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God the Father Definition

God the Father.

First member of the Godhead who once lived as a righteous human in another realm before he became exalted. He has a tangible body of flesh and bones (D&C 130:22) and is the literal father of every premortal human being in the spirit world. According to Joseph Smith, “I will go back to the beginning before the world was, to show what kind of being God is. What sort of a being was God in the beginning? Open your ears and hear, all ye ends of the earth, for I am going to prove it to you by the Bible, and to tell you the designs of God in relation to the human race, and why He interferes with the affairs of man. God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret, if the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power, was to make himself visible,—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with him, as one man talks and communes with another” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 345. See also Achieving a Celestial Marriage, p. 129).  He also said, “We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see. These are incomprehensible ideas to some, but they are simple. It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another, and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did, and I will show it from the Bible” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp. 345-346. See also Gospel Principles, 1997, p. 305).

In Christianity, God the Father was God from all eternity to all eternity (Psalm 90:2; John 8:41). He is self-existent and independent of any external cause. He always was God and always will be God. He alone is God and knows no others. Isaiah 44:8 says, “Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any.”

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