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.

289. This shows us the senselessness of concepts people have when they think about God in nonhuman terms and about divine attributes as not being in a human God. Separated from person, these concepts are nothing but theoretical constructs.

On God as the essential person, from whom we are human by virtue of our acceptance of love and wisdom, see 11-13 above. I stress this here for the sake of what follows, to make it clear that the universe was created by God because God is a person.

158. Since the physical world's sun is nothing but fire and is therefore lifeless, the warmth that emanates from it is also lifeless, and so is the emanating light. By the same token, the atmospheres called ether and air that receive this sun's warmth and light and bring them down into our embrace are lifeless as well. Since all these are lifeless, absolutely all the earthly things beneath them called soils are lifeless. However, they are all surrounded by spiritual realities that emanate and flow out from the spiritual world's sun. If they were not surrounded in this way, soils could not be activated to bring forth the forms of use called plants and the forms of life called animals, and they could not provide the substances that enable us to come into being and to survive.