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.

53. Created, finite things may be said to have reality and manifestation, substance and form, life, and even love and wisdom, but all of these are created and finite. The reason we can say they have these attributes is not that they possess any divinity but that they are in Divinity and there is Divinity in them. Anything that has been created is intrinsically without soul and dead, but it is given a soul and brought to life by the presence of Divinity in it, and by its dwelling in Divinity.

152. I gave ample evidence in part 1 that everything in the universe was created by divine love and wisdom (see particularly 52-53 [52-54]). The point here is that this was done by means of the sun that is the first emanation of divine love and wisdom.

No one who can see how effects follow from causes and how causes lead to effects in due order and sequence can deny that the sun is the beginning of creation. Everything in our world is sustained by it, and because everything is sustained by it, everything arose from it--the one fact follows from the other and bears witness to it. Everything, that is, is watched over by the sun because the sun has determined its being, and the act of watching over it is an ongoing determination of that thing's being. This is why we say that being sustained is a constant coming into being. If anything were totally removed from the inflow of the sun through our atmospheres, it would instantly dissipate. It is the atmospheres with their different degrees of purity, empowered by the sun, that hold everything together. Since the universe and everything in it is sustained by the sun, then, we can see that the sun is the beginning of creation, the source.

We say "by the sun" but we mean "by the Lord through the sun," since the sun too was created by the Lord.