Spiritual Meaning of

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Gen 6:1-7:5

The Most Ancient Church came to its final end in the great wickedness portrayed under the parable of the sons of God seeing the daughters of men that they were fair and taking to themselves wives of the daughters of men. Immediately following upon this, we read: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Then follows a statement of the final result of this state of wickedness. We read: "And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth." This is the language of appearances, for it was evil that destroyed the fallen people of the Most Ancient Church. The Lord seeks to save; He is not a destroyer. But the evil look upon the Lord as the cause of their misery; and the letter of the Bible expresses in the language of appearances, their thought of the Lord. The genuine truth is expressed elsewhere in the Scripture, where it is said: "Evil shall slay the wicked."

The spiritual destruction that overtook the last posterity of the Most Ancient Church came as the result of their own evil state. The church ended with them. The celestial dispensation closed. But the Lord never leaves Himself without a witness in the earth. When one dispensation of religion closes, the Lord immediately raises up a new dispensation of the church; and in doing so, He begins with the remnant of good people in the consummated church - people who while nominally of it are not irretrievably involved in its evils and falsities, but are capable of deliverance from them. This remnant constitutes the nucleus of the New Church which arises as the means of salvation to mankind.

At the end of the Adamic Church, this remnant was represented by Noah. Here, as was the case with Adam we are not to think of an individual by the name of Noah, but we are to think of all the people of the consummated Adamic Church who were capable of being saved by being formed into a new church. These were the remnant, and in this Divine allegory, they are personified and called Noah. Thus it is said: "But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." There were with the people called Noah remains of good - things that had been preserved and that served as a plane on which the Lord's spirit could act in effecting a new process of regeneration. These remains are meant by these words: "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generation; and Noah walked with God." This brings us to the consideration of one of the most marvelous things in connection with the Divine parable - we refer to the organic and structural change which the Lord, in His Divine mercy, effected in the minds of the Noatic people.

In the Adamic people, the will and the understanding were united. They acted not as two, but as one faculty. In whatever direction their wills turned, their understandings took the same course. This was their distinctive genius. The two parts of their mental structure cohered and formed one. Good from the Lord flowed directly into their wills, and because their understandings were immediately connected with their wills, good passed from their wills into their understandings in a direct way and was formed into truth. This peculiarity of mental structure led them, in the beginning, to the very highest celestial attainment and life. But when they fell away from the Lord, they still retained this peculiarity of mental structure and carried it down with them into all the moral corruptions into which they descended. Loving what was evil they could not do otherwise than believe what was false. Do we see what this led to? Their minds were like a glutinous substance. When good and truth touched them they became glued to them and profaned. Remains of good and truth could not be implanted in them, for their genius was such that there was no separate plane in their minds for such goods and truths to adhere to. This was the spiritual cause for the utter extinction, physically and spiritually, of the last posterity of the Most Ancient Church. Noah, who is said to have found grace in the eyes of the Lord, represents, as we have said, the remnant in the Most Ancient Church who were not totally involved in this condition; and in this remnant, the Lord wrought the mighty miracle of the separation of their intellectual principle from their fallen and corrupt wills. This was a great miracle as well as an exhibition of the profoundest mercy; for it at once enabled them to lift their intellects above their corrupt hearts and learn what was good and true, and thus have formed in the intellectual part of their minds a new will principle above and apart from their fallen proprium.

This made the storing of remains possible; and it also rendered an outward revelation of truth necessary. It also ushered into existence an entirely new mental and spiritual genius. The celestial life, as it had been, would be no more. That plane of the mind - of the race mind, closed with the end of the Most Ancient Church. A spiritual church - a church on a discretely lower plane of the race mind, arose. It commenced with the people called Noah. It was a new dispensation of religion. It was instituted by a Divine revelation - by a sacred scripture, which we know as the Ancient Word. This sacred Word was a book of Divine symbols. The truths which were inwardly revealed to the Most Ancient Church and which were collected and preserved by the people called Enoch, when the intuitive faculty was perishing in the church, were outwardly revealed to the understandings of the Noetic people. We do not have the time to dwell upon this story of the Ancient word further than to say that it gave rise to the Ancient or Spiritual church; that the first eleven chapters of Genesis belonged originally to it and that in the Hebrew Scripture, it is quoted and certain of the books that formed it mentioned by name, such, for instance, as the book of the wars of Jehovah, the book of Jasher and the book of the Enunciators. This outward revelation of the Word was made necessary because of the structural change that was effected in the mental organization of the Noetic race, for their intellectual part being separated from their will, the only light upon religious subjects that could reach them must come into their understandings in an external way. By receiving and obeying the truth thus communicated to them, they formed a new will, a will of obedience in their understandings, and were, in time, regenerated by the truth.

This is what is meant by the Lord's command to Noah to build the ark. The ark is the symbol of the church that was formed in them; for the church is not a mere outward ecclesiasticism, but is the kingdom of God in human souls. This work of building up in their lives the principles of the kingdom of God is told under the allegorical form of Noah building an ark. The allegory is God's beautiful way of telling us of the building of this spiritual church in their minds.

The ark was to be built of gopher wood. This was a low order of wood and very inflammable. Do you see the lesson? It stood for the concupiscences and peculiar cupidities of the Noetic people. How could these things be built into a spiritual ark of safety? Think! The Lord begins with man as he finds him. He cannot build with material that man does not possess. In the beginning, He makes use of our selfishness. He appeals to and works with the motives we present to Him - ever leading us on to higher and better things. So of the people in this story. Their very concupiscences were made use of. They could not be led, in the beginning, to regeneration by the love of the intrinsic excellence of the truth. At first, their improvement had to be built upon some personal and selfish consideration. It is the same with us today. This is what is meant by the gopher wood. This, however, was a temporary state.

The same was true of the pitch used; for the ark is said to have been pitched within and without. At first, these people were protected from the outward invasion of falsehood and from the inward seduction of evil by appeals to their selfishness. We are no better; for the Lord does, in the beginning, the same thing with us. How good and merciful He is to accept us as we are! Yes, but He loved those Ancient people as He loves us, not for what they were but for what they were capable of becoming. The gopher wood and the pitch were all they had of themselves to begin with. But they did possess remains from the Lord; and they were what the Lord reached and ultimately unfolded in a life of beautiful spiritual regeneration. While the Lord makes use of what is man's in the beginning, yet He does it merely as the means of reaching and developing what is of His own in man. It was thus that He began with the gopher wood and pitch and ended with a redeemed and regenerated church.

The three stories of the ark - what were they, other than the three distinct degrees of mental life in the man of the Ancient Church? And the beasts, clean and unclean - what were they other than the affections and thoughts, spiritual and natural, that were brought under the regenerating influence of the Divine truth in the minds of the people of the Noetic age? These facts are the spiritual realities that lie back of the symbols in the allegory.

The ark had one door on its side. Could that door be anything less than hearing, receiving and obeying the voice of the Lord? And the window in the top of the ark - do we not see that it was the elevated intellectual principle, which is the spiritual window of the soul, letting in the light of the Father's face by which their minds were illuminated from heaven? How wonderful the story is!