As Man Is

As my seven-year-old was playing the piano today, he stopped right in the middle of the song he was playing, Rain Dance, and asked me out of the blue, “When was Heavenly Father born?”  He said he was thinking about it because the Indian rain dance he was playing about was, in his words, asking Heavenly Father to give them rain.  I was a bit taken aback by his question for it is so simple and yet something we know so little about.  I told him I honestly didn’t know the answer to his question and that Heavenly Father created us and we don’t really know what happened before that.  We know so very little about our lives in the premortal realm; we know even less about what happened before our spirits were created by our Father in Heaven. 

We do believe, though, that there indeed was such a beginning for God the Father.  Joseph Smith taught in his famous King Follet discourse, “He once was man like us, and the Father was once on an earth like us.”  President Lorenzo Snow related an experience in which he learned from the Spirit about this subject: “The Spirit of the Lord rested mightily upon me—the eyes of my understanding were opened, and I saw as clear as the sun at noonday, with wonder and astonishment, the pathway of God and man. I formed the following couplet which expresses the revelation, as it was shown me.… As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be.”  We believe in eternal progression, that we can in some far distant future become as God is, and that He has, in some past eternity, made that same progression.  Yet the Lord taught Moses in what should be the first chapter of the Bible, “I am without beginning of days or end of years” (Moses 1:3).  Alma similarly taught the people of Ammonihah that Christ is “without beginning of days or end of years” (Alma 13:9).  These ideas seem to contradict each other; if the Father and the Son are without beginning of days, how could they have been like us and made the same progression we make?  If Christ was the Firstborn then there must have been a time when He became such, and if God became God then there must have been some past eon in which He was not yet at that state, implying a beginning for Him too.  I believe we can reconcile this by simply considering the point of view; from our perspective it is as if the Father and the Son indeed had no beginning.  Their perfect power and influence stretch not just forward for all eternities but also backwards; for us we can correctly consider them to have always been our Father and our Savior.  Since our creation as spirits they were, and our entire eternal existence is governed by the fact that they are. 

And yet, President Hinckley remarked about President Snow’s couplet, “That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don’t know very much about.”  It is not a subject we should dwell on.  If the Lord hasn’t revealed much about it, then surely that is an indication that we don’t need to understand it all now.  What’s important is our own progression, not God’s that has already been made.  Alma might say to us, “Let these things trouble you no more, and only let your sins trouble you, with that trouble which shall bring you down unto repentance” (Alma 42:29).  What matters most is how we progress today, how we become one step closer to God’s character in our journey of a million miles.  We don’t know when Heavenly Father was born, but we know when we were and that our time of preparation here is short: “This life is the time for men to prepare to meet God” (Alma 34:32).  We’ll have plenty of time in the next to get these other questions answered.