John 1:14. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory as that of the only-begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.
When a person thus attains through rebirth the true state of being a child of God, into which they are truly born by God the Father, or by the love within God, they attain the glory of the primordial light in God. This primordial light is the divine primordial foundational Being itself, and this Being is the actual only-begotten Son of the Father. In the same way, light rests hidden within the warmth of love until love arouses it and allows it to shine forth from itself. This holy light is therefore also the actual glory, eternally full of grace—the light of God—and full of truth; this truth is true reality, or the Word made flesh.
John 1:15. John bears witness to Him, crying out and saying: This was the One of whom I said: After me will come He who was before me, for He existed before I did.
John again bears true witness to this and, immediately after the baptism in the River Jordan, draws people’s attention to the fact that the very man he has just baptized is the One of whom he had spoken to the people throughout his preaching of repentance, so that they might receive Him worthily: He who would come after him (John) had been before him, and thus existed before he did. In its deeper meaning, this again amounts to saying: This is the primordial foundational light and primordial foundational Being of all light and being, which preceded all being and from which all being came forth.
John 1:16. From His fullness we have all received grace for grace.
But this primordial light is also the eternally great glory. From eternity this glory was God Himself in God, and from the fullness of this glory all beings have received their being, their light and their free life.
All life is therefore a grace from God and fills the form that bears life through and through. The primordial life within every human being is therefore a first grace of God, since it is in itself that same glory of God. But this grace had suffered harm through the familiar weakening of the feeling of greatness by the lower feeling of having come into being, and the necessary dependence on the primordial light and primordial ground of all being that resulted from this.
When this first grace within human beings was in danger of being almost entirely lost, the primordial light itself came into the world. It taught people to entrust this first grace to the primordial light again, or rather to return wholly into this primordial Being and there receive a new life in place of the old light. This exchange is the receiving of grace for grace: as it were, giving up the old, weakened life, no longer fit for anything, in exchange for a new, indestructible life in and from God in all its fullness.
The first grace was a necessity in which no freedom, and therefore no permanence, prevails. The second grace, however, is complete freedom, free from every compulsion, and therefore—because nothing presses or constrains it—forever indestructible. For where there is no enemy, there is also no destruction; by ‘enemy’ is meant everything that exerts any kind of hindering influence on a free being.