The Urantia Book Study Edition
The Urantia Book Study Edition
INDEX
The Urantia Book Study Edition

Topical Studies

God


The subject of God is threaded throughout The Urantia Book; from the first sentence to the last, God is present on practically every page. So, the subject of GOD is understandably huge, and it is impossible to do it justice in the span of one topical study. Nevertheless, we have gleaned the following quotes from The Urantia Book which will give you some idea of God his reality, his presence, his perfection, and his loving personality.

At the end of this study, you’ll find several additional links that will help you to gain a fuller understanding of God as revealed in Urantia Book teachings.

The Universal Father Loving Spirit Father To All
The Universal Father is the God of all creation, the First Source and Center of all things and beings. First think of God as a creator, then as a controller, and lastly as an infinite upholder. (1:0.1)

God is primal reality in the spirit world; God is the source of truth in the mind spheres; God overshadows all throughout the material realms. To all created intelligences God is a personality, and to the universe of universes he is the First Source and Center of eternal reality. God is neither manlike nor machinelike. The First Father is universal spirit, eternal truth, infinite reality, and father personality. (1:2.1)

“God is spirit.” He is a universal spiritual presence. The Universal Father is an infinite spiritual reality; he is “the sovereign, eternal, immortal, invisible, and only true God.” (1:3.1)

Even your olden prophets understood the eternal, never beginning, never ending, circular nature of the Universal Father. God is literally and eternally present in his universe of universes. He inhabits the present moment with all his absolute majesty and eternal greatness. ... Thus are the plans and purposes of the First Source and Center like himself: eternal, perfect, and forever changeless. (2:2.1)

The concept of God as a king judge, although it fostered a high moral standard and created a law respecting people as a group, left the individual believer in a sad position of insecurity respecting his status in time and in eternity. The later Hebrew prophets proclaimed God to be a Father to Israel; Jesus revealed God as the Father of each human being. The entire mortal concept of God is transcendently illuminated by the life of Jesus. Selflessness is inherent in parental love. God loves not like a father, but as a father. He is the Paradise Father of every universe personality.

Righteousness implies that God is the source of the moral law of the universe. Truth exhibits God as a revealer, as a teacher. But love gives and craves affection, seeks understanding fellowship such as exists between parent and child. Righteousness may be the divine thought, but love is a father’s attitude. (2:6.4)

...The olden concept that God is a Deity dominated by kingly morality was upstepped by Jesus to that affectionately touching level of intimate family morality of the parent child relationship, than which there is none more tender and beautiful in mortal experience. (2:6.1)

Finite appreciation of infinite qualities far transcends the logically limited capacities of the creature because of the fact that mortal man is made in the image of God there lives within him a fragment of infinity. Therefore man’s nearest and dearest approach to God is by and through love, for God is love. And all of such a unique relationship is an actual experience in cosmic sociology, the Creator creature relationship the Father child affection. (3:4.7)

First and last eternally the infinite God is a Father. Of all the possible titles by which he might appropriately be known, I have been instructed to portray the God of all creation as the Universal 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. (4:4.5)

While God is to and in the universes all that we have portrayed, nevertheless, to you and to all other God knowing creatures he is one, your Father and their Father. To personality God cannot be plural. God is Father to each of his creatures, and it is literally impossible for any child to have more than one father. (56:4.4)

No matter how much you may grow in Father comprehension, your mind will always be staggered by the unrevealed infinity of the Father I AM, the unexplored vastness of which will always remain unfathomable and incomprehensible throughout all the cycles of eternity. No matter how much of God you may attain, there will always remain much more of him, the existence of which you will not even suspect. And we believe that this is just as true on transcendental levels as it is in the domains of finite existence. The quest for God is endless! (102:7.5)

God is the Father; man is his son. Love, the love of a father for his son, becomes the central truth in the universe relations of Creator and creature not the justice of a king which seeks satisfaction in the sufferings and punishment of the evil doing subject. (188:5.1)

The Father is living love, and this life of the Father is in his Sons. And the spirit of the Father is in his Sons’ sons mortal men. When all is said and done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God. (196:3.35)

The Name of God
Near the center of the universe of universes, the Universal Father is generally known by names which may be regarded as meaning the First Source. Farther out in the universes of space, the terms employed to designate the Universal Father more often mean the Universal Center. Still farther out in the starry creation, he is known, as on the headquarters world of your local universe, as the First Creative Source and Divine Center. In one near by constellation God is called the Father of Universes. In another, the Infinite Upholder, and to the east, the Divine Controller. He has also been designated the Father of Lights, the Gift of Life, and the All powerful One. (1:1.4)

Those who know God through the revelations of the bestowals of the Paradise Sons, eventually yield to the sentimental appeal of the touching relationship of the creature Creator association and refer to God as “our Father.” (1:1.5)

Proof of God
The existence of God can never be proved by scientific experiment or by the pure reason of logical deduction. God can be realized only in the realms of human experience; nevertheless, the true concept of the reality of God is reasonable to logic, plausible to philosophy, essential to religion, and indispensable to any hope of personality survival.

Those who know God have experienced the fact of his presence; such God knowing mortals hold in their personal experience the only positive proof of the existence of the living God which one human being can offer to another. (1:2.4)

Religion must ever be its own critic and judge; it can never be observed, much less understood, from the outside. Your only assurance of a personal God consists in your own insight as to your belief in, and experience with, things spiritual. To all of your fellows who have had a similar experience, no argument about the personality or reality of God is necessary, while to all other men who are not thus sure of God no possible argument could ever be truly convincing. (101:2.16)

God is so all real and absolute that no material sign of proof or no demonstration of so called miracle may be offered in testimony of his reality. Always will we know him because we trust him, and our belief in him is wholly based on our personal participation in the divine manifestations of his infinite reality. (102:1.5)

Man’s contact with the highest objective reality, God, is only through the purely subjective experience of knowing him, of worshiping him, of realizing sonship with him. (196:3.24)

God is not the mere invention of man’s idealism; he is the very source of all such superanimal insights and values. God is not a hypothesis formulated to unify the human concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness; he is the personality of love from whom all of these universe manifestations are derived. (196:3.24)

God Indwells His Creatures As A Divine Prsence
The infinity of the perfection of God is such that it eternally constitutes him mystery. And the greatest of all the unfathomable mysteries of God is the phenomenon of the divine indwelling of mortal minds. The manner in which the Universal Father sojourns with the creatures of time is the most profound of all universe mysteries; the divine presence in the mind of man is the mystery of mysteries. (1:4.1)

The creature not only exists in God, but God also lives in the creature. “We know we dwell in him because he lives in us; he has given us his spirit. This gift from the Paradise Father is man’s inseparable companion.” “He is the ever present and all pervading God.” “The spirit of the everlasting Father is concealed in the mind of every mortal child.” “Man goes forth searching for a friend while that very friend lives within his own heart.” “The true God is not afar off; he is a part of us; his spirit speaks from within us.” “The Father lives in the child. God is always with us. He is the guiding spirit of eternal destiny.” (3:1.4)

Even though the Paradise Father functions through his divine creators and his creature children, he also enjoys the most intimate inner contact with you, so sublime, so highly personal, that it is even beyond my comprehension that mysterious communion of the Father fragment with the human soul and with the mortal mind of its actual indwelling. Knowing what you do of these gifts of God, you therefore know that the Father is in intimate touch, not only with his divine associates, but also with his evolutionary mortal children of time. The Father indeed abides on Paradise, but his divine presence also dwells in the minds of men. (12:7.13)

Do not allow the magnitude of the infinity, the immensity of the eternity, and the grandeur and glory of the matchless character of God to overawe, stagger, or discourage you; for the Father is not very far from any one of you; he dwells within you, and in him do we all literally move, actually live, and veritably have our being. (12:7.12)

God is so trusting, so loving, that he gives a portion of his divine nature into the hands of even human beings for safekeeping and self realization. (117:4.3)

“God is spirit, and God gives a fragment of his spirit self to dwell in the heart of man. Spiritually, all men are equal. The kingdom of heaven is free from castes, classes, social levels, and economic groups. You are all brethren.” (134:4.7)

The Subtle Mystery of God
To every spirit being and to every mortal creature in every sphere and on every world of the universe of universes, the Universal Father reveals all of his gracious and divine self that can be discerned or comprehended by such spirit beings and by such mortal creatures. God is no respecter of persons, either spiritual or material.

As a reality in human spiritual experience God is not a mystery. But when an attempt is made to make plain the realities of the spirit world to the physical minds of the material order, mystery appears: mysteries so subtle and so profound that only the faith grasp of the God knowing mortal can achieve the philosophic miracle of the recognition of the Infinite by the finite, the discernment of the eternal God by the evolving mortals of the material worlds of time and space.

Do not permit the magnitude of God, his infinity, either to obscure or eclipse his personality. “He who planned the ear, shall he not hear? He who formed the eye, shall he not see?” (1:4.6)

“Touching the Infinite, we cannot find him out. The divine footsteps are not known.” “His understanding is infinite and his greatness is unsearchable.” The blinding light of the Father’s presence is such that to his lowly creatures he apparently “dwells in the thick darkness.” Not only are his thoughts and plans unsearchable, but “he does great and marvelous things without number.” (2:1.1)

God Is Personal
God is much more than a personality as personality is understood by the human mind; he is even far more than any possible concept of a superpersonality.

God is not hiding from any of his creatures. He is unapproachable to so many orders of beings only because he “dwells in a light which no material creature can approach.” The immensity and grandeur of the divine personality is beyond the grasp of the unperfected mind of evolutionary mortals. (1:5.2)

Without God and except for his great and central person, there would be no personality throughout all the vast universe of universes. God is personality.

Notwithstanding that God is an eternal power, a majestic presence, a transcendent ideal, and a glorious spirit, though he is all these and infinitely more, nonetheless, he is truly and everlastingly a perfect Creator personality, a person who can “know and be known,” who can “love and be loved,” and one who can befriend us; while you can be known, as other humans have been known, as the friend of God. He is a real spirit and a spiritual reality. (1:5.7)

God is spirit spirit personality; man is also a spirit potential spirit personality. Jesus of Nazareth attained the full realization of this potential of spirit personality in human experience; therefore his life of achieving the Father’s will becomes man’s most real and ideal revelation of the personality of God. Even though the personality of the Universal Father can be grasped only in actual religious experience, in Jesus’ earth life we are inspired by the perfect demonstration of such a realization and revelation of the personality of God in a truly human experience. (1:6.8)

God Means Different Things To Different People
God is to science a cause, to philosophy an idea, to religion a person, even the loving heavenly Father. God is to the scientist a primal force, to the philosopher a hypothesis of unity, to the religionist a living spiritual experience. (1:6.2)

The Perfection of God
God is not a cosmic accident; neither is he a universe experimenter. The Universe Sovereigns may engage in adventure; the Constellation Fathers may experiment; the system heads may practice; but the Universal Father sees the end from the beginning, and his divine plan and eternal purpose actually embrace and comprehend all the experiments and all the adventures of all his subordinates in every world, system, and constellation in every universe of his vast domains. (2:1.4)

God’s primal perfection consists not in an assumed righteousness but rather in the inherent perfection of the goodness of his divine nature. He is final, complete, and perfect. There is no thing lacking in the beauty and perfection of his righteous character. (2:2.5)

God Is Just
God is righteous; therefore is he just. “The Lord is righteous in all his ways.” “`I have not done without cause all that I have done,’ says the Lord.” “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” The justice of the Universal Father cannot be influenced by the acts and performances of his creatures, “for there is no iniquity with the Lord our God, no respect of persons, no taking of gifts.”

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap.” True, even in the justice of reaping the harvest of wrongdoing, this divine justice is always tempered with mercy. Infinite wisdom is the eternal arbiter which determines the proportions of justice and mercy which shall be meted out in any given circumstance. (2:3.1)

Only the discernment of infinite wisdom enables a righteous God to minister justice and mercy at the same time and in any given universe situation. The heavenly Father is never torn by conflicting attitudes towards his universe children; God is never a victim of attitudinal antagonisms. (2:4.3)

God Is Loving
God is inherently kind, naturally compassionate, and everlastingly merciful. And never is it necessary that any influence be brought to bear upon the Father to call forth his loving kindness. The creature’s need is wholly sufficient to insure the full flow of the Father’s tender mercies and his saving grace. Since God knows all about his children, it is easy for him to forgive. The better man understands his neighbor, the easier it will be to forgive him, even to love him. (2:4.2)

“God is love"; therefore his only personal attitude towards the affairs of the universe is always a reaction of divine affection. The Father loves us sufficiently to bestow his life upon us. “He makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (2:5.1)

God is divinely kind to sinners. When rebels return to righteousness, they are mercifully received, “for our God will abundantly pardon.” “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God.” (2:5.4)

But the love of God is an intelligent and farseeing parental affection. The divine love functions in unified association with divine wisdom and all other infinite characteristics of the perfect nature of the Universal Father. God is love, but love is not God. (2:5.10)

God Is Neither Angry Nor Jealous
God is never wrathful, vengeful, or angry. It is true that wisdom does often restrain his love, while justice conditions his rejected mercy.

God loves the sinner and hates the sin: such a statement is true philosophically, but God is a transcendent personality, and persons can only love and hate other persons. Sin is not a person. God loves the sinner because he is a personality reality (potentially eternal), while towards sin God strikes no personal attitude, for sin is not a spiritual reality; it is not personal; therefore does only the justice of God take cognizance of its existence. The love of God saves the sinner; the law of God destroys the sin.

Facing the world of personality, God is discovered to be a loving person; facing the spiritual world, he is a personal love; in religious experience he is both. Love identifies the volitional will of God. The goodness of God rests at the bottom of the divine free willness the universal tendency to love, show mercy, manifest patience, and minister forgiveness. (2:6.7)

All too long has man thought of God as one like himself. God is not, never was, and never will be jealous of man or any other being in the universe of universes. Knowing that the Creator Son intended man to be the masterpiece of the planetary creation, to be the ruler of all the earth, the sight of his being dominated by his own baser passions, the spectacle of his bowing down before idols of wood, stone, gold, and selfish ambition these sordid scenes stir God and his Sons to be jealous for man, but never of him.

The eternal God is incapable of wrath and anger in the sense of these human emotions and as man understands such reactions. These sentiments are mean and despicable; they are hardly worthy of being called human, much less divine; and such attitudes are utterly foreign to the perfect nature and gracious character of the Universal Father. (4:3.1)

God Is Omnipresent
God is everywhere present; the Universal Father rules the circle of eternity. But he rules in the local universes in the persons of his Paradise Creator Sons, even as he bestows life through these Sons. “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Sons.” These Creator Sons of God are the personal expression of himself in the sectors of time and to the children of the whirling planets of the evolving universes of space. (3:0.1)

The ability of the Universal Father to be everywhere present, and at the same time, constitutes his omnipresence. God alone can be in two places, in numberless places, at the same time. God is simultaneously present “in heaven above and on the earth beneath"; as the Psalmist exclaimed: “Whither shall I go from your spirit? or whither shall I flee from your presence?” (3:1.1)

God Is Omnipotent
The Universal Father is not a transient force, a shifting power, or a fluctuating energy. The power and wisdom of the Father are wholly adequate to cope with any and all universe exigencies. (3:2.6)

God is unlimited in power, divine in nature, final in will, infinite in attributes, eternal in wisdom, and absolute in reality. (3:2.12)

The Sovereignty of God
The sovereignty of God is unlimited; it is the fundamental fact of all creation. The universe was not inevitable. The universe is not an accident, neither is it self existent. The universe is a work of creation and is therefore wholly subject to the will of the Creator. The will of God is divine truth, living love; therefore are the perfecting creations of the evolutionary universes characterized by goodness — nearness to divinity; by potential evil remoteness from divinity. (3:6.2)

There is no limitation of the forces and personalities which the Father may use to uphold his purpose and sustain his creatures. (4:1.4)

The Universal Father has not withdrawn from the management of the universes; he is not an inactive Deity. If God should retire as the present upholder of all creation, there would immediately occur a universal collapse. Except for God, there would be no such thing as reality. (4:1.6)

Divinity Must Personalize To Be Grasped
The character of God is infinitely superhuman; therefore must such a nature of divinity be personalized, as in the divine Sons, before it can even be faith grasped by the finite mind of man. (4:3.7)

God Is Changeless
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. God is purposive energy (creative spirit) and absolute will, and these are self existent and universal.

Since God is self existent, he is absolutely independent. The very identity of God is inimical to change. “I, the Lord, change not.” God is immutable; but not until you achieve Paradise status can you even begin to understand how God can pass from simplicity to complexity, from identity to variation, from quiescence to motion, from infinity to finitude, from the divine to the human, and from unity to duality and triunity. And God can thus modify the manifestations of his absoluteness because divine immutability does not imply immobility; God has will he is will.

God is the being of absolute self determination; there are no limits to his universe reactions save those which are self imposed, and his freewill acts are conditioned only by those divine qualities and perfect attributes which inherently characterize his eternal nature. Therefore is God related to the universe as the being of final goodness plus a free will of creative infinity. (4:4.1)

Law is the unchanging reaction of an infinite, perfect, and divine mind.

God is the assurance of stability for all created things and beings. He is God; therefore he changes not.

And all this steadfastness of conduct and uniformity of action is personal, conscious, and highly volitional, for the great God is not a helpless slave to his own perfection and infinity. God is not a self acting automatic force; he is not a slavish law bound power. God is neither a mathematical equation nor a chemical formula. He is a freewill and primal personality. He is the Universal Father, a being surcharged with personality and the universal fount of all creature personality. (12:7.4)

God is the one and only self caused fact in the universe. He is the secret of the order, plan, and purpose of the whole creation of things and beings. The everywhere changing universe is regulated and stabilized by absolutely unchanging laws, the habits of an unchanging God. The fact of God, the divine law, is changeless; the truth of God, his relation to the universe, is a relative revelation which is ever adaptable to the constantly evolving universe. (102:7.2)

God And Revelation
In science, God is the First Cause; in religion, the universal and loving Father; in philosophy, the one being who exists by himself, not dependent on any other being for existence but beneficently conferring reality of existence on all things and upon all other beings. But it requires revelation to show that the First Cause of science and the self existent Unity of philosophy are the God of religion, full of mercy and goodness and pledged to effect the eternal survival of his children on earth. (4:4.7)

The revelation of the truth about God is appearing, and the human race is destined to know the Universal Father in all that beauty of character and loveliness of attributes so magnificently portrayed by the Creator Son who sojourned on Urantia as the Son of Man and the Son of God. (4:5.7)

God Is Approachable
The Father desires all his creatures to be in personal communion with him. He has on Paradise a place to receive all those whose survival status and spiritual nature make possible such attainment. Therefore settle in your philosophy now and forever: To each of you and to all of us, God is approachable, the Father is attainable, the way is open; the forces of divine love and the ways and means of divine administration are all interlocked in an effort to facilitate the advancement of every worthy intelligence of every universe to the Paradise presence of the Universal Father. (5:1.8)

The Father is no respecter of persons; he treats each of his ascending sons as cosmic individuals. (117:6.22)

God Is Man’s Eternal Destination
Sooner or later, God is destined to be comprehended as the reality of values, the substance of meanings, and the life of truth.

God is not only the determiner of destiny; he is man’s eternal destination. All nonreligious human activities seek to bend the universe to the distorting service of self; the truly religious individual seeks to identify the self with the universe and then to dedicate the activities of this unified self to the service of the universe family of fellow beings, human and superhuman. (5:4.2)

Jesus Revealed God To Mankind
Jesus not only revealed God to man, but he also made a new revelation of man to himself and to other men. In the life of Jesus you see man at his best. Man thus becomes so beautifully real because Jesus had so much of God in his life, and the realization (recognition) of God is inalienable and constitutive in all men. (16:9.6)

The Greatness of God
Greatness is synonymous with divinity. God is supremely great and good. Greatness and goodness simply cannot be divorced. They are forever made one in God. (28:6.21)

God is not a self centered personality; the Father freely distributes himself to his creation and to his creatures. (32:4.10)

God’s Eternal Purpose
The eternal purpose of the eternal God is a high spiritual ideal. The events of time and the struggles of material existence are but the transient scaffolding which bridges over to the other side, to the promised land of spiritual reality and supernal existence. (32:5.2)

God Is Unity
God is unity. Deity is universally coordinated. The universe of universes is one vast integrated mechanism which is absolutely controlled by one infinite mind. The physical, intellectual, and spiritual domains of universal creation are divinely correlated. The perfect and imperfect are truly interrelated, and therefore may the finite evolutionary creature ascend to Paradise in obedience to the Universal Father’s mandate: “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.” (56:0.1)

Pure energy is the ancestor of all relative, nonspirit functional realities, while pure spirit is the potential of the divine and directive overcontrol of all basic energy systems. And these realities, so diverse as manifested throughout space and as observed in the motions of time, are both centered in the person of the Paradise Father. In him they are one must be unified because God is one. The Father’s personality is absolutely unified. (56:1.4)

The universe of universes is altogether unified. God is one in power and personality. There is co ordination of all levels of energy and all phases of personality. Philosophically and experientially, in concept and in reality, all things and beings center in the Paradise Father. God is all and in all, and no things or beings exist without him. (56:9.14)

God Is First Truth
God is the first truth and the last fact; therefore does all truth take origin in him, while all facts exist relative to him. God is absolute truth. As truth one may know God, but to understand to explain God, one must explore the fact of the universe of universes. (102:6.6)

To science God is a possibility, to psychology a desirability, to philosophy a probability, to religion a certainty, an actuality of religious experience. (102:6.8)

God Is Infallible
The infinite God is, as always, replete and complete, infinitely inclusive of all things except evil and creature experience. God cannot do wrong; he is infallible. God cannot experientially know what he has never personally experienced; God’s preknowledge is existential. Therefore does the spirit of the Father descend from Paradise to participate with finite mortals in every bona fide experience of the ascending career; it is only by such a method that the existential God could become in truth and in fact man’s experiential Father. (108:0.2)

The doing of the will of God is nothing more or less than an exhibition of creature willingness to share the inner life with God with the very God who has made such a creature life of inner meaning value possible.

The imitation of God is the key to perfection; the doing of his will is the secret of survival and of perfection in survival. (111:5.1)

The Experience of God
Men all too often forget that God is the greatest experience in human existence. Other experiences are limited in their nature and content, but the experience of God has no limits save those of the creature’s comprehension capacity, and this very experience is in itself capacity enlarging. When men search for God, they are searching for everything. When they find God, they have found everything. The search for God is the unstinted bestowal of love attended by amazing discoveries of new and greater love to be bestowed. (117:6.9)

The Kingdom of God
The kingdom of God is in the hearts of men, and when this kingdom becomes actual in the heart of every individual on a world, then God’s rule has become actual on that planet; and this is the attained sovereignty of the Supreme Being. (118:10.1)

“The brotherhood of men is founded on the fatherhood of God. The family of God is derived from the love of God God is love. God the Father divinely loves his children, all of them.”

“The kingdom of heaven, the divine government, is founded on the fact of divine sovereignty God is spirit. Since God is spirit, this kingdom is spiritual. The kingdom of heaven is neither material nor merely intellectual; it is a spiritual relationship between God and man.” (134:4.1)

In answer to Thomas’s question, “Who is this God of the kingdom?” Jesus replied: “God is your Father, and religion my gospel is nothing more nor less than the believing recognition of the truth that you are his son. And I am here among you in the flesh to make clear both of these ideas in my life and teachings.” (141:4.2)

The Will of God
“The will of God is the way of God, partnership with the choice of God in the face of any potential alternative. To do the will of God, therefore, is the progressive experience of becoming more and more like God, and God is the source and destiny of all that is good and beautiful and true.” (130:2.7)

“Though human beings differ in many ways, the one from another, before God and in the spiritual world all mortals stand on an equal footing. There are only two groups of mortals in the eyes of God: those who desire to do his will and those who do not. As the universe looks upon an inhabited world, it likewise discerns two great classes: those who know God and those who do not.” (133:0.3)

Jesus Teaches of God
But Jesus earnestly warned his apostles against the foolishness of the child of God who presumes upon the Father’s love. He declared that the heavenly Father is not a lax, loose, or foolishly indulgent parent who is ever ready to condone sin and forgive recklessness. He cautioned his hearers not mistakenly to apply his illustrations of father and son so as to make it appear that God is like some overindulgent and unwise parents who conspire with the foolish of earth to encompass the moral undoing of their thoughtless children, and who are thereby certainly and directly contributing to the delinquency and early demoralization of their own offspring. Said Jesus:"My Father does not indulgently condone those acts and practices of his children which are self destructive and suicidal to all moral growth and spiritual progress. Such sinful practices are an abomination in the sight of God.” (147:5.9)

When once you grasp the idea of God as a true and loving Father, the only concept which Jesus ever taught, you must forthwith, in all consistency, utterly abandon all those primitive notions about God as an offended monarch, a stern and all powerful ruler whose chief delight is to detect his subjects in wrongdoing and to see that they are adequately punished, unless some being almost equal to himself should volunteer to suffer for them, to die as a substitute and in their stead. The whole idea of ransom and atonement is incompatible with the concept of God as it was taught and exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth. The infinite love of God is not secondary to anything in the divine nature. (188:4.8)

“The kingdom of God is within you” was probably the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving spirit. (195:10.4)

Please click on the following links for further study about God:
Paper 1 — The Universal Father
Paper 2 — The Nature of God
Paper 3 — The Attributes of God
Paper 4 — God’s Relation to the Universe
Paper 5 — God’s Relation to the Individual