Does it not say: in the beginning God created heaven and earth? And the earth was desolate and empty, and darkness upon the deep; but God’s Spirit hovered over the waters.
And God said: let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good; then He separated the light from the darkness. He called the light day and the darkness night; then out of evening and morning came the first day.
Look, these are Moses’ words; if you wish to take them in a natural sense, you must surely see at first glance the thickest nonsense (!) that must necessarily emerge.
What, then, is the heaven, and what the earth, of which Moses says that all this was created in the beginning? Heaven is the spiritual, and earth the natural, in a human being; this was and still is desolate and empty, as with you. The waters are your poor knowledge in all things, over which God’s Spirit does indeed also hover, but is not yet within it.
But since God’s Spirit always sees that it is most terribly dark in the depths of your material world, He speaks to you, as now evidently: let there be light!
Then a glimmer begins to dawn within your nature, and God indeed sees how good the light is for your darkness; but only you yourselves cannot and will not see it. Therefore a division also takes place within you: namely, day and night are separated, and from the day within you, you then recognize your heart’s former night.
In a human being, a first natural state of being is deep evening, thus night; but when God gives him a light, such a light is a true dawn for the person, and thus out of the person’s evening and dawn truly comes his first day of life!
For look, if Moses, who was initiated into all the learning of the Egyptians, had wished to set forth in his writing the origin of the earth’s first natural day, with all his knowledge and wisdom he would surely have noticed that a day can never emerge from evening and morning; for evening is naturally always followed by firm night, and only morning is followed by day!
What lies between evening and morning is accordingly night; only what lies between morning and evening is day!
If Moses had said: and so out of morning and evening came the first day, you could indeed understand the natural day by it. But for good reason of correspondence he said precisely the reverse, and this signifies the person’s evening and at the same time night, which is also easy to grasp, since no one had ever yet seen a child possessing all wisdom.
When a child is born into the world, it is entirely dark in its soul, and thus night; but the child grows, then receives all kinds of instruction, and thereby gains ever more insight into all kinds of things. And look, this is the evening: that is, a twilight then begins in the soul, just as, by comparison, it is at evening.
You may well say that there is twilight in the morning too, and Moses could surely have said: and so out of the morning twilight and the morning, which is actually already bright, came the first day?
To this I say: certainly, if he had wished to tell people the sheerest nonsense in spiritual correspondence! But Moses knew that only evening corresponds to a person’s earthly state; he knew that people’s purely earthly formation of understanding proceeds precisely like the natural evening’s ever-weakening radiance.
The more people begin to strive after earthly things with their understanding, the weaker the purely divine light of love and spiritual life becomes in their hearts. Therefore Moses also called such an earthly light in a person evening!
Only when God through His mercy lights a little light of life in a person’s heart does the person begin to see the nothingness of everything he had previously acquired with his understanding, the spiritual evening; and then he gradually sees ever more clearly that all the treasures of the evening light are just as perishable as that light.
But the proper light from God, kindled in the person’s heart, is precisely the morning, which with and out of the preceding evening brings about the first true day within the person.
But from this present explanation of Mine you must also see that there must be a very mighty difference between the two lights, or better, kinds of knowledge; for all knowing in the world’s evening light is deceptive and therefore also perishable. Only truth endures eternally; all that deception must finally come to nothing.