Hi JAFulkers :
Welcome to the forum : I think that you will find that there are a multitude of opinions on forums that vary in many, many ways and, though some are insightful, most involve some degree of personal speculation on even fairly basic doctrines. Good luck coming to your own conclusions regarding what it is you will believe in this life.
1) The nature of God : a rough speculative model of concepts (who knows what is actually correct...)
The early judeo-christian text Pistis Sophia discusses a type of "self-willed matter" that spirits are composed of.
I have wondered if God himself may be described by this same sort of "intelligent, self-willed matter" having an eternal existence. I do not see any reason why all intelligent creatures cannot be made of the same base intelligent spiritual material in the same way that all animals and insects and living things share the same base materials in their basic, unseen atomic structure. If this is correct, all spirits may share some base relationships in existence with each other just as living things in the world do. It is simply a model that I see in this world and apply to eternal worlds until I have better data and can improve and correct the model I have.
2) God as "the Father" and we as “children” of God
I have also both wondered and speculated as to what it meant (or means) when we describe God as "the ‘Father’ of our spirits". I don’t imagine the name "Father" implying a "birth" similar to physical birth for spirits composed of "intelligent, self-willed matter" (if that is what they are composed of...). Instead I have assumed that God must allow for some inaccuracy in our use of certain words in an imperfect context to describe heavenly conditions and processes because we lack adequate words to describe the reality. The words we use may have only vague and symbolic connections to actual conditions in heaven and are only vague types of eternal things.
For example, the gospel of phillip describes the principle that "Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. One will not receive truth in any other way." . Thus, we have types of relationships and contexts here that vaguely and symbolically mirror eternal contexts. He calls himself our "Father" but perhaps this is simply the closest word we have for what God is. The use of written or spoken language as cognitive symbolism does just that, language attempts to symbolize and describe the reality that attempts to represent. I may tell a 3 year old son that certain ends of magnets “like each other" and "want to be connected" in trying to explain polar attractions in symbols that he understands. In truth, magnets don’t “like” or “dislike” being together since they have no emotion. I’m simply trying to convey some concept in the limited and imperfect symbolism of language, taking into account a three-year-olds' level of communication ability and his symbol set.
Perhaps “Children” of God are the very closest thing in our imperfect linguistic symbol set, to the actual relationship we have to our relationship to God. For example, the gospel of phillip says that "Whereas in this world the union is one of husband with wife –...in the Aeon the form of the union is different, although we refer to them by the same names." I might accurately describe my wife as "my best friend", however the term still does not adequately describe the depth and breadth of that relationship over a life time. That relationship is much, much more than a "best" friendship. In this same way, perhaps the term "father" will be vastly insufficient to describe the actual relationship we have with God in the eternal worlds? Perhaps we will discover that “Children of God” doesn’t begin to describe the depth and closeness of relationship between us and God.
Because I have assumed that such descriptions that we use in our current language and it’s limited cognitive symbolism only very vaguely describes actual eternal relationships and conditions. I have therefore assumed that God, as an actual progenitor of sorts, chose to be called "Father" because that best describes his relationship to us.
Whether God "adopts" the pre-creation spirits of mankind in some way (and thus he is a symbolic "Father" to them), or the God actually is, somehow, related to mankind in some way (and thus is a literal "Father" to them) I cannot say, since I simply lack the data (though I believe that there is a relationship implied in the early judeo-christian texts)
Anyway, good luck in coming up with your own base model and then in improving it over your lifetime.
Clear
