According to the English Standard Version Student Study Bible, published in 2011 the phrase “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” indicates either a “summary of the entire process of creation or a description of the first event in creation.” The entire process or just the first event. Either way, it is talking about the creation of the whole universe, not just the planet Earth. A footnote regarding the word ‘created’ points out that both here and at verse 16 where it says “and God made two lights” the word ‘made’ can be translated meaning ‘fashioned’ also. If ‘created' was intended by the original author, then it refers to bringing into being everything that exists, but if ‘fashioned’ was the meaning intended, we have to ask what object or what substance or material that already existed was being fashioned.
So we have a problem. Traditional Christian thinking maintains that the first chapter of Genesis is about the creation of everything from scratch. And this problem of translation is in the very first verse.
Another problem pops up immediately. Is this creation story about the creation of the universe or just the planet earth? It says that God made the expanse, which according to the footnotes of this study bible means ‘Heaven’. But the footnote in this study bible says it also means sky. There is a difference.
If we are talking about water in the sky, does that mean rain, and if so we should note that as far as we know, it doesn’t rain on any of the other planets in the Solar System. And, besides, it didn’t rain on this planet either until the Earth cooled sufficiently and an atmosphere was created on it. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Scientists estimate that that oceans were formed after the first billion years or so, give or take a few million. So maybe this all just pertains to the Earth, not the original creation of everything.
Or…maybe it really doesn’t have anything to do with the physical formation of the Earth. Maybe it’s about something else. I suppose I could go on and on about the problems with this literal or physically oriented explanation of the first verses in Genesis. But I won’t. You’re welcome.
Instead, let’s consider a different possibility. Suppose this is all a sort of code for something quite different than the creation of the physical universe. Well, we know now that it is, because Emanuel Swedenborg, with the help of the Lord, has cracked the code.
Here’s how that happened. Instead of reading into the literal text of the Bible his own interpretation of the meaning of its complex texts the way other theologians do, Swedenborg has shown us that there is another spiritual meaning hidden within the literal text that is the work of the Lord and that clearly does explain how it pertains to us. It is a description of how we can be regenerated and can become angels.
And not only that, but he also explains why it was necessary for God to regenerate us. Swedenborg explains why God couldn’t just create us to be perfect in the first place and why he didn’t prevent the earliest people from falling from the elevated psyche that God originally implanted in humanity, which was like that of the highest angels, who have internal perception.
The important thing we need to understand is that these verses are not what they appear to be in the literal text. They are not about how the physical universe came into being. They are about us. We human beings are the subject of the creation story in Genesis, not the earth, not the heavens. Instead, it is about the levels of being that are possible in us.
Last week I talked about the first day of creation and how there is stuff everything is made of called material and there is other stuff that is not physical called spiritual substance. It is substantial and has real being, but it is not physical. The physical realm is made of material, matter, and science is discovering the nature of matter in sub-atomic particles that make it up. But this natural, physical matter is created from something else, something not physical, but substantial.
Swedenborg calls that substance Divine Love which comes forth from God as Divine Wisdom to create everything. Don’t confuse this with the emotion we call love. Love is very limited when we experience it as desire. It is only our desire and it can be either good or evil, or something in between. Desiring in this mundane form is really a self-centered emotion. It is not really caring about another person. Love is caring, not just for, but about, God or another person, wanting what is best for them, not our self. Think about the Lord’s two great commandments to love God and our neighbor with our whole being. Divine Love is what God is. God is Love. Love creates. It is God’s very nature to create.
When God comes forth to be in the physical realm, God becomes, or takes the form of, Divine Wisdom. Love in the form of Divine Wisdom is substantial, this non-physical substance. One way we experience it is our consciousness.
No one, no scientist, has succeeded in defining what consciousness is, but clearly when Swedenborg wrote about Divine Wisdom, he was referring to what we experience as our consciousness, which is our essential being. Modern physicists are coming to the same conclusion. Some of them maintain that there is no empty space, but rather everything of space is filled with consciousness.
It is consciousness that emerges into the physical realm through what Swedenborg called the first natural point. This is the emergence of the building blocks of physical matter. The famous physicist Steven Hawking has suggested that there may be a vast number of these “first natural points.” Swedenborg calls this substance Divine Wisdom. It is information from this Divine Wisdom that provides the directions or blueprint, how to form something physical, seemingly out of nothing. Can it be that Divine Wisdom is what we experience as consciousness?
But is that “nothing” actually God in the form of Divine Wisdom. The statement in the very beginning of the book of Genesis, the third verse, that says “Let there be light” seems to announce the presence of God visibly in the created universe. But it actually refers to our conscious minds being created. Our conscious minds are God’s connection to the physical earth.
Divine Wisdom instills in us the ability to receive information. This in-form-ation is the substantial form Divine Wisdom takes in our minds which we experience as our thoughts and perceptions. They are real. They exist. We experience them. We can’t pick an idea up, but we can “look” at it. It does exist. It is something real. From it we receive the ability to think and understand abstract ideas that the lower forms of life on the earth cannot understand.
This ability to comprehend complex ideas not only separates us from other animals, but it is what gives us the ability to choose. It also burdens us with the responsibility of a conscience, which other animals do not have. It makes us human. We have to choose between good and evil and to do that we have to be able to understand the difference. God created us in this way because God’s whole purpose in creating the heavens and the earth was to create a heaven from humanity in order that God could consciously relate with His creation and join it to himself. So this gift of Divine Wisdom that we experience as our rationality that makes our regeneration possible is God’s way of joining himself to us and creating heaven. This is why it says, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light, in Genesis, right at its outset. The rest of the Bible’s inner or spiritual meaning is based on this essential fact.
When the Bible says on day two of creation that God separated the waters from the waters, it is referring to the difference we experience between our conscious level of thought and the higher levels within us. These are there even though we don’t often consciously experience them. We can become aware of them if we prepare ourselves over a strenuous path of development, but for most of us, they remain part of what we call our unconscious mind. There is a good reason for this. As we are, crude, undeveloped, often unthinking creatures, responding unconsciously to the stimulants of our physical environment, we would screw it all up if we were able to. This is why we are not conscious of the many, many operations going on in our bodies to keep us alive.
The level of our minds that we consciously experience is called the waters beneath the expanse in the second day of creation, and the higher levels, of which we are not normally aware, are the levels above the expanse. As I mentioned last week, Philip Hefner writes in his book entitled The Human Factor, “We must act as co-creators within God’s purposeful scheme.”
First we must recognize that we have these levels in our minds. Then, we must realize that we spend almost all of our waking hours functioning in our mind’s lowest level, the level of mind that formed when we were babies and little children, constructed out of our interpretation of the world around us.
What Hefner means is that we must recognize that God is trying to regenerate us, that is, create us anew through our understanding and reforming us to be less selfish and self-oriented, more caring and loving. We can do this by raising the level we are observing and looking at our self internally, at our real intentions. If we do that, we begin to make more conscious decisions and we can begin to assist God in reforming us so that He can open those higher levels of understanding in us. This is the process of regeneration. This is what we are created for. It is only through regeneration that we can be joined to God in this way, and actively participate in the perfection of heaven.
This is the separation of the waters in the second verse of Genesis. In Apocalypse Explained (AE 695) Swedenborg says water signifies truth in our affection, and cold water signifies truth in obedience; for obedience alone, that is without affection, is a natural affection and not spiritual, so it is cold. It may even be coerced by our fears, and therefore not even really part of us. This shows us that the inner meaning of the literal text of the second verse in Genesis doesn’t mean what it says literally. It is about the levels in our minds, not clouds and oceans in the world. On the lowest level of mind we are obedient but without the motivation of real, caring love. We follow the rules, but not beyond the limits imposed by our selfishness. Mostly we do it out of some kind of fear, not out of love.
Understanding what the inner, spiritual meaning of the biblical text is helps us to understand what is expected of us. If we take this to heart as well as to mind, we can assist God in changing us, in regenerating us. But we have free choice. If we don’t care, if we love ourselves the way we are, we don’t have to bother to change. Changing is a lot of work requiring a lot of effort, especially mindful effort, which is sometimes the hardest kind of effort to make. We have to make choices. That’s life. We can deny it and go our own way as far as we can get, or we can turn ourselves around and follow the Lord to the heavenly community He has waiting for us. The choice is ours. Only you can make that choice for you and you can only make it for yourself.