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.

290. The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, brought forth the sun of the spiritual world out of himself, and created the universe and all its contents from it. Part 2 of the present work dealt with the sun of the spiritual world, and the following points were made there. In the spiritual world, divine love and wisdom look like a sun (83-88). Spiritual warmth and spiritual light emanate from that sun (89-92). That sun is not God. Rather, it is an emanation from the divine love and wisdom of the Divine-Human One. The same is true of warmth and light from that sun (93-98). The sun of the spiritual world is seen at a middle elevation, as far from angels as the physical world's sun is from us (103-107). The east in the spiritual world is where the Lord is seen as the sun, and the other directions follow from that (119-124 [119-123], 125-128 [124-128]). Angels always face the Lord as the sun (129-134, 135-139). The Lord created the universe and everything in it by means of that sun that is the first emanation of divine love and wisdom (151-156). The physical world's sun is nothing but fire and is therefore dead; and since nature has its origin in that sun, it is dead. Further, the physical world's sun was created so that the work of creation could be finished off and completed (157-162). There would be no creation if it were not for this pair of suns, one living and one dead (163-166).

125. Since the regions are variations in the way angels accept love and wisdom, I need to say something about the variety that gives rise to the appearance.

As I explained in the preceding section, the Lord is in each angel, and each angel is in the Lord. However, since it looks as though the Lord as the sun were outside angels, it also looks as though the Lord is seeing them from the sun and that they are seeing the Lord in the sun. This is much like seeing an image in a mirror. So if we talk on the basis of the way things seem, that is how it is. The Lord sees and examines angels face to face, but angels do not see the Lord in the same way. When they are engaged in the love for him that comes from him, they do see him straight ahead, so they are in the east or the west. When they are more engaged in wisdom, though, they see the Lord off to the right, and when they are less engaged in wisdom they see him off to the left, so they are respectively in the north or the south.

The reason they have an oblique view is that love and wisdom emanate from the Lord as a single whole, but they are not accepted that way by angels, as I have already noted [99]. Any wisdom that goes beyond love may look like wisdom, but it is not, since there is no life from love in that excess wisdom.

We can see from this where the differences in receptivity come from, the differences that cause the appearance that angels live in the different regions in the spiritual world.