God was once a man

Start with what the Church holds as scripture and doctrine, because the teaching that God was once a man rests on less than many people assume.

The Becoming Like God essay, published by the Church, says of Lorenzo Snow’s couplet, “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be,” that “Little has been revealed about the first half of this couplet, and consequently little is taught.” It quotes President Gordon B. Hinckley, who said in 1997, “That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don’t know very much about.” The essay notes that the couplet “has never been canonized.” It says of the King Follett sermon that “the surviving sermon text is not canonized and should not be treated as a doctrinal standard in and of itself.”

The idea may still matter to you. The test the Church itself points to is its canonized scriptures: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants. What do they say about whether God was always God?

Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses, and it speaks directly to time: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God” (Psalm 90:2). Before anything was made, God was already God, and Moses traces that back without limit.

Through Malachi, God says, “For I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). Through Hosea, “for I am God, and not man” (Hosea 11:9). Balaam says, “God is not a man, that he should lie” (Numbers 23:19).

Those last three verses are mainly about God’s character: he keeps his word and does not act as people do. By themselves they do not settle whether God once had a human life. Psalm 90:2 speaks of God’s being across all time, and says he was God before the world, “from everlasting.”

Your own scriptures speak to this question more directly than the Bible does.

Moroni writes, “For I know that God is not a partial God, neither a changeable being; but he is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity” (Moroni 8:18). Moroni 7:22 calls God “from everlasting to everlasting.” Mormon asks, “why has God ceased to be a God of miracles and yet be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so he would cease to be God” (Mormon 9:19).

Section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the revelation on how the Church was to be organized, makes the same confession: “there is a God in heaven, who is infinite and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting the same unchangeable God,” and that people should “love and serve him, the only living and true God” (Doctrine and Covenants 20:17-19).

A mortal man who became God would have changed in the deepest way a being can change, and Mormon says that if God changed, “he would cease to be God.” “Unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity” is hard to reconcile with a God who was once something else.

Isaiah 43 to 45 is the Bible’s longest passage about whether there are other gods. “Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD … before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me” (Isaiah 43:10). “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God” (44:6). God then asks a question and answers it himself: “Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any” (44:8).

Latter-day Saints often read the LORD (Jehovah) in Isaiah as the premortal Jesus. On that reading or the more common one, the speaker says no God was formed before him, and that he knows of no other.

If God the Father was once a man who became God, then before that, another being was God, and God himself was formed into God. Isaiah’s God says that did not happen. The essay is right that the Church does not teach rival gods competing for worship, but Isaiah’s words go further than ruling out rivals. They rule out any God formed before the LORD, or after him. Paul says the same in a world full of gods: “though there be that are called gods … to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:5-6).

There is a sense in which the Bible does say God became a man, and it may be the answer to the longing behind the couplet. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). Paul says Christ, “being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation … and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6-7).

Christians call this the incarnation, meaning that God the Son took on a full human life without ceasing to be God. The couplet runs from man to God; the incarnation runs from God to man, so that people could be brought to him. “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15). You do not need a God who was once a mortal to have a God who knows what being human is like.

Irenaeus, quoted in the Church’s own essay, says the same: Christ “did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be what He is Himself.” God came first, and came down. Read more at Jesus is God.

The second half of the couplet points to something real. “We know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Believers are “changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18) and “conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). Peter’s “partakers of the divine nature” is defined in the same sentence: “having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1:4).

This is likeness in holiness, love, and undying life, a share in God’s own life given by grace. The essay quotes an early Christian definition of becoming divine: “the attaining of likeness to God and union with him so far as is possible.” That is close to what most Christians mean by the promise. The essay itself grants that “What exactly the early church fathers meant when they spoke of becoming God is open to interpretation,” and that there are “likely important differences” between their teaching and the Church’s.

In the Bible, you will be like God forever, and he will be your God forever. You will never become another God, because there is no other, and there never was.