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.

283. People who think rationally and clearly see that the universe was not created from nothing because they see that nothing can arise from nothing. Nothing is simply nothing, and to make something out of nothing is self-contradictory. Anything that is self-contradictory is in conflict with the light of truth that comes from divine wisdom, and if something is not from divine wisdom, it is not from divine omnipotence either.

Everyone who thinks rationally and clearly also sees that everything has been created out of a substance that is substance in and of itself. This is the essential being from which everything that exists can arise. Since only God is substance in and of itself and is therefore essential being, it follows that there is no other source of the arising of things.

Many people do see this, since reason enables them to. However, they do not dare argue it for fear that they might arrive at the thought that the created universe is God because it is from God--either that, or the thought that nature is self-generated, which would mean that its own core is what we call "God." As a result, even though many people have seen that the only source of the arising of everything is God and God's essential being, they have not dared move beyond the first suggestion of this. If they did, their minds might get ensnared in a so-called Gordian knot with no possibility of escape. The reason they could not disentangle their minds is that they were thinking about God and God's creation of the universe in temporal and spatial terms, terms proper to the physical world, and no one can understand God and the creation of the universe by starting from the physical world. Anyone whose mind enjoys some inner light, though, can understand the physical world and its creation by starting from God, because God is not in time and space.

On Divinity not being in space, see 7-10 above; on Divinity filling all space in the universe nonspatially, see 69-72, and on Divinity being in all time nontemporally, see 72-76 [73-76]. We will see later that even though God did create the universe and everything in it out of himself, still there is not the slightest thing in the created universe that is God. There will be other things as well that will shed an appropriate light on the subject.

90. Because angels are spiritual beings, they cannot live in any other warmth or in any other light than spiritual warmth and light. On the other hand, people cannot live in any other warmth or in any other light than natural warmth and light. For a spiritual environment suits a spiritual being, and a natural one a natural being. If an angel were to draw the least bit of his existence from natural heat and light, he would perish, because it is unsuited to his life.

[2] Every person in the interiors of his mind is a spirit. When a person dies, he departs altogether from the world of nature, leaving all of its properties behind, and enters into a world which has not a speck of nature in it. And in that world he lives so detached from nature that he has no communication with it by any continuous connection, that is, by the kind of continuum that exists between something purer and something cruder, but by the kind of connection that exists between something prior and something subsequent, whose only communication is by correspondent relationships.

[3] It can be seen from this that spiritual heat is not a purer natural heat, and spiritual light a purer natural light, but that they are of an entirely different character; for spiritual heat and light take their character from a sun that is pure love, which is life itself, while natural heat and light take their character from a sun that is nothing but fire, which has in it absolutely no life (as we said above).