God Desires Human Happiness

God's nature, including all his acts and feelings, corresponds precisely to the truth and relations of things. If he is a perfect being, it cannot be otherwise.  It is not possible for him, being what he is, to sunder himself from the things he has made, and from the relations they sustain to himself and each other; nor to act otherwise, and to be otherwise, than in perfect consistency with such things and relations.

Among other works which are to be attributed to him, God has formed moral agents. Of all his various works, this is, in some respects, the greatest. He has formed angels; he has formed men. The mere fact that he has made them, which involves the additional fact of the relationship of cause and effect, in other words, of father and child, constitutes an alliance, which is both an alliance of morality and an alliance of the affections In other words, he is allied to them by duty and allied to them by love.

If God is a good and holy being, it is not possible for him to create a being or beings susceptible of happiness, without making provision for their happiness, and without rejoicing in their happiness. To be indifferent to and not to rejoice in the happiness of his creatures, would be the characteristic of an evil and not of a good being. But no moral being which God has created can be truly and permanently happy without loving God and all other beings as God would have them love; in other words, without being holy. We come, then, to the conclusion, that another and very great source of God’s happiness is the contemplation of the holiness and happiness of his creatures. If they are holy, they cannot be otherwise than happy; and if they are happy, God must be happy in them.

— edited from A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) Part 7, Chapter 12.

The Natural and Moral Suprememcy of God's Will

There is a natural supremacy of the divine will. There is a moral supremacy also. In natural things, it is supreme by nature. In moral things, it is supreme by right.

The natural supremacy, which presents itself first for consideration, is fixed, and cannot be otherwise than it is. It is the supremacy which makes and originates; the infinite energy concentered in the one infinite purpose, overspreading all, consummating all. All things which exist, so far as the mere fact of being is concerned, have their existence, both in its origin and its continuance, in the natural supremacy of God's will. In that will, all trees and plants, and all other things which are produced on the earth's surface, have their life. In that will, the sun, and moon, and stars live; and all things and beings that inhabit them. In that will, all men, and all animals inferior to men, in all their varieties, have their origin and their continued support. It is a will supreme, because everything else is a dependency.

This, it will be noticed, is said in connection with the physical  nature of things. Over all things in their physical nature, there is what may be called a natural or physical supremacy of the divine will, which transcends everything because it is the source of everything.

There is also a moral supremacy of the divine will. God, in the exercise of the natural supremacy of his will, and acting under the direction of his moral nature, created beings like himself, beings having a moral nature. In  doing this, he gave them the power to do as they pleased; that is to say, to take any course which they might choose to take within the sphere of their natural or physical capability. But in giving them the power thus to act, which was essential to them as moral beings, he did not give them the right.  He could not do it. As a being possessed of all power, he could give them the power to do what they pleased; but, as a being possessed of all holiness, he could give them the right to do only what  was right, and nothing else. Further than this, they never had any right, nor ever can have.

— from A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) Part 5, Chapter 3.

Broken Cisterns

Original truth is aphoristic. Its declaration is its argument. It carries conviction in its simplest affirmations. It is enough, therefore, merely to affirm, that the created must flow out of the uncreated; that the temporal must flow out of the eternal. God is the uncreated; God is the eternal. God, therefore, God alone, God beyond time, beyond and above all creating power, is the " living" or perpetual fountain. He has the true life in himself, and that life is Love. — All other life is from him and by him.

Hence it is said, in the language of Scripture,— language not more simply eloquent and affecting than it is true: — "My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken ME, the fountain of living waters,  and hewn out broken cisterns that can hold no water." [Jer. 2: 13] And it is here, more than anywhere else, that we find the source of trouble with men. God, in creating men, not only gave them the principle of faith, but opened also the eternal fountain of love in their hearts; but men, in an evil hour, stopped it by ceasing to believe in the source from which it came. Satan, reminding them that God had made them moral agents, maliciously whispered that they would do well to avail themselves of their power by hewing out cisterns of their own, — in other words, that they should try to live as originators, and not as recipients; that they should try to live without living in and from God. They made the attempt; turned away from God, and, in striving to live in their own strength, found, in their sins and sorrows, that they had exchanged the living fountain for "broken cisterns, which could hold no water."

— A Treatise on Divine Union, Part 4, Chapter 4.