish man',

Everyone who hears My words and does them I liken to a wise man who built his house upon the rock; but everyone who hears My words and does them not I liken to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. Matthew 7:24, 26.

Matters of the understanding, as has been shown, are meant by 'creeping things which the waters produce', and by 'birds over the earth and over the face ¹ of the expanse'. Matters of the will are here meant by 'living creatures which the earth brings forth', and by 'beasts and creeping things', and also by 'the wild animals of the earth'.

Footnotes:

In the Word, “light” in the highest sense represents Divine Truth: knowledge, ideas, understanding that come to us from the Lord. In lesser degrees -- the light of a lamp, the light of the moon and so forth -- it represents lower levels of truth, ideas and understanding drawn from more earthly sources. Also, the sun in the Word represents the Lord, with its heat representing the divine love and its light representing the divine wisdom. That wisdom flows into our minds and enters our lives in the form of truth -- things we can know and ponder that lead us and help us to be good people. This connection between light and thought is one of many spiritual/natural relationships that's embedded in our common language. People “see the light” when they understand something; we try to “shed some light” by bringing new thoughts to a difficult question; people are “enlightened” when they get new information or a more complete understanding of something. And a light bulb in a cartoon represents an idea!