These days, when most people think about God it’s usually in some context having to do with power. And it’s probably because evolutionary religions have always found it useful to wed their ideas about God’s authority to their own dubious intentions. What good does it do to talk about love and mercy when those things don’t give you any earthly leverage?
People seem to have either strident or pallid positions around the whole notion of God. They posit him as being a micro-managing authoritarian with a hidden rule book, that only church authorities can interpret, or a whimsical but capriciously absent landlord whose creation is free to interpret any way you like. Or just a non-entity—a ridiculous idea that anyone with common sense can see through—which seems to be the position of many intelligent people who are put off by the barbarity and hypocrisy evident in orthodox religion.
But, however God is thought about it’s doubtful anyone would’ve guessed that, seated in eternity and with complete volition, he’d be portrayed as a Creator who divested himself of control at every juncture—prodigiously gifting creator prerogatives, personality and freewill to seed his own experiential self through a matrix of creator personalities and then essentially handing them the responsibility for their joint creations.
But the Urantia Book says that’s basically what he’s done. He’s chosen to have his finite self be born through the culminating, actively synthesizing experience of freewill finite creators and creatures instead of ready-made from his own existential cloth. And this has been confusing for us with our expectations of perfection, peace and all the appropriate good management by God in his Heaven as we’ve thought about him in the past.
If man recognized that his Creators—his immediate supervisors—while being divine were also finite, and that the God of time and space was an evolving and nonabsolute Deity, then would the inconsistencies of temporal inequalities cease to be profound religious paradoxes. No longer would religious faith be prostituted to the promotion of social smugness in the fortunate while serving only to encourage stoical resignation in the unfortunate victims of social deprivation.
The Urantia Book 116:1
It turns out that all of that interplay between masculine and feminine, idea and ideal, spirit and matter, actual and potential—all of that push pull—is being seeded through divine but finite personalities that take their origin in the Paradise Trinity and move into generating still more finite creation themselves. While this is literally inconceivable to us it ends up making sense the more you think about it. Personalities that have origin give rise to an organic creation with origin, too. But while the origins and natures of these finite creators may reflect the perfection of the Trinity, their universes of things and beings are still very imperfect and incomplete. The process is evolutionary, in dual motion, descending from perfection and stability outward and downward toward endless potential, and ascending upward and inward from unrealized potential toward its stable, eternally loving and fully actualized center.
The book describes three tiers of finite creators that directly descend from the Paradise Trinity to the evolutionary universes with the Supreme Being then situated between them and the Trinity. The Supreme is not yet a conscious or self-acting entity—and yet mysterious operations already emanate from his unformed self.
The first two tiers are smaller in number but the third, that of the Creator Sons and Daughters, is substantial. More than 700,000 pairs. These are the finite creators of what they call “local universes” and each local universe is capable of eventually sustaining upwards of 10,000,000 inhabited worlds. They say that ours is still very young, currently populated by just under 4,000,000 inhabited planets. (Urantia cosmology describes a staggeringly huge, well organized and diverse universe.) Our Creator Son is called Christ Michael and his complement is the Local Universe Creative Spirit or simply the ‘Mother Spirit’.
The book says he is a ‘divine son’–which is a phrase that created a great deal of confusion during his incarnation here–as did ‘the only begotten son’. But here’s how they describe the nature of a being of his order, also called the Michael Sons, which take their origin directly in the Universal Father and Mother Son:
Each Creator Son is the only-begotten and only-begettable offspring of the perfect union of the original concepts of the two infinite and eternal and perfect minds of the ever-existent Creators of the universe of universes. There never can be another such Son because each Creator Son is the unqualified, finished, and final expression and embodiment of all of every phase of every feature of every possibility of every divine reality that could, throughout all eternity, ever be found in, expressed by, or evolved from, those divine creative potentials which united to bring this Michael Son into existence. Each Creator Son is the absolute of the united deity concepts which constitute his divine origin.
The Urantia Book 71:1.2
Remembering that the word ‘finite’ implies beginning but not necessarily an end, you can see the endless potential these finite Creator Sons actually possess. In function, the Sons interact dynamically to generate the transcendental patterns found in the Absonite alpha and omega into the endless variations that become the things and beings populating their universes. But all these things and beings become part of a deeper, more divine, genetic outworking by being born through the value and meaning levels inherent in that Son. He holds a genetic component of the evolutionary God that will factor as surely into the Supreme’s actualization as our parents’ DNA did in ours–and its outworking through him, and from him to us, becomes intrinsic in us and in everything we see.
The Creator Son interacts dynamically with spirit and energy patterns while the lines of gravity, physical power and currents of mind that manifest and sustain them are inherent in the physical presence of the Mother Spirit. He is free to move more independently in time while she remains situated at the center of their joint creation, providing presence and stability in space. She holds the spirit presence of both of them.
He generates creatures and patterns that are more diverse and multi-functioning while hers are more uniform and productive of stability and help. They’re perfect and absolute complements as they were created to be. She’s the daughter of the Infinite Spirit and will always provide the means of mediation between matter and spirit in their universe. He holds ultimate authority while she manifests true power—and she’s also the mother of angels.
The authority of a Creator Son is not a given, though, and like everything in the experiential universe, it must be earned. These Sons are required to incarnate into creature life in their own universes while revealing diverse aspects of loving, divine will that combine in the godhead in order to gain sovereignty. Our Michael Son completed that process on this world while incarnated as a human being and revealing the Father phase of divine will: Simple father love as manifest in the will of the First Source and Center.
It all sounds so lofty, doesn’t it? But there’s never anything easy about divinity when it comes into contact with finite experience. Dynamic, unselfish love runs directly counter to how things work on an imperfect, evolutionary world and these Sons seem very drawn to contrast. They’re not only required to retrieve the troubled worlds in their domains and reestablish divine order but to reveal the nature of divine love as they do so. As a result, their incarnations invariably play out in very problematic situations that must be worked through from the vulnerable vantage point of the very creatures they’ve brought into existence and they must accomplish this–seven times through seven levels of creature life–to gain sovereignty.
But there’s a dual motion that takes place through these incarnations. Creator Sons are the Logos, the rule of truth, reason and mercy, in their universes. Being experiential, the substance of their revelation of these values becomes a living, palpable Spirit that gains in presence throughout their creation. Whether we know it or not, the light of truth that our Creator Son has forged into experience has become a lit pathway accessible through the currents of higher mind to all of us as his universe children. He is Logos. After all, we are part of the unfolding of the potentials folded up in his being, too. His experiences as a creature end up informing ours as both creatures and co-creators ourselves. ‘He is the vine and we are the branches’ in that organic, holistic and evolutionary reach into experience from the existential godhead. We share the same divine DNA.