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Many people wonder how God can influence events in the universe. However, when we understand how the material universe came into being from fields of Love and Wisdom, it is easy to see how it is possible. Although the parts of the universe are free to act and interact, they are regulated and maintained by Divine principles and laws because God is omnipresent.
For example, most of the laws of the physical universe can be derived from the principle of least action which is God's action in the physical world. All processes in the universe always tend towards equilibrium or harmony because all things are endeavoring to return to God (Love) in the least amount of time. Planets and stars are rotating and revolving harmonically in order to return to the singularity or center of God (Love). This is where the law of Universal gravitation originates. In the atomic world, atoms are interacting and binding into more complex and coherent molecules until they form the harmonic helices of DNA. And all minerals, plants and animals evolved toward the harmonic human form because this is the form of Truth.
And God continues to influence humans by flowing into the spiritual, mental and physical worlds. God's unselfish Love flows into our own heart to urge us to realize our true purpose. God's True ideas flow into our mind to help us find ways to realize this purpose. And His power flows into our body as energy to enable us to translate our ideas into useful actions in the world.
Of course, as human beings, we always reserve the freedom to reject God's help or Divine Providence by ignoring conscience and rationality. However, by choosing to ignore God and willing, thinking and acting from self-love and self-intelligence, we are willingly and indefinitely delaying our arrival in Heaven and creating our own hell.
Man is in God from the Divine omnipresence so far as he lives according to order, because God is omnipresent, and wherever He is in His own Divine order there He is, as it were, in Himself, because He is order itself, as was shown above. Since man was created a form of Divine order, God is in him; but so far as a man lives according to Divine order, God is fully in him. If, however, he does not live according to Divine order, God is still in him, but in the highest regions of his soul, affording him the power to understand what is true and to will what is good, that is, the ability to understand and the inclination to love. But so far as a man lives contrary to order, he closes the lower regions of his mind or spirit, and prevents God from coming down and filling those lower regions with His presence; thus God is in him, but he is not in God. It is a general law in heaven that God is in every man, evil as well as good, but that a man is not in God unless he lives according to order. For the Lord says
He wills that man should be in Him, and that He should be in man. John xv. 4.
Man is in God by a life according to order, because God is omnipresent in the inmost parts of the universe and everything therein, for these are in order. In those things, however, which are contrary to order, as is the case with those things alone which are outside the inmost parts, God is omnipresent, continually striving with them in the constant effort to reduce them to order. Therefore so far as a man suffers himself to be brought into order, God is omnipresent in his whole being, and consequently God is in him and he is in God. The absence of God from a man is no more possible than the absence from the earth of the sun with its heat and light. Earthly objects, however, do not enjoy the full influence of the sun except when they receive its heat and light in springtime and summer.
These considerations may be applied to the Divine omnipresence, because a man is in spiritual heat and at the same time in spiritual light, that is, in the good of love and in the truths of wisdom, only in so far as he is in order. However, spiritual heat and light differ from natural heat and light, for natural heat departs from the earth and its objects in winter, and natural light withdraws during the night in consequence of the earth's rotation round its own axis and its revolution round the sun; but it is not so with spiritual heat and light, for God is present with every one by means of His Sun, which does not change as the sun of this world appears to do. It is man who turns himself away as the earth turns from its sun; and when he turns away from the truths of wisdom he is like the earth turned away from the sun at night, but as he turns from the good of love he is like the earth turned away from the sun in winter. From this comparison may be seen the correspondence existing between the effects and uses of the Sun of the spiritual world and those of the sun of the natural world. Emanuel Swedenborg [TCR 70]
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