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'.

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3619. 'Rebekah said to Isaac' means the Lord's perception from Divine Truth. This is clear from the meaning of 'saying' as perceiving, from the representation of 'Rebekah' as the Divine Truth of the Lord's Divine Rational, and from the representation of 'Isaac' as the Divine Good of that Rational, all dealt with already. And because Divine Good is Essential Being (Esse) in itself, and Divine Truth the Life springing from that Being - and the Lord as a consequence of this is primarily the Lord by virtue of Divine Good - the words stating that the Lord's perception comes from Divine Truth are therefore used here. Perception from the Divine Truth of the Rational flows from the area of the understanding, whereas perception from Divine Good flows from that of the will. Yet perception from the understanding does not belong to the understanding but to the will flowing into it, for the understanding is nothing else than the external form which the will is given. Such is the nature of the understanding when it is joined to the will. But until it has been so joined the understanding seems to exist by itself, and the will by itself, though all that actually happens is that the external separates itself from the internal. For when the understanding inwardly desires and thinks something, it is the end in view originating in the will that constitutes its life and governs the thinking there. The reason the understanding receives its life from the end in view is that the end a person has in view is his life, see 1909, 3570. This shows to some extent what is meant in the representative sense by any ordinary human being's perception from truth, and what is meant in the highest sense by the Lord's Perception from Divine Truth.