7 Days of Creation in Genesis 1

The True Meaning of the 7 Days of Creation: Spiritual Rebirth

Word MeaningsFirstSecondThirdFourthFifthSixthSeventh SummariesMore

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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