Here is a brief summary of what I call the story of God and man as revealed to us in the Bible and through Jesus. Please understand that the story of God Himself.
Table of contents
- The Story of God and Man
- The Mystery of God in Man
- The Story of God and Man
- How Can Jesus Be God and Man?
The story of man is a story of the spirit within being marred, leading to wrong thinking, faulty feelings, and bad behavior, all of which is bad enough in the here and now but also ultimately leads to death and hell, an eternal separation from the God who created us out of His love for us. This paints a picture of a life that is wasted and tossed aside. Since we are eternal creatures, this is an everlasting state.
Tragically, too many stop listening to the Story of God and Man at this point and somehow turn it on its ear. And because of that, they never get to the good news of just how much God does love us. See, many hear of death and hell and tune out. We do that ourselves! We are the ones who sinned, not God.
And in spite of our sins, He continues to love us. Jesus reminds us that life is lived from the inside out—that is, from the heart. He reiterates that we are spiritual beings and all of us are animated from the heart. The words from the gospel of John say this so eloquently: For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved. While this gift of forgiveness and deliverance and restoration is offered and given freely, it does not automatically come to any person. And what is the response that God invites from us?
Two words from the Bible describe our response: Faith means believing in Jesus, but not merely believing a fact to be true.
The Story of God and Man
The biblical word for faith is far deeper and richer. It means trusting Him for your life, now and forever, giving Him leadership of your life. Believing in Jesus means inviting His Spirit to come and take up residence within your own spirit. Try as we might, we cannot reform the deficiencies of the spirit, of the heart, of the soul.
We need for God to enter in and change us. We cannot do it ourselves, but we must open our hearts to Him. Jesus often spoke of this figuratively, as we have already noted with the tree and the fruit. On another occasion, He said it this way: Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
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The Story of God and Man is man meaning all of us—both men and women receiving the Spirit of God into our lives so that we might live in Him and through Him, becoming like Jesus as He transforms us day by day. Following Jesus is a journey that does indeed begin with a first step, but it is a journey of joy that focuses on the living water of Jesus. Yes, we are all spiritual beings. We are all spiritual people, whether we think of it that way or not. Your spirit is animating who you are and what you do. It makes sense that your Creator knows your purpose better than anyone else—including you yourself!
Jesus Himself was once asked to identify the greatest commandment in all the Law of Moses. Understanding that to a practicing Jew of the day the commandments were central to life, Jesus was really being asked: What, of all God said to us, is the most important? Instead, He said these two are the Great Commandments: Our primary purposes in life, according to Jesus, are to love God with all we are and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
How are you doing in achieving these purposes? You can choose to follow many different paths in life; the only path that will result in your being all you were created to be and experiencing a loving relationship with God and others is to follow the way of Jesus. It is a grand journey that you can embark upon today. Yes, this is a brief summary of the Story of God and Men as revealed to us in the pages of the Bible.
Are you seeking to find meaning and purpose in your life? We would be delighted to share with you more of this exciting life offered to us by God! Are you ready to follow Jesus? The Father has power, knowledge, glory, and dominion that the Son does not have and to which the Son is in subjection see Matthew Why did Jesus need counsel from the Father if they are the same being? Jesus needed help and a sustaining power from the Father to perform his mission on earth Matthew How could his doctrine not be his if he is the same being as the Father?
Further, why does Paul consistently open his letters with a statement emphasizing the separateness of God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ—particularly since all of these letters were written after the resurrection? The Holy Spirit is a being separate from the Father and Son. This is evidenced in Matthew In short, Latter-day Saints believe that the simplest reading of the New Testament text produces the simplest conclusion—that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate and distinct personages, that they are one in purpose, one in mind, one in glory, one in qualities and attributes, but separate in person and being.
I am persuaded that the sheer preponderance of references in the Bible would lead an uninformed reader—one unaffected by either the conclusions of the creeds Protestant and Catholic positions or insights from latter-day revelation the Latter-day Saint position —to the understanding that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are separate beings.
That is, one must look to the third- and fourth-century Christian church, not to the New Testament itself, to make a strong case for the Trinity. Well then, are the Mormons monotheistic, believers in one God? We believe they are one in that they possess all of the attributes of godliness in perfection. We believe they have the same mind, the same objective for humanity, the same purpose. We believe they are one in the sense that theirs is a covenantal relationship, a relationship established before the world was. Under any given conditions each would act in the same way, guided by the same principles of unerring justice and equity.
The one-ness of the Godhead, to which the scriptures so abundantly testify, implies no mystical union of substance, nor any unnatural and therefore impossible blending of personality. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are as distinct in their persons and individualities as are any three personages in mortality. Yet their unity of purpose and operation is such as to make their edicts one, and their will the will of God. The Master desires that his followers be one—that there be no schisms, no factions, no divisions in the body of Christ.
Indeed, the unity that exists in the Godhead is but a pattern of what ought to exist in every congregation, in every family, and in every heart that professes Jesus as the Christ. Surely Jesus was not pleading for the Father to somehow make of the Apostles one essence, one being, but rather that the Apostles and those who hearkened to their words might be united in heart and mind by the power of the Spirit.
Live up to that great part of divinity that is within you. For as God is always the same, so also man, when found in God, shall always progress toward God. Clement of Alexandria ca. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria ca. Just as the Lord, putting on the body, became a man, so also we men are both deified through his flesh, and henceforth inherit everlasting life.
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Augustine of Hippo AD — If then we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods. Gregory of Nyssa ca. AD —94 , a Catholic bishop and one of the Cappadocian Fathers, contributed to this theological discussion by taking a much more optimistic approach to the natural world. Nicholas of Cusa, a German cardinal whose Latin name was Cusanus —64 , built upon this foundation in the fifteenth century. His teachings might be distilled as follows: Humankind is not just restored to an original condition but is exalted to a point of deification.
Further, theosis , or deification, has remained a significant doctrine within Eastern Orthodoxy. Archimandrite Christoforos Stavropoulos observed: This is the end and the fulfillment of our earthly destiny. Do you understand the meaning of this calling? Do we accept that we should in fact be on a journey, a road which leads to Theosis? As human beings we each have this one, unique calling, to achieve Theosis. In other words, we are each destined to become a god, to be like God Himself, to be united with Him. This is the purpose of your life; that you be a participant, a sharer in the nature of God and in the life of Christ, a communicant of divine grace and energy— to become just like God, a true god.
One scholar has written: In the words of St. Basil the Great, man is nothing less than a creature that has received the order to become god. One grand manifestation of the fact that people are being divinized is the extent to which they begin to grow in love and more especially in godly love, or charity. Deification is a result of the engulfing fire of divine love, not of philosophical discipline.
Christ invites all men everywhere to come unto him that they may be like him. The idea of the ultimate deification of man has not been completely lost from modern Christian thinking. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly though, of course, on a smaller scale His own boundless power and delight and goodness.
The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for.
He meant what He said. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. There are no ordinary people. Where He goes, it goes too. He is the first of His kind; He will not be the last. From A Grief Observed: But that, I suppose, is just your grand experiment. Or no; not an experiment, for you have no need to find things out.
Rather your grand enterprise. I honestly do not fully know what Lewis meant by these statements. The doctrine of the deification of man did not originate with Lewis nor with the Latter-day Saints; it is to be found throughout Christian history and within Orthodox Christian theology today. Whether Lewis would have agreed fully with the teachings of early Christian leaders on deification—or, for that matter, with what the Latter-day Saints teach—I cannot tell. In writing of the concept of men and women gaining immortality in the resurrection, N.
That is, it will have passed beyond death not just in the temporal sense that it happens to have gone through a particular moment and event but also in the ontological sense of no longer being subject to sickness, injury, decay, and death itself. Wright appears to be suggesting that the resurrected body has indeed undergone a major ontological change, from corruptible to incorruptible, from natural to spiritual, from mortal to immortal.
The Mystery of God in Man
Could it be that the resurrected being, having been perfected in Christ see Moroni They are they who are the church of the Firstborn. They are they into whose hands the Father has given all things—they are they who are priests and kings, who have received of his fulness, and of his glory;. I say that the Vision appears to be the first revelation of this doctrine, but I do so cautiously. Between the time of the Vision of the Glories in and the King Follett sermon on April 7, , Joseph Smith and the early brethren took part in a training program known as the School of the Elders.
In the winter of —35 in Kirtland, Ohio, the Lectures on Faith were delivered. In lecture 5 we have not only a deep and profoundly significant discussion of the Godhead but also a specific reference to men and women becoming like God through being graced and endowed with the power and might and glory and mind of Deity. We are created, we are born for the express purpose of growing up from the low state of manhood, to become gods, like unto our Father in heaven.
We believe God is comprehendible, knowable, approachable, and, like his Beloved Son, touched with the feeling of our infirmities see Hebrews 4: At the same time, our God is God. There is no knowledge of which he is ignorant and no power he does not possess. Scriptural passages that speak of him being the same yesterday, today, and forever clearly have reference to his divine attributes—his love, justice, constancy, and willingness to bless his children. Eternal life consists in being with God; in addition, it entails being like God.
God is our Heavenly Father, the Father of our spirits see Numbers He is a glorified, exalted man, a Man of Holiness see Moses 6: We are created in his image and likeness. God is in every way a divine being. He possesses in perfection every godly attribute.
The Story of God and Man
He is omnipotent, omniscient, and, by the power of his Holy Spirit, omnipresent. Joseph Smith taught in the King Follett sermon that God was once a man and lived on an earth. When and how and in what manner he became God is unknown. We do know that he is infinite and eternal. God has the power and the desire to extend his grace, including the gifts, fruit, and blessings of the Spirit, to his children. He does not hesitate to do so. The scriptures do not speak of a barrier beyond which men and women may progress spiritually. In the words of Elder Bruce R. Brother Joseph explained that as men and women live in such a way as to cultivate the gifts of the Spirit, they eventually receive the assurance of eternal life—they make their calling and election sure.
In receiving the promise of salvation, the individual has thereby passed the tests of mortality and qualified for exaltation and godhood hereafter. King Benjamin closed his magnificent sermon with this invitation: While laboring tirelessly with the people of the Church, particularly those in transgression, Alma the Elder received the following commendation and promise from God: Thou art blessed because of thy exceeding faith in the words alone of my servant Abinadi. And blessed art thou because thou hast established a church among this people; and they shall be established, and they shall be my people.
And because thou hast inquired of me concerning the transgressor, thou art blessed. In our dispensation, the Lord made a like promise to the latter-day seer: Those who grow up in the Lord see Helaman 3: The role of the Holy Spirit is to lead men and women to the point of illumination and inspiration at which they are ready to be ushered into the presence of the Father and the Son. As baptism is the gate to membership in the Church of Jesus Christ on earth, so celestial marriage opens the door to membership in the heavenly church.
It is made up of those who qualify for the blessings of the Firstborn. Jesus is the Firstborn of the Father and, as such, is entitled to the birthright. As an act of consummate mercy and grace, our blessed Savior makes it possible for us to inherit, receive, and possess the same blessings he receives, as though we were the Firstborn. We become heirs of God, joint heirs, or coinheritors with Christ to all the Father has, including eternal life. These blessings do not come to the sign seeker, the curious, or the man or woman possessed of excessive zeal.
Those who have come unto Christ by covenants and saving ordinances seek for the certain assurance of salvation before the end of their mortal lives. But should one not formally receive the glorious promise in this life, the scriptures attest that faithfully enduring to the end eventuates in eternal life, whether that assurance be received here or hereafter see 2 Nephi God is our Father and wants all of his children to become as he is. Thus the plan of salvation is a developmental process whereby we learn to exercise faith in God and Christ unto life and salvation.
Many Christians find the Latter-day Saint concept of deification to be problematic at best and perverse at worst. Interestingly, they do not seem to be too put off by the Eastern Orthodox teachings on the matter. When it comes to the Latter-day Saints, however, it is a different story. Our belief that finite human beings may relate to and come to be like an infinite and eternal being borders on blasphemy, they contend, for it shortens the otherwise infinite chasm between Creator and creation.
Mouw of Fuller Theological Seminary observed:. While Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy espoused very different, indeed opposing, metaphysical systems, with Joseph arguing for a thorough-going physicalism and the founder of Christian Science insisting on a thorough-going mentalism—they each were motivated by a desire to reduce the distance between God and human beings.
These two reduce-the-distance theologies emerged in an environment shaped significantly by the high Calvinsim of New England Puritanism. I think it can be plausibly—and rightly, from an orthodox perspective—argued that New England theology, which stressed the legitimate metaphysical distance between God and his human creatures, nonetheless at the same time fostered an unhealthy spiritual distance between the Calvinist deity and his human subjects.
Even though we believe in the ultimate deification of man, I am unaware of any authoritative statement in Latter-day Saint literature that suggests that men and women will ever worship any being other than the ones within the Godhead. Pratt wrote one of the first theological treatises within Mormonism, Key to the Science of Theology.
In describing those who are glorified and attain eternal life, Elder Pratt stated: But we are of the same species in the sense that God has a form, and were he to appear, he could be seen. We are of the same species in that he is a real person, a man, an exalted man, not merely a sovereign and governing force or a congeries of laws. Smith and Janne M. Men and women cannot work themselves into glory or godhood, cannot gain eternal life through human effort alone. One does not become more and more Christlike through sheer grit and willpower. Central to any and all spiritual progress is the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and it is only by and through his righteousness that we may be declared righteous.
It is only by the power of his precious blood that we may be cleansed and sanctified from the taint and tyranny of sin. And it is only by and through the power of his everlasting life that we receive life—energy, strength, vitality, renewal, enabling power—to accomplish what we could never, worlds without end, accomplish on our own.
Just how strange, then, is the Latter-day Saint doctrine of deification? How unscriptural is it? The first, written in his Christmas sermon of , affirms: For the word becomes flesh precisely so that the flesh may become word. God becomes man so that man may become God. Thus power becomes powerless so that weakness may become powerful.
How Can Jesus Be God and Man?
In the fifteenth century, Cusanus taught: It is as if the Creator had spoken: The inference, therefore, is that every created thing as such is perfect, even if by comparison to others it seems less perfect. This relates to all the elements of his being from the most peripheral to the very core of his existence. To summarize, Latter-day Saints teach that through the cleansing and transforming power of the blood of Jesus Christ, and through the sanctifying and divinizing power of the Holy Spirit, men and women may over time mature spiritually, a process that is referred to variously as participation, transformation, union, intermingling, partaking, elevation, kingship, interpenetration, joint-heirship, son- and daughterhood, adoption, re-creation, and realization.
Just how odd, how unusual, how unorthodox, how unfathomable, how un-Christian are the words of Joseph Smith and the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints? We worship an infinite and eternal God. Indeed, as Joseph Smith taught the School of the Elders, if we did not believe that the Almighty possesses all of the divine attributes in perfection, we could not exercise faith in God unto life and salvation.
Finally, whether the Latter-day Saint doctrines of exaltation and deification are the same as those delivered by the Church Fathers, by Eastern Orthodox thinkers of the past and present, or by modern Christians is absolutely immaterial. Nor do we in the twenty-first century: Rather, I wish not to suggest that others ought to accept Mormonism because bright and inspired minds of other faiths have used language or ideas similar to our own, but instead to point out what should be more obvious than it is to many—that the doctrine of deification, divinization, theosis has been around for a long, long time and that it should require more than a tiny bit of cognitive and spiritual dissonance to dismiss or ignore it outright.
Our enemies have criticized us for believing in this. Our reply is that this lofty concept in no way diminishes God the Eternal Father. He is the Almighty. He is the Creator and Governor of the universe. He is the greatest of all and will always be so. But just as any earthly father wishes for his sons and daughters every success in life, so I believe our Father in Heaven wishes for his children that they might approach him in stature and stand beside him resplendent in godly strength and wisdom.
We might well ask, Does God want his children to be like him? Or is this something that is repulsive to him? Is it something that is inappropriate?