What we believe about God is probably the most important thing we can believe. Everything else in a world view starts with our concept of God. So let’s try to understand what Mormonism says about God so we can compare our own beliefs.
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God the Father has not always been God.
According to Latter-day Saint thinking, there was a time when God was not God. Before he became divine, he existed as a mortal human being. Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of Mormonism, put it like this in a message called the King Follett Discourse:
God himself was once as we are now…. It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for certainty the Character of God,...that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did.
Our Heavenly Father, says Smith, was once human, just like us, and dwelt on some planet much like ours.
Lorenzo Snow, a later LDS prophet, summarized this doctrine in a famous saying: “As man now is, God once was.”
By contrast, the Bible teaches that God has always been God. Psalm 90:2 declares, “Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from beginning to end, you are God.” Long before anything else existed, God was still God. One translation says, “From everlasting to everlasting, you are God.”
God the Father is an exalted man.
But the being Mormons worship as God did not remain in his mortal human state. Over time, he progressed to become a god. This is what the word “exalted” means to Mormons: to be exalted is to become like God, with all the powers and prerogatives of God. In the King Follett Discourse, Joseph Smith added: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” In other words, God is the same kind of being as humans are.
Thus in Mormonism, deity is not an intrinsic condition, but an attainable status or role. If godhood is intrinsic, humans cannot become gods, because humans are a different kind of being than God is. But to Latter-day Saints, God is not a different sort of being, the same kind of being who has achieved a higher standing or position.
By contrast, the Bible teaches that God is not a man, nor ever was a man. Number 23:19 states quite clearly, “God is not a man, so he does not lie. He is not human, so he does not change his mind.” God does not have the failings that human beings have, such as deceit or uncertainty. The reason is not because he is more highly evolved or exalted than we are in our present condition. The reason is because God is not human at all.
God the Father has a physical body of flesh and bone.
If God is an exalted human being, it follows that he would have the same anatomy as we do. This is expressed in a training manual called Gospel Principles: “His eternal spirit is housed in a tangible body of flesh and bones.” It makes sense that if God is or was a man, he would have a human body with two arms, two legs, internal organs, and the rest.
But the Bible...
