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:

5689. 'And he said, God be gracious to you, my son' means that the Divine was also present with the spiritual of the celestial, which is the intermediary, because it goes forth from the celestial of the spiritual, which is truth from the Divine. This is clear from the meaning of 'God be gracious - when this is said by the celestial of the spiritual, which is 'Joseph', to the spiritual of the celestial, which is 'Benjamin', and when the latter is also addressed by the former as 'son' - as the Divine presence also with the spiritual of the celestial, which is the intermediary, because this goes forth from the celestial of the spiritual, which is truth from the Divine. For 'Benjamin' is the spiritual of the celestial, see 3969, 4592; he is the intermediary too, 5411, 5413, 5443, 5639.

[2] Since, as stated above, the Lord's inner man was the celestial of the spiritual, and this was truth from the Divine or the clothing next to the Divine Himself within the Lord, and since the spiritual of the celestial, which is the intermediary, went forth from that, it follows that the Divine was also present with this intermediary. What goes forth from something acquires its essential being from that from which it goes forth; but it is clothed with coverings such as serve to enable communication to take place and thereby enable a useful purpose to be realized in a lower sphere. The coverings that clothe it are derived in part from such things as exist in that lower sphere, to the end that the internal from which it goes forth can operate in the lower sphere through the kinds of things present there.

[3] What provides its essential being is so to speak its father, since that essential being is its soul; and what provides its clothing is its mother, for that clothing is the body belonging to this soul. This is why, as stated above, the intermediary must be derived from both if it is to be an intermediary - from the internal as its father and from the external as its mother.