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.

99. The spiritual warmth and light that result from the emanation from the Lord as the sun form a single whole just as his divine love and wisdom do. Part 1 explains how divine love and wisdom form a single whole in the Lord. Warmth and light form a similar whole because they are emanations, and emanations constitute a whole by reason of their correspondence. The warmth answers to love, and the light to wisdom.

It therefore follows that since divine love is the divine reality and divine wisdom is the divine manifestation (see 14-16 above), spiritual warmth is divinity emanating from the divine reality and spiritual light is divinity emanating from the divine manifestation. This means that just as divine love is a property of divine wisdom and divine wisdom is a property of divine love because of this union (see 34-39 above), spiritual warmth is a property of spiritual light and spiritual light is a property of spiritual warmth. As a result of this kind of oneness, it follows that warmth and light are a single whole as they emanate from the Lord as the sun.

We will see later, though [125], that they are not accepted as a single whole by angels or by us.

157. The sun in the natural world is nothing but fire and consequently lifeless, and because nature takes its origin from that sun, it too is lifeless. Creation itself cannot in the least be ascribed to the sun of the natural world, but must be ascribed wholly to the sun of the spiritual world, since the sun in the natural world is completely lifeless, while the sun in the spiritual world is alive, being the first emanation of Divine love and wisdom; and something that is lifeless does not do anything by itself, but as the result of some other agency. Consequently to ascribe to it any responsibility for creation would be like ascribing to the tool wielded in the hands of an artisan the work which the artisan accomplishes.

The sun in the natural world is sheer fire from which every particle of life has been withdrawn. In contrast, the sun in the spiritual world is fire which has in it Divine life.

The idea angels have of the fire of the sun in the natural world and of the fire of the sun in the spiritual world is this - that the Divine life is present inwardly in the fire of the sun in the spiritual world, but outwardly in the fire of the sun in the natural world.

It can be seen from this that the activity of the natural sun comes not from itself, but from a living force emanating from the sun of the spiritual world. Consequently if the living force of that sun were to be withdrawn or removed, the natural sun would collapse.

It is owing to this that worship of the sun is, of all the forms of worshiping God, the lowest, for it is altogether as lifeless as the sun itself. Therefore such worship is called in the Word an abomination. ¹

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