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THE UNIVERSAL GOD The Personality
of God |
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CEDOMIL VUGRINCIC, M.D., Ph.D.
Interim Paper XXIV |
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In the previous Interim- Papers we have reviewed the
meanings of the TRUE WORSHIP of the agencies of the Holy Spirit, the Mind of the The following Interim-Paper is devoted to further
enlightenment about the true nature of God.
***** Do
not permit the magnitude of God and 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?" The
Universal Father is the acme of divine personality; He is the origin and
destiny of personality throughout all creation. God is both infinite and
personal; He is an infinite personality. The Father is truly a personality,
notwithstanding that the infinity of his person places him forever beyond the
full comprehension of material and finite beings. 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 super-personality.
But it is utterly futile to discuss such incomprehensible concepts of divine
personality with the minds of material creatures whose maximum concept of the
reality of being consists in the idea and ideal of personality. The material
creature's highest possible concept of the Universal Creator is embraced
within the spiritual ideals of the exalted idea of divine personality.
Therefore, although you may know that God must be much more than the human
conception of personality, you equally well know that the Universal Father
cannot possibly be anything less than an eternal, infinite, true, good, and
beautiful personality. 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. He "measures the waters in the hollow of his hand, measures a
universe with the span of His hand. It is He who sits on the circle of the
earth, who stretches out the heavens as a curtain and spreads them out as a
universe to dwell in." "Lift up your eyes on high and behold who
has created all these things, who brings out their worlds by number and calls
them all by their names"; and so it is true that "the invisible
things of God are partially understood by the things which are made."
Today, and as you are, you must discern the invisible Maker through His
manifold and diverse creation, as well as through the revelation and
ministration of His Sons and their numerous subordinates. Even
though material mortals cannot see the person of God, they should rejoice in
the assurance that He is a person; by faith accept the truth which portrays
that the Universal Father so loved the world as to provide for the eternal
spiritual progression of its lowly inhabitants; that He "delights in his
children." God is lacking in none of those superhuman and divine
attributes which constitute a perfect, eternal, loving, and infinite Creator
personality. In
the local creations (excepting the personnel of the superuniverses) God has
no personal or residential manifestation aside from the Paradise Creator Sons
who are the fathers of the inhabited worlds and the sovereigns of the local
universes. If the faith of the creature were perfect, he would assuredly know
that when he had seen a Creator Son he had seen the Universal Father; in
seeking for the Father, he would not ask nor expect to see other than the Son.
Mortal man simply cannot see God until he achieves completed spirit
transformation and actually attains The
natures of the Paradise Creator Sons do not encompass all the unqualified
potentials of the universal absoluteness of the infinite nature of the First
Great Source and Center, but the Universal Father is in every way divinely
present in the Creator Sons. The Father and his Sons are one. These 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. As
we see the Universal Father revealed throughout His universe; as we discern
Him indwelling His myriads of creatures; as we behold Him in the persons of
his Sovereign Sons; as we continue to sense His divine presence here and
there, near and afar, let us not doubt nor question His personality primacy.
Notwithstanding all these far-flung distributions, He remains a true person
and everlastingly maintains personal connection with the countless hosts of
His creatures scattered throughout the universe of universes. The
idea of the personality of the Universal Father is an enlarged and truer
concept of God which has come to mankind chiefly through revelation. Reason,
wisdom, and religious experience all infer and imply the personality of God,
but they do not altogether validate it. Even the indwelling Thought Adjuster
is pre-personal. The truth and maturity of any religion is directly
proportional to its concept of the infinite personality of God and to its
grasp of the absolute unity of Deity. The idea of a personal Deity becomes,
then, the measure of religious maturity after religion has first formulated
the concept of the unity of God. Primitive religion had many personal gods, and they were
fashioned in the image of man. Revelation affirms the validity of the
personality concept of God which is merely possible in the scientific
postulate of a First Cause and is only provisionally suggested in the
philosophic idea of Universal Unity. Only by personality approach can any
person begin to comprehend the unity of God. To deny the personality of the
First Source and Center leaves one only the choice of two philosophic
dilemmas: materialism or pantheism. In
the contemplation of Deity, the concept of personality must be divested of
the idea of corporeality. A material body is not indispensable to personality
in either man or God. The corporeality error is shown in both extremes of
human philosophy. In materialism, since man loses his body at death, he
ceases to exist as a personality; in pantheism, since God has no body, He is
not, therefore, a person. The superhuman type of progressing personality
functions in a union of mind and spirit. Personality
is not simply an attribute of God; it rather stands for the totality of the
coordinated infinite nature and the unified divine will which is exhibited in
eternity and universality of perfect expression. Personality, in the supreme
sense, is the revelation of God to the universe of universes. God,
being eternal, universal, absolute, and infinite, does not grow in knowledge
nor increase in wisdom. God does not acquire experience, as finite man might
conjecture or comprehend, but He does, within the realms of his own eternal
personality, enjoy those continuous expansions of Self-realization which are
in certain ways comparable to, and analogous with, the acquirement of new
experience by the finite self-creatures of the evolutionary worlds. The
absolute perfection of the infinite God would cause Him to suffer the awful
limitations of unqualified finality of perfectness were it not a fact that
the Universal Father directly participates in the personality struggle of
every imperfect soul in the wide universe who seeks, by divine aid, to ascend
to the spiritually perfect worlds on high. This progressive experience of
every spirit being and every mortal creature throughout the universe of
universes is a part of the Father's ever-expanding Deity-consciousness of the
never-ending divine circle of ceaseless self-realization. It
is literally true: "In all your afflictions He is afflicted."
"In all your triumphs He triumphs in and with you." His prepersonal
divine spirit is a real part of you. The Isle of Paradise responds to all the
physical metamorphoses of the universe of universes; the Eternal Son includes
all the spirit impulses of all creation; the Conjoint Actor encompasses all
the mind expression of the expanding cosmos. The Universal Father realizes in
the fullness of the divine consciousness all the individual experience of the
progressive struggles of the expanding minds and the ascending spirits of
every entity, being, and personality of the whole evolutionary creation of
time and space. And all this is literally true, for "in Him we all live
and move and have our being." Reference: The Urantia Book, Paper 1, Section 5
(edit/modif.)
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