285. The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, could not have created the universe and all its constituents without His being human. People who have a natural, corporeal idea of God as a person cannot at all comprehend how God as a person could have created the universe and all its constituents. For they think to themselves, "How could God as a person traverse the universe from one interval of space to another and create? Or how could He from His abode speak a word, and upon its utterance things be created?" Such are the thoughts which enter their ideas when they hear it said that God is human, among people who think of the human God in the way that they do of a person in the world, and who think of God in terms of nature and its properties of time and space. On the other hand, people who think of the human God not in terms of a person in the world, and not in terms of nature and its properties of space and time, clearly perceive that the universe could not have been created without God's being human. [2] Direct your thought into an angelic idea of God as being human, and dismiss as far as you can an idea of space, and you will in your thinking approach the truth. Some of the learned also perceive that spirits and angels do not exist in space, because they perceive anything spiritual as being independent of space. For it is like thought. Although thought exists in a person, still the person can by means of it be as though present elsewhere, in any place whatever, even the most remote. Such is the state of spirits and angels, who are human, even in respect to their bodies. They appear in the place where their thought conveys them, since intervals of space and distances in the spiritual world are appearances, and these accord with their thought from affection. [3] It can be seen from this that God, who appears far above the spiritual world as the sun, to whom cannot be attributed any appearance of space, must not be thought of in terms of space. One can then comprehend the fact that He created the universe, not out of nothing, but out of Himself. One can further comprehend that His human body cannot be thought of as great or small, or as having any stature, because this, too, involves space; consequently that in the first and last of things, and in the greatest and least of them, He is the same; and furthermore that His Humanity is inmostly within every created thing, but independently of space. It may be seen in nos. 77-82 above that the Divine in the greatest and least of things is the same; and in nos. 69-72, that the Divine fills every space and interval of space independently of space. Moreover, because the Divine does not exist in space, neither is it extended in space, as the inmost of nature is.