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:

4967. 'An Egyptian man' means natural truth. This is clear from the meaning of 'a man' as truth, dealt with in 3134, and from the meaning of 'Egypt' as factual knowledge in general, dealt with immediately above in 4964, 4966. And since 'Egypt' means factual knowledge it also means the natural, for all the factual knowledge present with a person constitutes his natural since it resides in his natural man, and includes knowledge about spiritual and heavenly realities. The reason for this is that the natural is the position within which and from which he sees those realities. Those which he does not see from that position are unintelligible to him. But a regenerate person, who is called spiritual, sees them in one way, an unregenerate person, who is called merely natural, in another. In the case of a regenerate person factual knowledge has the light of heaven shed upon it, but not so in the case of an unregenerate one. The light shed on the unregenerate person's factual knowledge comes by way of spirits governed by falsity and evil, a light which, it is true, begins as the light of heaven but among such spirits is reduced to a dim light like that of evening or night. Indeed spirits of this kind, and consequently men like them, see in the way owls do - clearly at night but dimly during the daytime. That is, they see falsities clearly and truths dimly, and therefore worldly things clearly but heavenly ones dimly, if at all. From this one may recognize that genuine factual knowledge is natural truth; for all genuine factual knowledge that is of the kind meant in the good sense by 'Egypt' is natural truth.