Divine Love and Wisdom #285
285. The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, could not have created the universe and everything in it except as a person. If people have an earthly, physical concept of the Divine-Human One, they are utterly incapable of understanding how a human God could create the universe and everything in it. They think to themselves, "How can a human God wander from place to place through the universe creating things?" or "How can God speak the word from one place, and things be created as soon as the word is spoken?" Things like this come to mind when people say that God is a person if people are thinking about the Divine-Human One the same way they do about earthly people, and when their thought about God is based on nature and its attributes, time and space. On the other hand, if their thought about God is not based on earthly people, not based on nature and its space and time, they grasp clearly that the universe could not have been created unless God were a person.
Focus your thought on the angelic concept of God, of a human God, and as far as you can, eliminate any concept of space, and you will be close to the truth in your thinking.
Some scholars have actually grasped the fact that spirits and angels are not in space because they conceive of spirit as being apart from space. Spirit is like thought. Even though our thought is within us, it enables us to be present somewhere else, no matter how far away. This is the state of spirits and angels, who are people even in respect to their bodies. They seem to be wherever their thought is because in the spiritual world place and distance are apparent only, and are in complete accord with what people are thinking about with interest.
We can tell from this that the God who is visible as a sun far above the spiritual world, who cannot be given any appearance of space, is not to be thought of in spatial terms. In that case, we can understand that the universe was not created out of nothing but out of God, and that God's human body is not to be thought of as large or small or of some particular height because these are matters of space. This means that God is the same from first to last, in the largest and smallest things. It means also that this Person is at the heart of everything created, but nonspatially so.
On Divinity as being the same in the largest and smallest things, see 77-82 above; and on Divinity as filling all spaces nonspatially, see 69-72. Since Divinity is not within space, it is not on the same continuum as the inmost aspect of nature.
Genesis 1:1-8
1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first Day.
6
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
