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.

55. 3. In everything it does, divine providence focuses on what is infinite and eternal from itself, especially in the intent to save the human race. What is intrinsically infinite and eternal is Divinity itself or the essential Lord. What is secondarily infinite and eternal, though, is divinity emanating, or the Lord in others created from himself--in us and in angels, that is. This divinity is the same as divine providence because the Lord provides by means of that derivative divinity that everything be kept in the design in which and into which it was created. Since it is emanating divinity that is accomplishing this, it follows that all of it is divine providence.

295. The existence of such a difference between the thoughts of angels and those of people has been made known to me by the following experiment:

I have told angels to think about something spiritually and after that to tell me what they thought. When they did so and tried to tell me, they could not, saying that they were unable to put it into words.

The same was the case with their spiritual speech and with their spiritual writing. Not a word of their spiritual speech was the same as a word of natural speech, nor was any part of their spiritual writing the same as natural writing, except for the letters, each one of which contained a complete meaning.

On the other hand - surprisingly - they said that they seem to themselves to think, speak and write in their spiritual state in the same way that a person does in his natural state, when in fact nothing is the same.

It was apparent from this that natural and spiritual things differ in accordance with degrees of height, and that they do not communicate with each other except through correspondences.