2020-01-06. Monotheism or not?
We read in The Urantia Book that one reason Michael of Nebadon chose the Hebrew society to be incarnated within was that its worship of one God.
This one God whom these people worshiped was significant because he was a singular being, a point that was always important for the evolution of a viable and sound religious belief system. This was in contrast to many other religious beliefs that had many gods and goddesses, idols really, that took all kinds of forms and acted in all kinds of ways, many of which were not very nice.
But our text tells us this:
“Notwithstanding there is only one Deity, there are three positive and divine personalizations of Deity. Regarding the endowment of man with the divine Adjusters, the Father said: “Let us make mortal man in our own image.” Repeatedly throughout the Urantian writings there occurs this reference to the acts and doings of plural Deity, clearly showing recognition of the existence and working of the three Sources and Centers.” (UB10:3.1)
Even a few of the Old Testament books, in the effort to copy material from one version or translation from another, the scribe forgot to take out the plural version of God––Gods––and leave the singular. One of the words for God (of Israel) is Elohim, which is the plural of Eloah. The mistake is so common in the Hebrew Bible that, today, we accept that it must mean the singular of the word God.
I have wondered if this oversight by early Hebrew scribes was derivative of much earlier beliefs in the multiplicity of Gods that is closer to the truth.
So we learn that our Universe of Universes has three primary God: the First Source and Center, the Second Source and Center, and the Third Source and Center. These are all existential and hail from the Isle of Paradise. They are known to us more commonly as God (our Paradise Father), the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit.
In power, they all may act together or separately according to the roles they each play. But they may also bring into existence additional functions through the act of trinitization. Through this additional Deity, the Paradise Trinity, the additional functions have resulted in the Universes of time and space.
Our Paradise Father, in creating the Eternal Son, gave forth the opportunity for the creation of the Local Universe Creator Sons, the Michaelsons. Michael of Nebadon is our local universe Creator Son. And as the total master universe is far more complex than we can observe it to be from our vantage point, and our Paradise Father has delegated most of his powers and functions to others does the line so that he does not interact within the universes of time and space except through his bestowed spirit fragment, we humans have really been looking at Michael as God of our universe.
As our universe unfolds there are additional Deity personalities, also referred to as Gods: God the Supreme, God the Ultimate, and God the Absolute. These Gods are “… actualizing Deity personalities of the post-Havona epochs in the time-space and the time-space-transcended spheres of master universe evolutionary expansion.”
While we have our three existential and eternal Gods from Paradise and our actualizing three from eternity, we read of the three Gods of potentiality: the Deity Absolute, the Unqualified Absolute, and the Universal Absolute.
Additionally, there are many other sons of God that intervene between us and our Paradise Father, except for that indwelling spirit, our Thought Adjuster.
As for “God the Sevenfold,” I don’t even want to go there.
Footnote:
From Wikipedia: “The word elohim or ‘elohiym is a grammatically plural noun for “gods” or “deities” or various other words in Biblical Hebrew. … In Hebrew, the ending -im normally indicates a masculine plural. However, when referring to the Jewish God, Elohim is usually understood to be grammatically singular (i.e. it governs a singular verb or adjective). In Modern Hebrew, it is often referred to in the singular despite the -im ending that denotes plural masculine nouns in Hebrew.
“The word Elohim occurs more than 2500 times in the Hebrew Bible, with meanings ranging from “gods” in a general sense (as in Exodus 12:12, where it describes “the gods of Egypt”), to specific gods (e.g., 1 Kings 11:33, where it describes Chemosh “the god of Moab”, or the frequent references to Yahweh as the “elohim” of Israel), to demons, seraphim, and other supernatural beings, to the spirits of the dead brought up at the behest of King Saul in 1 Samuel 28:13, and even to kings and prophets (e.g., Exodus 4:16). The phrase bene elohim, translated “sons of the Gods”, has an exact parallel in Ugaritic and Phoenician texts, referring to the council of the gods.”
If you read on your will see excruciating efforts to justify the plural spelling to mean only a singular God:
Wikipedia continued: “Elohim, when meaning the God of Israel, is mostly grammatically singular, and is commonly translated as “God”, and capitalised. For example, in Genesis 1:26, it is written: “Then Elohim (translated as God) said (singular verb), ‘Let us (plural) make (plural verb) man in our (plural) image, after our (plural) likeness'”. Wilhelm Gesenius and other Hebrew grammarians traditionally described this as the pluralis excellentiae (plural of excellence), which is similar to the pluralis majestatis (plural of majesty, or “Royal we”). Gesenius comments that the singular Hebrew term Elohim is to be distinguished from elohim used to refer to plural gods, and remarks that:
“The supposition that אֱלֹהִים (elohim) is to be regarded as merely a remnant of earlier polytheistic views (i.e. as originally only a numerical plural) is at least highly improbable, and, moreover, would not explain the analogous plurals (see below). That the language has entirely rejected the idea of numerical plurality in אֱלֹהִים (whenever it denotes one God), is proved especially by its being almost invariably joined with a singular attribute….” –– Wilhelm Gesenius
It also make a difference in which version of the Bible one uses. The Aramaic Bible is the closest thing to what the original words said, although it, too, was translated or reconstructed in the context of our monotheistic culture where one God is all there is or can be. King James version can along quite late and if chock full of errors and misuse of language, much of it intentional. (See the books of Bart D. Ehrman.)
