Season 1, Podcast 15, “What is Man?”

A New Voice of Freedom

Season 1, Podcast 15, “What is Man?”

We cannot understand man unless we first understand God, who God is and what his relationship is to man. God is a self-existing intelligence without beginning or ending. He has always existed through all the eternities. That which has life in itself cannot be created or destroyed. God has life in himself. He cannot be created or destroyed. God is the greatest of all intelligences. He is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. He is all knowing, all powerful, and though he is an individual with flesh and bones, his presence is felt throughout the universe. There is no greater intelligence than God, and there can never be a greater intelligence than God.

Man is also an eternal intelligence as old as God is. Intelligence can be defined as life, consciousness, and intelligence, with thought processes and self-awareness. It must be so else how can we account for the existence of life or the existence of God. Something can never come from nothing. What is intelligence? Intelligence is who we are. It is what makes us unique. Intelligence must have the following attributes:

· It must be made of matter and energy.

· It must have life in itself.

· It must have consciousness.

· It must have infinite potential.

· It must self-exist.

· It cannot be created or destroyed.

· It can have no beginning or end.

That, of course, leads to some fundamental questions. If intelligent life self exists, what is man’s relationship to God? Why do we refer to God as our creator? The answers are actually very simple. We must refer back to who God is, omniscient and omnipotent, all knowing and all powerful.

God is an intelligence. We are intelligences. God saw the potential in us, and he wanted to make us like him; therefore, he invited us into his Kingdom. Like him we were self-existing intelligences, but unlike him we were not omniscient and omnipotent. God invited us onto the path of eternal progression, the same path that gave him his Godhood, that we may become like him. What other purpose would he have? Isn’t that what we want for our own children. Life on earth is patterned after life in heaven. That is why we have the Fifth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long on the land which thy Father in Heaven giveth thee.”

God has a body of flesh and bones. We didn’t. We wanted a body of flesh and bones. To enter the kingdom of God, he first had to become the Father of our spirits. In other words, we were born into his kingdom, becoming his spirit children. That means our self-existing intelligence was placed in our spirit body, just as our spirit body is placed into our physical body. That also means that we have heavenly parents just as we have earthly parents. Through birth we were giving a divine nature. That is what Peter meant when he said,

2 Peter 1:1-4

“Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ: Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”

We lived with God as spirits in heaven. Even in heaven we had agency. There was a War in heaven in which Lucifer drew away a third part of the spirits. The others followed the archangel Michael, who acting under the direction of Jesus Christ, defeated Lucifer and hi