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.

288. Since God is a person, the whole angelic heaven, taken as a single unit, presents itself as a single person. It is divided into regions and districts according to our human members, organs, and viscera. There are heavenly communities that make up the district of the brain and all its components, of all the facial parts, and of all our physical internal organs; and these districts are distinguished from each other exactly the way they are in us. In fact, angels know what district of the [heavenly] person they live in.

Heaven as a whole has this appearance because God is a person; and God is heaven because the angels who constitute heaven are recipients of love and wisdom from the Lord, and recipients are images.

I have explained at the close of a series of chapters in Secrets of Heaven that heaven is in the human form in all respects.

157. The physical world's sun is nothing but fire and is therefore dead; and since nature has its origin in that sun, nature is dead. In no respect whatever can creation itself be attributed to the physical world's sun: it is due entirely to the spiritual world's sun. This is because the physical world's sun is totally lifeless, while the spiritual world's sun is alive, being the first emanation of divine love and wisdom. Anything that is lifeless does not effect anything on its own, but is activated; so to attribute any aspect of creation to a lifeless sun would be to attribute the work of an artisan to the tool in the artisan's hand.

The physical world's sun is nothing but fire, with all its life removed. The spiritual world's sun is a fire that has divine life within it.

The angelic concept of the fire of the physical world's sun and the fire of the spiritual world's sun is like this: divine life is internal to the fire of the spiritual world's sun and external to the fire of the physical world's sun. We can see from this that the activity of our physical sun is not autonomous but stems from a living force that emanates from the spiritual world's sun. Consequently, if the living force of that sun were withdrawn or removed, our sun would fail. This is why the worship of the sun is the lowest of all forms of worship of God. It is just as dead as the sun itself; so in the Word it is called an abomination.