 The 5th Day: Genesis 1:20-23
20. And God said, Let the waters cause to creep forth the creeping thing, the living soul; and let fowl fly above the earth upon the faces of the expanse of the heavens.
21. And God created great whales, and every living soul that creepeth, which the waters caused to creep forth after their kinds, and every winged fowl after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and the fowl shall be multiplied in the earth.
23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Summary
The fifth state is when the man discourses from faith, and thereby confirms himself in truth and good: the things then produced by him are animate, and are called the "fish of the sea," and the "birds of the heavens."
Details from Emanuel Swedenborg:
Verses 20-23,
from
Thomas King,
from Theodore Pitcairn
from illustration by David Chambers,
from
Lee Woofenden:
And now we're
beginning a living relationship with the Lord: really feeling God in our
life. That is the point at which living animals start to come. On the fifth day,
we have the ones that populate the sky and the land: the birds flying in the
air, and the fish swimming in the sea. These are the first living, feeling
thoughts of doing goodness that are coming, not just from believing that
we ought to, but from feeling in our heart that this is what we want
to do from other people. We care about people, and therefore we really
want to do good for them from love.
These are the living
creatures. The living creatures represent our feelings, our loves; and these
develop later on. After we've gotten our mind more or less straightened out,
then we develop our heart. Then we begin to act from love. And this is the first
time that we really can be said to be alive spiritually: when we begin to
act from love.
The birds are the
living spiritual thoughts that we have, and the fish are the living material
thoughts that we have. And one of the nice things about this is that we don't
believe our spiritual life is separate from our outward, everyday life. We
believe that our spiritual life comes down into our material life, and
all of the knowledge that we had before about how to get along in the world now
comes alive from spiritual motivations. Everything we learned before about how
to run your business, how to take care of our home, how to raise our kids; all
of those things that we learned now come alive spiritually. We do our work, not
just because it's what we have to do, but because we want to love and serve one
another. And all the knowledge that we gained before helps us to do that, and
makes us effective as a person of God's kingdom working in this world. So we
have both our spiritual and our material knowledge working together to make us
good and useful people here on earth.
from
Lee Woofenden
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