Who Is Heavenly Father?

A picture goes around social media every few months. A glowing figure on a throne, a man looking up at him, and three lines of text: If God was once a man like us, who was His God? And if that God had a God, where does the chain begin? Underneath sits Isaiah 43:10: “Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.”

It is a fair question. It deserves better than a meme, and it deserves better than a quick comeback in a comment thread too.

The best place to start is not the one sentence everyone argues about. It is everything else. The scriptures say a great deal about God the Father — His names, His nature, His body, His character, His relationship to His Son, and His relationship to you. Gather all of that first, and the question on the meme looks very different by the time you get to it.

What did Jesus teach us to call Him? “Our Father which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). Not “our Creator,” not “the Absolute,” not “the Ground of Being.” Father. Every other name the scriptures give Him fills in what kind of Father He is.

Look at that list for a moment. Two of His names, given in the language of Adam, have the word Man in them. Two of His titles only make sense if the word god describes more than one being — “God of gods” is built the same way as “King of kings,” and it marks the One who stands first among them. (Why the word works that way is explained on God — A Misunderstood Title.)

None of that was invented to support a Latter-day Saint argument. It is simply what the text calls Him.

Most Christians call God “Father” as a figure of speech — a way of saying He made us and cares for us. The scriptures press harder than that. When Paul stood on Mars Hill in front of philosophers who worshipped statues, he did not tell them God was like a father. He told them they were His family.

Notice how his argument runs. Because we are God’s offspring, we should not imagine Him as a carved statue. The child tells you something about the parent. Hebrews makes the same comparison in plain family terms: we had fathers of our flesh and gave them reverence, so “shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?” (Hebrews 12:9). Earthly fathers on one side, the Father of our spirits on the other. The comparison only works if both are REAL fathers.

The restored scriptures say it outright. The inhabitants of the worlds “are begotten sons and daughters unto God” (Doctrine and Covenants 76:24). When the Lord wept over the wicked in Enoch’s day, His grief was a parent’s grief: He had commanded them to love one another, “and that they should choose me, their Father” (Moses 7:33).

So who is Heavenly Father? Before anything else — before throne, glory, or power — He is the Father of your spirit. Malachi asked the question that follows from it: “Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us?” (Malachi 2:10). Yes. We do. (More on where we came from is on The Pre-Existence.)

The first chapter of the Bible says man was made “in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26–27). What does image mean there? Most readers take it as something abstract: reason, morality, a soul. But Genesis defines its own words four chapters later, and it does so on purpose.

The same two words, side by side. Adam bore God’s likeness, and Seth bore Adam’s likeness and image. Nobody reads the second half as a metaphor for Seth’s moral reasoning. Seth LOOKED like his father. The writer put the two statements together so the reader would hear the connection.

The rest of scripture fills in what Genesis implies. Stephen, about to be stoned, “saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55–56). Hebrews calls the Son “the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3). Jesus told Philip, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). And when the Father and the Son appeared to Joseph Smith in 1820, he saw “two Personages,” and one of them spoke of the other as “My Beloved Son” (Joseph Smith—History 1:17).

What about “God is a Spirit” (John 4:24)? Read the rest of the verse: “and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” Jesus is telling a Samaritan woman how to worship, not taking an inventory of what the Father is made of. The same scriptures call God a consuming fire and a rock, and nobody concludes He is made of either.

And Jesus Himself drew the line between a spirit and a body for us. After He rose, He said, “handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). He is the express image of the Father. He HAS flesh and bones. That is the whole argument, in His own words.

A body tells you what He is. It does not tell you who He is. For that, the scriptures describe His character, and they describe it more often and more tenderly than most people expect.

The passage in Moses 7 deserves more than a line in a list. Enoch watches the God of heaven weep, and he cannot understand it. You are holy, he says, and from all eternity to all eternity — your creations cannot be numbered — “how is it thou canst weep?” (Moses 7:29–31).

The answer is not that God is weak. It is that He is a Father, and His children “are without affection, and they hate their own blood” (Moses 7:33). An unmoved, passionless being could not weep over that. Heavenly Father does.

Now the part that matters most for the question on the meme. The New Testament presents the Son as God — “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), and Thomas answering “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). It also presents the Son as someone who has a God. The two sit in the same chapter.

That is the risen Christ speaking, on Easter morning. He is not talking about His mortal limitations — those are behind Him now. And He did not stop saying it after He ascended. Paul writes of “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:17). The glorified Christ, speaking from heaven in Revelation, says “my God” four times in a single verse (Revelation 3:12), and promises the faithful a seat on His throne “even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (Revelation 3:21).

So the idea that troubles the meme — a God who has a God — is not something Joseph Smith brought to the Bible. It is ALREADY there, in the words of Jesus. Every Christian has to account for it. The only question is how.

The United States has one President. It has also had dozens of others, and several of them are still alive. Nobody thinks that contradicts “one President.” The word names an office and a standing, and the one who holds it for us is the one we answer to. Paul says it in a single verse:

To us there is one God, the Father. That is the Latter-day Saint position exactly. The Church’s own statement on the subject puts it this way: “Latter-day Saints believe that God’s children will always worship Him. Our progression will never change His identity as our Father and our God” (Gospel Topics, “Becoming Like God”).

Here is the honest answer, in three parts — what scripture says, what has been taught, and what nobody knows.

What scripture says

The scriptures show us a divine Son who has a Father and calls Him God. They show us the Father presiding in “the Council of the Eternal God of all other gods” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:32), and the Gods organizing the earth together (Abraham 4:1). They do NOT name the Father’s Father, and they do not describe His history.

Latter-day Saints sometimes point to one verse here. The King James text of Revelation 1:6 says Christ has made us “kings and priests unto God and his Father.” In fairness, most modern translators render the Greek as “his God and Father,” meaning Christ’s God and Father, and the verse cannot carry the weight by itself. It should not be asked to.

What has been taught

In April 1844, less than three months before his death, Joseph Smith asked the congregation, “What kind of a being is God?” His reason for asking was simple: “if men do not comprehend the character of God they do not comprehend themselves.” He then taught that God “was once as one of us” (quoted in “Becoming Like God”). Lorenzo Snow later put it in a couplet: “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be.” (The sermon has its own page: The King Follett Discourse.)

Where does an idea like that come from? Joseph reasoned from what the Son said about Himself:

What did the Son do? He was born, took a body, lived a mortal life, laid it down, and took it up again — and He tells us He does what He has seen His Father do. Joseph drew the conclusion. It is a prophetic teaching drawn from scripture; it is not itself a verse of scripture, and Latter-day Saints should not pretend otherwise.

What nobody knows

The Church says this plainly about the first half of Lorenzo Snow’s couplet: “Little has been revealed about the first half of this couplet, and consequently little is taught.” President Gordon B. Hinckley, asked about it by a reporter in 1997, said, “That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don’t know very much about” (both in “Becoming Like God”).

So who was His God? We do not know His name, and scripture does not tell us. Is that a problem? Not really. Scripture tells us almost nothing about anything before “In the beginning.” It was given to bring us home, not to satisfy every curiosity about eternity. Joseph himself said in that same sermon, “It will take a long time after the grave to understand the whole.”

The meme quotes one line. Isaiah wrote a whole argument, and the line means something different once you read the verses on either side of it.

Start with the setting. Isaiah 43 and 44 are a courtroom. The nations are summoned to “bring forth their witnesses” (Isaiah 43:9), Israel is called as the Lord’s witness, and the case is against idols. Who forms gods in this passage? Isaiah answers it himself a chapter later: “They that make a graven image are all of them vanity … Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing?” (Isaiah 44:9–10).

That is what a formed god is in Isaiah — one a craftsman made. None of those came before the Lord, and none ever will matter after Him. The next line names the real issue: “beside me there is no saviour.” The passage is about who saves Israel and who deserves Israel’s worship. It is not a lecture on the population of heaven.

Then ask who is speaking. “Saith the Lord” — in the King James Bible, LORD in small capitals stands for Jehovah. In the next chapter the same speaker says, “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God” (Isaiah 44:6). Who claims that title in the New Testament? The risen Christ: “Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead” (Revelation 1:17–18). In the latter days He said it again, by name: “the voice of Jehovah, saying: I am the first and the last; I am he who liveth, I am he who was slain; I am your advocate with the Father” (Doctrine and Covenants 110:3–4).

Put that together. The One who says “before me there was no God formed” is the same One who says “my Father is greater than I” and “my God, and your God.” If Isaiah 43:10 meant that no divine being stands before the speaker in any sense at all, it would contradict John 20:17. So it cannot mean that — for ANYONE.

This is not only a Latter-day Saint problem to solve. The Nicene Creed confesses the Son as “begotten of the Father … God of God.” Every Christian who believes Jesus is Jehovah and also believes Jesus has a Father already reads Isaiah 43:10 in its context. The meme simply asks Latter-day Saints to stop doing what everyone else does too.

The last line of the meme assumes there has to be a first link. Why? Because in our experience everything has a beginning. But the scriptures go out of their way to say that the things of God do not.

Every account of God ends in something that simply always was. Classical theology says God alone is eternal and everything else was made from nothing. Restored scripture says intelligence and element are eternal too, and that God, “from everlasting to everlasting,” organized what already existed. NEITHER view has a first link. Asking where the chain begins is like asking what day eternity started on — the question assumes the very thing that scripture denies.

What about verses that call God unchangeable? “From everlasting to everlasting the same unchangeable God” (Doctrine and Covenants 20:17) is Latter-day Saint scripture, so it is fair to ask how it fits. Read where the Book of Mormon uses the same language. Mormon argues that little children cannot need baptism, for “if not so, God is a partial God, and also a changeable God, and a respecter to persons” (Moroni 8:12). Unchangeable, in scripture, means His character, His justice and His dealings with His children do not shift. You can rely on Him.

Can we explain how an eternal past works? No. Nobody can, on any theology. “Believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend” (Mosiah 4:9) applies to the creeds as much as it applies to us.

Jesus defined eternal life in one sentence: “that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Not know about Him. KNOW Him. You cannot know someone you have been told is beyond all description, without body, parts or passions. You can know a Father.

And that is who the scriptures describe from Genesis to the Doctrine and Covenants: a glorified, embodied, perfect Father who made you in His image, who weeps when His children hate one another, who gave His Son, and whose entire work is your immortality and eternal life. His Son calls Him “my God,” and in the same breath tells you He is “your God” too.

So when the question comes — who was His God? — it is all right to say we don’t know His name yet. We know His Son. We know Him. And the Son promised that the one who overcomes will sit with Him on His throne, “even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (Revelation 3:21). The rest of the answer is waiting there.

Related reading:

• What Is a God, and Who Is Our Heavenly Father?

• God — A Misunderstood Title

• The King Follett Discourse

• The Trinity

• The Pre-Existence

• Exaltation — Becoming Like God

• Heavenly Mother