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.

296. There are three things in the Lord that are the Lord--a divine element of love, a divine element of wisdom, and a divine element of service. These three things are made visible outside the sun of the spiritual world--the divine element of love through its warmth, the divine element of wisdom through its light, and the divine element of service through the atmospheres that enclose it. On the emanation of warmth and light from the spiritual world's sun--warmth from the Lord's divine love and light from the Lord's divine wisdom--see 89-92 [93-98], 99-102, and 146-150. I now need to note that the third thing that emanates from the sun there is an atmosphere that serves as the vessel of warmth and light, and that it emanates from that divine aspect of the Lord that is called "service."

303. No one who thinks that there are constant intermediate steps between what is first and what is final, and that nothing can come into being except from some antecedent, and ultimately from what is first, can fail to agree that the material substances on earth have been brought forth by the sun by means of its atmospheres. What is first is the spiritual world's sun, and what is first relative to that sun is the Divine-Human One, or the Lord.

Since the atmospheres are those relatively early things by which the sun makes itself present in outermost things, and since those relatively early things are constantly diminishing as they work and extend themselves all the way to their limits, it follows that when their action and expansion come to rest at their limits, they become the kinds of material substance that we find on earth, retaining from the atmospheres that gave rise to them a tendency and effort to produce useful functions.

People who propose a creation of the universe and everything in it with no constant intermediate steps from what is first cannot help but formulate theories that are fragmentary and disconnected from actual causes. When these theories are explored by a mind that probes the matter more deeply, they look not like houses but like a pile of rubble.