Imagine the fear of the shepherds to whom the angels appeared announcing Jesus birth. Simple men with little or no education. Men whose experience of life was almost exclusively in this physical realm. Suddenly, in the middle of the dark night the glory of the Lord shown around them and they were terrified. What could be happening!? But an angel appeared to them and told them not to fear, but to go and see the Savior who was born to save them. This was the Messiah they had been told would come and save them from their enemies. At first they were filled with fear because they did not understand, but they lost the fear when they understood. Then their faith took over and they went to the stable to worship their Messiah.
Swedenborg tells us that to fear means to be without faith. As a result of their tangible experience with the angel, however out-of-the-ordinary it was, the shepherds came to have faith, to believe in the Lord’s reality. They had to receive what appeared to them as a miracle, before they could be brought to faith. But isn’t life itself a miracle? Don’t we all live moment to moment in a miracle that is so close to us that we don’t see it?
But here we are and we have a purpose in God’s Conjunctive Design and that purpose is to conjoin the earth, this physical level of existence, with the spiritual level through the spiritual levels of mind that God has created within us. The whole story of the Lord’s birth is about Him becoming one of us so that the connection between us and God can be real to us. When we realize how much the Lord is with us every moment of our existence, then we can be released from our fear of the unknown that hangs over us and we can become truly useful to God and fulfill our real purpose, which is to join humanity with God and join this physical level of creation to the spiritual levels above it.
The reason we are so important in God’s design is that we contain the connection between God and this physical world. That connection is not physical. It is spiritual. It is literally in our minds.
So in the description of the fourth day of creation that we find in the story of creation in the first chapter of Genesis, we have been given a coded message from God to our ancient ancestors describing how we human beings are constructed and the purposes we fill. The phrase “Let there be light” doesn’t refer to the stars that lit up the physical universe surrounding them. It refers to the awakening of consciousness within us. Our spirit gradually becomes aware of the world in which we are living, surrounded and contained in a physical machine, our physical bodies, designed to let us get around in this outer world. We do so with free will, insofar as the environment does not impede our choices. We move out into the world, a consciousness within a machine, and begin our formation, hopefully resulting in a new angel at the other end of our life on earth.
As we develop we enter day two of the Genesis story, where we begin to see the difference between what is inside of us and what is outside of us, and we distinguish between them. This distinction is intended to bring us to a more important discernment, recognizing the difference between ideas, thoughts and feelings in the memories we are building up of things that are of this physical world. These help us to function here. These are also things that are important to our spiritual existence, which is an entirely different level of knowing, a distinct memory from that of the physical things. This is the separation of the waters, and unless we make this distinction between truth about this physical world and truth about the spiritual world, we form values that are not compatible with our true purpose here.
But the Lord assists us in making this distinction by giving us what Swedenborg calls our ‘remains’, those little comforting, loving things our parents and others who loved us as tiny children did for us that taught what loving others is. These are the things represented by the dry land that emerges out of the waters and the plants and trees that grow in it. These are the feelings and thoughts we have that care about others the way we were cared for. These only become effective in producing an angel within us if we repent of the selfish things we learned to do and believe in as we grew up. This is the purpose of those so-called remains, to remind us of a better way than selfishness. A way of life that gives to others, which is the essential characteristic of a heavenly person, an angel. Unless we grow these seeds of goodness within us and produce plants that nourish us and others within ourselves, we cannot become fit for a community in heaven, where only love is acceptable. We must grow these plants that produce the fruits of love within us.
Well, plants need light to grow. So the creation story in Genesis tells us that on the fourth day God created lights in the heavens to separate the day from the night. That light is the light of our sun on this particular planet. But Swedenborg tells us that in the spiritual world there is a corresponding sun where the Lord resides, radiating His Divine Love out into the heavens and down through them to create this physical world. His Love goes forth from Him in the form of Divine Wisdom, information that forms the heavens and the earth, or the natural level of existence.
The natural emerges in this way from the spiritual source of everything. We experience the presence of the spiritual in the natural through our minds. Divine Wisdom is the vehicle of creation. It is the fuel that powers our bodies and our minds and enlivens us.
Genesis says that on the fourth day the Lord created the physical sun of our solar system as a corresponding luminary to the Divine Sun in which the Lord resides. This greater luminary at the center of our solar system provides our heat and light without which nothing could live and grow on the earth. If our minds are open to the Lord and his wisdom for us, we live in the spiritual light of the greater luminary, the spiritual sun in which the Lord resides. In that state we can grow and flourish spiritually, no matter what our state in the physical world. Whether we are rich or poor, free or enslaved, sick or healthy, we can participate in the spiritual growth available to us. In this way, God has provided that everyone has the possibility of becoming an angel. Only God knows who is an angel and who has become an evil, self-centered spirit. We can never judge.
The lesser lights signified by the moon and stars in creation’s fourth day represent our understanding of spiritual truths when we are still in relative darkness. This kind of ignorance to the truth about our existence is caused by our valuing things of this world above those of the heavenly realm. It’s like living in a closet. The word closet comes from the Latin word clausm, meaning an enclosure. If we are enclosed enough by the physical stuff cluttering our lives we can’t find the doorknob so we can’t open the door to let in a little light. This is what happens to us when we become overly engaged in earthly matters, what Swedenborg called
“the things of this world”. Then we don’t pay enough attention to our spiritual needs. The faint light of stars and the reflected light of the moon are not sufficient to grow healthy plants and trees in our garden out in the back yard, much less maintain any plants in the house. We wither and die spiritually unless we get out of our closet and into the sun. Then we can work, and play, and grow spiritually strong and capable of loving our neighbor as our self and God as the light of our life, the source of our being. It takes active engagement, effort on our part to actually change, to actually become a more spiritual being.
We can’t make the change by ourselves. The Lord does that within us by entering in when we invite the presence of Divine Love and Wisdom within us. We entertain the Lord as our special guest, one we would not hurt or betray in the slightest as if our whole life, our whole being, depends on that guest feeling right at home in our hearts. The Lord knocks at the door of our closet. Open the door. Let some spiritual light in, the Lord’s Wisdom continuously bringing the dawn of the fourth day. We must open that closet door and step out into that glorious light.