333. The premise is that for our salvation, divine providence begins at our birth and continues to the end of our life. To understand this, we need to realize that the Lord knows the kind of person we are and the kind of person we want to be and therefore the kind of person we will be. Further, he cannot deprive us of the freedom of our volition if we are to be human and therefore immortal, as amply explained above; so he foresees what our state will be after death and provides for it from our birth all the way to the end of our life. He does this for evil people by both allowing and constantly leading them away from their evils, and for good people by constantly leading them to what is good. So divine providence is constantly at work for our salvation; but it cannot save more of us than want to be saved. We want to be saved if we believe in God and are led by him, and we do not want to be saved if we do not believe in God and we lead ourselves. In the latter case, we are not thinking about eternal life or salvation, while in the former case we are. The Lord sees all this and still leads us, doing so under the laws of his divine providence, laws he cannot violate because that would be to violate his divine love and his divine wisdom, and therefore himself.

[2] Since he foresees everyone's state after death and foresees our place as well--in hell for people who do not want to be saved and in heaven for people who do--it follows that, as just stated, he provides places for the evil by permitting and leading them away and for the good by leading them to their places. It follows also that if this were not being done constantly for everyone from birth to the end of life, neither heaven nor hell would endure. Without this foresight and providence, that is, there would be neither a heaven nor a hell, only confusion. (See 202-203 above on the fact that we are all provided with places by the Lord in his foresight.)

[3] To illustrate this by a comparison, if an archer or musketeer were to aim at a target and a straight line a mile long were drawn behind the target, then if the aim were off just a hair, at the end of that mile the arrow or ball would have strayed far from the line behind the target. That is what it would be like if the Lord did not have his eye on eternity at every moment, every least moment, in his foresight and provision for everyone's place after death. The Lord does this, though, because to him the whole future is present, and to him everything present is eternal.

On the fact that divine providence focuses on what is infinite and eternal in everything it does, see above, 46-69, 214 and following.

85. The existence of a sun other than the sun in the natural world has previously been unknown. The reason it has been unknown is that the spiritual component in people has descended so far into the natural one in them that they do not know what the spiritual component is, and so neither do they know that there is a spiritual world in which spirits and angels dwell, a world other than and different from the natural world.

Since the spiritual world to people who live in the natural world lies so deeply hidden, it has therefore pleased the Lord to open the sight of my spirit, to enable me to see the things that exist in that world as I see those that exist in the natural world, and then to describe that world, as I have done in the book Heaven and Hell, which includes in one section a report of that world's sun. ¹ For I have seen it, and it appeared similar in size to the sun in the natural world and also to be similarly fiery, but more glowing. I have been informed as well that the entire angelic heaven is under that sun, and that angels in the third heaven see it constantly, angels in the second heaven frequently, and angels in the first or lowest heaven occasionally.

All the heat and all the light that they have comes from that sun, and so, too, everything else that appears in that world, as will be seen in subsequent discussions.

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