Mittens wrote:"God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret... … I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see. … It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the character of God and to know...that he was once a man like us.... Here, then, is eternal life - to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you... (“King Follett Discourse,” Journal of Discourses 6:3-4, also in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 345-346, and History of the Church, vol. 6, 305-307,)"
Just for fun, let's discuss the definition of “eternal”. Do you want to use a specific option in the definitions found in modern dictionaries? Or do you want to look at the words as they were used and understood in ancient times as written in the Bible?
Perhaps your view of "eternal" is that only God is eternal, existing in some kind of simple (no parts), metaphysical, unchanging state from infinite past to infinite future, existing before anything else ever existed. However, those are leaps beyond how the Bible uses “eternal”.
All that can be said of the scriptural usage of these terms (everlasting/eternal) is that whatever is called “eternal” goes beyond our usual sense or scope of existence or beyond our experience of time. The ancient authors wrote to an audience according to their understanding, which is limited. Our understanding is limited as well. Time is relative, and anything outside time as we currently know it is beyond the human experience. We think that living 100 years is a long time. Imagine living 100 thousand or 100 million years. It is unthinkable in relation to what we see in our mortality.
God is well beyond even billions and billions of years. How can we even fathom that? Having created the Universe and time as we know it, God transcends time in our Universe, and, if we want to speculate, He may very well have created another Universe or Universes (which would more correctly be related to a term called “Multiverse”). But that is another discussion and certainly falls under speculation beyond scripture and defined doctrine.
Anyways, here are a few Old Testament examples of two terms which are sometimes translated as everlasting/eternal. Let's see if they fit into what you are implying to mean as “eternal”:
עוֹלָם `owlam
Deut 33:15 describes the hills/mountains as "everlasting/eternal". Yet clearly the Bible teaches that the Earth along with the hills and mountains were created.
This is the same term used in the Psalms for God being “from everlasting to everlasting”. Yet most of the time we find this word translated as “ancient”. Other examples include “ancient people” (Isa 44:7), ancient landmark (Prov 22:28), and so forth.
Similarly, we have the Hebrew wordעַד `ad
Job 20:4 "Haven't you known this from ***everlasting/eternal***, since mankind was placed on the earth?
So here, having known since the beginning of the Earth is sufficient to be considered eternal/everlasting. The meaning is "antiquity or of old'. (Interesting also that Isaiah uses this same term in 57:15 to say that God “inhabits eternity.” Almost as if eternity can also be considered a place.)
Keep in mind that this is the same term that is used in Isaiah 9:6 for the “everlasting/eternal Father”.
Lets look at some New Testament words, like Ἀΐδιος aïdios
Jude 1:6 uses the term to describe “everlasting chains” for the angels who “kept not their first estate” which they will have “unto the judgement of the great day.” So, did these chains under darkness exist before God supposedly created everything Ex Nihilo, including the angels themselves?
Yet this term is the same word used to describe God's “eternal power and Godhead” in Romans 1:20.
How about another term, from which we get aeon. Αἰών Aiōn
Sometimes this one it is not just understood as long periods of time, but as “the worlds” or the Cosmos/Universe, which, as we both know, are created by God, so does not really fit your definition of something that always has been.
Finally, we have χρόνος and Αἰώνιος aiōnios ,
It is used over and over to describe both eternal salvation/redemption/inheritance as well as eternal judgment/fire/destruction.
It is also used to describe a whole host of other things, like the “eternal weight of glory” to be bestowed upon the faithful. It is used by Paul to describe an “everlasting covenant” between God and man. It is used in conjunction with another Hebrew term to say “since the world began”. It as also used to things that will exist in the future, for example, when comparing our earthly tabernacle, which is temporal, to the tabernacle we will have in the resurrection. (2 Cr 5:1).
So, again I ask you, is your definition of “eternal” consistent with how these terms were used and understood in ancient scripture? Or are you adding meaning beyond what the scripture actually says?
Have you weighed all of this against what Joseph Smith was trying to explain in relation to God?
-7up
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