God (Genesis 1 : 26 – 27 ). Elsewhere they are called God’s children and peo-
ple born of God.
As the sequence of topics in this book will show in many ways, the
more we live under divine guidance, meaning the more we submit to
God’s leading, the more and more deeply we become an image of God.
If human minds do not form an idea of God as the archetypal sub-
stance and form, and of God’s form as the Human Form itself, they ren-
der themselves highly susceptible to delusions and speculations about
God, about the development of the human race, and about the creation
of the world. Their thought of God is restricted to a thought of the
expanse of nature underlying the universe, or else a thought about empti-
ness or nothing at all. The development of the human race they think of
as a lucky coincidence—elements just happened to come together in this
form. As for the creation of the world, they see its substances and forms
as originating in geometry’s points and then lines; and because these are
nondimensional and one-dimensional they are actually nothing. In such
minds, everything that has to do with the church is like the river Styx or
the thick darkness in Tartarus.
3. The underlying divine reality is intrinsic reality, and is also an 21
intrinsic capacity to become manifest. Jehovah God is intrinsic reality
because from eternity to eternity he is the I Am, the Absolute, and the
first and only thing from which comes everything that exists and to
which everything owes its existence. Because of this and nothing else he
is the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, and the Alpha and
the Omega.
One cannot say that his underlying reality comes from himself,
because coming from himselfimplies before and after, and therefore time,
and time cannot apply to the infinite underlying reality that is described
as existing from eternity. Coming fromalso either implies another god
who is the real god, and then you have a god from a god; or it implies
that God formed himself. In either case God would not be uncreated or
infinite, because he would have boundaries and limitations that were
imposed either by himself or by some other god.
From the fact that God is the intrinsic underlying reality, it follows
that God is love in itself, wisdom in itself, and life in itself. It also follows
that God is the Absolute from which all things come and to which all
things are connected so that they may exist. God is God because he is life
in itself, as the Lord’s words in John 5 : 26 make clear. Likewise in Isaiah:
“I, Jehovah, am the maker of all things. I alone stretch out the heavens. I
§21 god the creator & creation 29