© 2022 Guy Antequera
© 2022 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Guy ANTEQUERA
December 21, 2021.
Of all the humans who have stayed on Urantia, it is Jesus who knows the Heavenly Father best, because he is His Father, and he said it well: “I come from the Father…” (UB 146:2.10). Knowing his Father well and for our edification, he could affirm: “… become more and more like God (UB 130:2.7)”. What did he mean by “being like God”? Can we give a simple and rational explanation of this concept of “similarity”. In other words, when can we say that two things are similar?
The idea is to simply present the similarity from a drawing known since our studious childhood in college: the geometric figure of two similar triangles. When can we say that two triangles are similar? Answer: when they look alike, when they have the same shapes, when they present us with the same proportions. Proportions is the right word.
Wikipedia provides us with a more in-depth definition that is more in line with mathematical canons:
“In Euclidean geometry, we say that two triangles are similar if they have the same shape, but not necessarily the same size.”
And the size will be highlighted in the diagram that follows. Now, let’s get back to our Heavenly Father and our similar triangles.
A triangle has three sides and three internal angles. Let’s assign a reality to each side by naming “Truth” the AB side, “Beauty” the BC side and CA the “Goodness” side. We could add that the sum of the three internal angles, which is 180º, is called Love because if there is no love, there is no Truth, Beauty, Goodness, in other words, if there are no angles, there is no triangle! And we will choose to draw an equilateral triangle - its three sides are equal, none predominates over the others.
The size of the Heavenly Father’s triangle is of course infinite, in other words His love develops a triangle with infinite sides like His Beauty, His Truth and His Goodness.
As it is impossible to represent such a triangle on a sheet of paper, there is a typographic trick which allows us to do so, it is the sign “: this sign will indicate a break in the distances.
The human being begins to develop his triangle of values $AB^{\prime} At the moment of the arrival of the Thought Adjuster since we were created “in his image” (UB 1:3.1), it is from this small triangle that our spiritual future is developed.
Of course, our three sides will never equal those of the Heavenly Father but they can have the same proportions, it is to get there that the Father asks us to be perfect in our sphere as He Himself is in His.
This perfection that we must achieve comes through our realization of beauty, truth and finally goodness.
Indeed, He asks us to develop these three values “harmoniously” as are the sides of His triangle, so as to make our triangle similar to His, even if the sides of our triangle are tiny compared to that of the Father, the fact remains that the similarity will remain eternally engraved in our soul; it is the work of our Thought Adjuster, this divine fraction of the Father.
How can we develop our three sides? Quite simply by doing the will of the Father as Jesus tells us: “…doing the will of God is the progressive experience which consists of becoming more and more similar to God, God being the source and destiny of all that is good, beautiful and true.” (UB 130:2.7), our Creator knows what he is talking about. In his prayer of the “Our Father” Jesus invites us: "And make us more and more perfect like yourself (UB 144:3.12).
If we want to know the will of the Father there is a good way, prayer: “Prayer is the breath of the soul and should encourage you to persevere in your attempts to better know the will of the Father” (UB 144:2.3). Chapter (144.2) is a real “user manual” for prayer, but if we say to ourselves “It is my will that your will be done (UB 118:8.11)” it is because we already know His will.
In fact, doing the will of the Father means being like God, therefore perfect in what we undertake, in all areas of truth, goodness, and beauty. It means having developed the three sides of our triangle harmoniously and proportionally, without hypertrophying one side in relation to the other two, this is what we call unification. And from the first issue of The Urantia Book, the tone is set for us, “the bar is set high”:
The enlightened worlds all recognize and worship the Universal Father, the eternal maker and infinite upholder of all creation. The will creatures of universe upon universe have embarked upon the long, long Paradise journey, the fascinating struggle of the eternal adventure of attaining God the Father. The transcendent goal of the children of time is to find the eternal God, to comprehend the divine nature, to recognize the Universal Father. God-knowing creatures have only one supreme ambition, just one consuming desire, and that is to become, as they are in their spheres, like him as he is in his Paradise perfection of personality and in his universal sphere of righteous supremacy. From the Universal Father who inhabits eternity there has gone forth the supreme mandate, “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.” In love and mercy the messengers of Paradise have carried this divine exhortation down through the ages and out through the universes, even to such lowly animal-origin creatures as the human races of Urantia. (UB 1:0.3)
This magnificent and universal injunction to strive for the attainment of the perfection of divinity is the first duty, and should be the highest ambition, of all the struggling creature creation of the God of perfection. This possibility of the attainment of divine perfection is the final and certain destiny of all man’s eternal spiritual progress. (UB 1:0.4)
You read correctly; in all our actions, thoughts and behaviors, we must act with the aim of perfection, it is difficult but the game is worth the effort, because if, in the future, we want to present ourselves before Our Heavenly Father who is infinitely perfect, we will only be able to do so if we too are in a state of perfection (UB 130:4.3).
Some practical examples?
In all the daily tasks that fall to us, in our job, in our garden, in our kitchen, let us do them perfectly and offer them to the Father from the start of the action as if he were next to us (which is perfectly true).
We are a dad, a mom, creator of objects, art, machines, food, bridges, roads, working towards perfection.
We practice a recreational activity, a sport, let us speak about it to our Adjuster, knowing that our body is his tabernacle of flesh which must be beautified and maintained to perfection; let us imitate God because His tabernacle is the perfect Paradise.
Another unexpected area where this perfection can be exercised is expressed in the words of invitation that Jesus spoke to the Roman soldier along the Tiber (UB 132:4.6). I leave it to you to find other examples, they are innumerable.
The enlightened worlds all recognize and worship the Universal Father, the eternal maker and infinite upholder of all creation. The will creatures of universe upon universe have embarked upon the long, long Paradise journey, the fascinating struggle of the eternal adventure of attaining God the Father. The transcendent goal of the children of time is to find the eternal God, to comprehend the divine nature, to recognize the Universal Father. God-knowing creatures have only one supreme ambition, just one consuming desire, and that is to become, as they are in their spheres, like him as he is in his Paradise perfection of personality and in his universal sphere of righteous supremacy. From the Universal Father who inhabits eternity there has gone forth the supreme mandate, “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.” In love and mercy the messengers of Paradise have carried this divine exhortation down through the ages and out through the universes, even to such lowly animal-origin creatures as the human races of Urantia. (UB 1:0.3)
Brotherly friendships
The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions! Surely the Christian fellowship of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices of living as will enable it to “follow after” the Master in the demonstration of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father’s will and of consecration to the unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear the exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment? Does institutional Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men as the ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus. (UB 196:1.2)