Episode:God the Father—Relation to the Universe (Part 3)

From Symmetry of Soul


In all his personal relations with the creature personalities of the universes, the First Source and Center is always and consistently a loving Father. God is a Father in the highest sense of the term. He is eternally motivated by the perfect idealism of divine love, and that tender nature finds its strongest expression and greatest satisfaction in loving and being loved.

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Keywords: Urantia, God, Stationary, Self-Contained, Changeless

Note: Justin Armstrong filled in for Brad, who was away this week.

Summary by Kermit

Commentary after Review

A major focus of this arc on God the Father has been the development of an objective recognition of the real God as a purely existential and transcendent being. Our reading this evening is an invitation to go beyond said definitive and precise recognition to a personal realization of God’s absolute, existential, and transcendent nature in the mind as a predicate for personal human action. By so doing you move beyond the old wineskins of the ghost-cult God. Philosophic religionists of the past have recognized a number of the transcendent elements of the real God, but the realization step is notably absent as the prevalence and persistence of the old ghost-cult God wineskins testifies. Remember, our grace encircuitment in the Holy Spirit enables us to reality-ize our recognition with our personality and leave behind the animal-origin ghost-cult ignorance of evolutionary religion. However, the reality-izing faculty can be falsely applied, thus perpetuating evolutionary concepts which have outlived their usefulness.

A brief but deep side discussion comparing divinity (deity-likeness) and righteousness (conformity to the cosmos) led to an insightful observation how as a finaliter, ever perfecting righteousness, achieves divinity. Thus divinity is related to deity as righteousness is related to the triunity of the cosmos (reality). The full details are worth visiting in the archive of the broadcast.

4:4. The Realization of God

God is the only stationary, self-contained, and changeless being in the whole universe of universes, having no outside, no beyond, no past, and no future. The other two Paradise Deities do have some experiential Deity in their nature. Thus God has no outer life and our only domain of contact with him is our inner life. In terms of our oft’ used hourglass analogy God has only an upper domain. This level of attempted understanding brings us to a reckoning of the Deity and Reality perspectives presented in the revelation. In this Paper the revelators are primarily speaking in the reality perspective. Terminology can be confusing if the reader is unclear as to the author’s perspective.

Lest we become disheartened in striving to grasp such abstract concepts of God, our author assures us that we will not begin to understand how God can pass from simplicity to complexity, from identity to variation, from quiescence to motion, from infinity to infinitude, from the divine to the human, and from unity to duality and triunity until we achieve Paradise status! Yet even Moses gave expression to a self-existent and self-contained God, as God reputedly responded to Moses’ inquiry at the burning bush, I AM THAT I AM.

Our discussions concerning the deeper considerations of aspects of God as absolute self-determination, final goodness, volitional absoluteness to mention a few do not lend themselves to my summarization. The reading and discussion of this entire section is worthy of repeated listening.

That being said, here is an attempt at summarizing an insight concerning God’s infinity of will. God individuates and distributes will in the personalities of his universe creatures, all the while retaining the infinity of will which is undividable. This in turn leads to the counterintuitive condition wherein such individuated and distributed will transcends the Father’s will inasmuch as it is liberated for action in the experiential realm which as we have learned is not available to the Universal Father directly.

4:5. Erroneous Ideas of God

As previously mentioned the real God as revealed in section 4 is not universally recognized. In direct and sometimes stark terms this section attempts to dispense with some of the most troublesome primitive but currently held ideas of God. As the author points out, religious tradition consists of not only confused concepts of God, but the concepts have also been imperfectly preserved and as such are neither trustworthy guides for religious living or the source of true information about the Universal Father. We note that there have been God-knowing men of past ages, but regrettably their religious insights have been commingled with temporal and material ideas of God and falsely existentialized. God is not a material technique for solving our temporal difficulties, but a spiritual technique for mobilizing our mental and spiritual resources for meeting the demands of evolutionary existence.

One of the greatest sources of confusion concerning God’s nature is the failure of our sacred books to distinguish among the personalities of the Paradise Trinity, and between Paradise Deity and local universe creators and administrators. Messages delivered by celestial agents have routinely been attributed as coming from God himself. Herein is a failure to recognize monotheism in truth and perpetuate a simplistic monotheism as a universe fact.

Urantian peoples continue to suffer from the influence of primitive ideas of a wrathful God. Even so the appearance of this revelation testifies to mortal man’s budding realization of living in a universe of comparative law and order concerning policies and conduct of the Supreme Creators and Supreme controllers

The author saves his harshest words for the doctrine of the atonement. That it persists down to today is characterized as puerile, primitive and unworthy of an enlightened age of science and truth. He goes on to call such beliefs utterly repulsive to celestials and an affront to God.

The paper ends on an optimistic note with a glimpse of our planetary destiny to know the Universal Father in all that beauty of character and loveliness of attributes so magnificently portrayed by our Creator Son in his Urantian bestowal as Son of Man and Son of God.