How, then, do you read in Genesis? Is it not written thus:
‘And God said: let lights come into being at the firmament of heaven, to divide day and night and give signs, times, days and years; and let there be two lights at the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and it happened thus. And God made two great lights, a great light to rule the day and a small light to rule the night, and also stars besides; and God set them at the firmament of heaven to shine upon the earth and rule the day and night and divide light and darkness. And God saw that it was good. Then out of evening and morning came the fourth day.’
Look, this is word for word the account of creation of the fourth day, through which, according to Genesis, the fourth day is actually brought about.
If you illuminate this matter a little more closely with—say—your merely natural powers of understanding, the thickest nonsense must surely strike your eyes at first glance if you take Genesis’s wording for its meaning!
According to Genesis, God already created light on the first day, and thus out of evening and morning came the first day. Say, what sort of light was that, then, which sufficed for three days to bring about day and night?! On the fourth day God says again: let lights come into being in heaven. Question: what lights, then, are to divide day and night? The light created on the first day has already brought about three days before; why now, on the fourth day, still more lights for one and the same task? Besides, only lights are spoken of, but there is not the slightest mention of a moon and a sun. Moreover, these lights also bring about signs—what signs? Finally, times—which ones? And days and years—what days and years? Is night nothing, then? Is night not counted just as much as day?
And besides, the earth is round as a sphere, always having day on one side and night on the other; according as the earth turns on its axis from west towards east, it will always be day where the lands face the sun, or rather are, in a certain way, pushed beneath the sun by the earth’s constant and ever-uniform rotation.
But if the natural day on earth is indisputably brought about thus by its own movement, while the sun does nothing but shine continually at one spot and through its light bring about day wherever its rays penetrate, and in this way cannot and can never rule the day—question: how could Moses have meant the sun and moon by his lights? And had Moses meant the natural sun and natural moon, he would certainly have named these two lights in heaven to make his revealed communication to humanity clearer; for in Moses’ time all people already knew how to name these two heavenly bodies.
Besides, Moses speaks of a firmament in heaven that actually exists nowhere in natural space, since the sun, moon and all the stars, as also this earth itself, float in the completely freest ether, restricted by nothing and nowhere, and through the law placed within them are maintained in their appropriate position, have free movement and are nowhere fastened to any heavenly firmament!
For there is only one firmament in endless and freest space, and it is God’s will, from which an eternally unchangeable law fills such space and all things within it.
If what appears to your eye as an immensely outspread blue vault were a firmament, and the sun, moon and all the stars were as it were fastened to it, how could they move, and particularly the planets you know constantly change their places?
The other stars, which you call the fixed ones, do indeed seem as though fastened to some firmament. But it is not so; they are only so immensely far from the earth, and their orbits so extensive, that they often scarcely complete them in several hundreds of thousands of earth years. For this reason their movements cannot be perceived even over a hundred human lifetimes, and that is why they appear to you as positively fixed. But in reality it is otherwise, and nowhere in the whole infinite space is there a so-called firmament.
The firmament Moses means is the firm will according to divine order, arising from proper understanding and from love, which is the blessed soil of life. But since such a will can arise only from the fruit-bearing fullness of true love for God in the human heart, just as that love itself arises from the heavenly light God poured into the person when He divided his inner darkness into evening and morning, this proper love, proper insight and proper understanding—all of which testify within the person as living faith—are heaven within the person. And the firm will arising from them in God’s order is the firmament of heaven within the person. To such a firmament, when it is fully in proper order according to God’s will of love, God gives new lights from the heaven of heavens, which is the pure Father-love in God’s heart; and the lights then illuminate the will, raise it to the insight of the angels of the heaven of heavens, and thereby raise the created person to an uncreated child of God—now reshaped anew, through his own free will, by himself in divine order!