1. Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence

Divine Providence Is the Form of Government Exercised by the Lord's Divine Love and Wisdom

To understand what divine providence is--that it is the way the Lord's divine love and wisdom govern us--it is important to be aware of the following things, which were presented in my book on the subject.

In the Lord, divine love is a property of divine wisdom and divine wisdom is a property of divine love (Divine Love and Wisdom 34-39).

Divine love and wisdom cannot fail to be and to be manifested in others that it has created (Divine Love and Wisdom 47-51).

Everything in the universe was created by divine love and wisdom (Divine Love and Wisdom 52, 53, 151-156).

Everything in the created universe is a vessel of divine love and wisdom (54-60 [55-60]).

The Lord looks like the sun to angels; its radiating warmth is love and its radiating light is wisdom (Divine Love and Wisdom 83-88, 89-92, 93-98, 296-301).

The divine love and wisdom that emanate from the Lord constitute a single whole (Divine Love and Wisdom 99-102).

The Lord from eternity, who is Jehovah, created the universe and everything in it from himself and not from nothing (Divine Love and Wisdom 282-284, 290-295). These propositions may be found in the work titled Angelic Wisdom about Divine Love and Wisdom.

47. Divine love and wisdom cannot fail to be and to be manifested in others that it has created. The hallmark of love is not loving ourselves but loving others and being united to them through love. The hallmark of love is also being loved by others because this is how we are united. Truly, the essence of all love is to be found in union, in the life of love that we call joy, delight, pleasure, sweetness, blessedness, contentment, and happiness.

The essence of love is that what is ours should belong to someone else. Feeling the joy of someone else as joy within ourselves--that is loving. Feeling our joy in others, though, and not theirs in ourselves is not loving. That is loving ourselves, while the former is loving our neighbor. These two kinds of love are exact opposites. True, they both unite us; and it does not seem as though loving what belongs to us, or loving ourselves in the other, is divisive. Yet it is so divisive that to the extent that we love others in this way we later harbor hatred for them. Step by step our union with them dissolves, and the love becomes hatred of corresponding intensity.

349. Visible phenomena in the created universe attest that nothing has been or is produced by nature, but everything by the Divine from itself, and this through the spiritual world. Most people in the world speak in accordance with the appearance that the sun by its heat and light produces whatever they see in fields, meadows, gardens and forests; that the sun by its warmth hatches grubs from eggs and causes beasts of the earth and birds of the sky to reproduce; indeed, even that it gives life to mankind.

People who only speak in this way because of the appearance can do so even though they do not ascribe these things to nature, because they are not thinking about it. For example, people who speak of the sun as rising and setting and creating days and years, or as being now at this or that height, speak in this way in accordance with the appearance, and can do so, even though they do not ascribe these things to the sun, because they are not thinking about the sun's stationary position and the revolution of the earth.

On the other hand, people who confirm themselves in the notion that the sun by its heat and light produces the phenomena that appear on the earth, eventually ascribe all things to nature, including as well the creation of the universe, and they become adherents of naturalism and at last atheists. After that they may indeed say that God created nature and endowed it with the power of producing such phenomena, but they say so for fear of losing their reputation. At the same time, however, by God the Creator they mean nature, and some of them the inmost element of nature, and they then regard as of no account any Divine tenets that the church teaches.