Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1167

1167. When the biblical accounts of the process of creation state that it lasted "six days", it thus means that the account is the world redemption's guidance formulated for beings belonging to an as-yet less intellectual step. What world redemption wanted in this way to tell the beings of this step is that creation took "six periods of time". It had no intention of stating how long these periods of time lasted, since it was of course a question that could not possibly arise, since these beings' "faculty for having an inkling" was, as will be remembered, exclusively and unshakeably attuned to "miraculous creation", which was, so to speak, a creation at lightening speed or an instantaneous way of coming into being. Telling these beings that creation took six immense periods of time, each lasting hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years, would have made absolutely no contact with their consciousness for it would seem to them to be quite impossible and therefore untrue. By expressing the periods of time as "six days", these periods were, however, immediately understandable since they were then completely in contact with the beings' "inkling" or "belief" in the miraculous ability of the Godhead or providence. Complete contact was created between the truth and these beings' ability to perceive, which would have been quite impossible in any other way. And "six days" and "six periods of time" are of course in principle the same, quite apart from the fact that "one day for the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day". In the same way the Bible's "seventh day" is also a period of millions of years, and expresses in the absolute sense the perfect physical form of existence that the terrestrial human being will come to live in when all terrestrial human beings have attained this stage of perfection, and each constitutes the "finished" or "perfect human being", has become "one with the Godhead" and "loves its neighbour as itself". This "seventh day" is thus the promised "new heaven" and "new Earth" in which "righteousness dwells".