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.

99. Spiritual heat and light as they emanate from the Lord as the sun are united, as His Divine love and wisdom are united. How Divine love and wisdom are united in the Lord was explained in Part One. ¹ Heat and light are united in the same way, because they are what emanate, and any attributes that emanate are by correspondence united. For heat corresponds to love, and light to wisdom.

It follows from this that as Divine love is the Divine being, and Divine wisdom its Divine expression (as shown above in nos. 14-16), so spiritual heat is the Divine attribute emanating from the Divine being, and spiritual light the Divine attribute emanating from the Divine expression. Consequently, as by virtue of that union Divine love is a property of Divine wisdom, and Divine wisdom a property of Divine love (as shown above in nos. 34-39), so spiritual heat is a property of spiritual light, and spiritual light a property of spiritual heat. Moreover, because of that union, it follows that heat and light as they emanate from the Lord as the sun are one.

That they are nevertheless not received as one by angels and people will be seen in subsequent discussions. ²

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