Jesus Christ as the Father

“Think of the word Father as role and not identity. If you take it as role and not identity, all the problems go away. If you hear the voice of God speaking to you, telling you Psalms 2:2, You are my son; this day have I begotten you, the voice you will be hearing will be Christ’s. No one gets out of this world, back into the family of God in eternity, without Christ as their father. We’re all the descendants of Adam, which means we’re going to die. But if we become sons [and daughters] of God, we become sons [and daughters] of that God who won the victory over the grave, who becomes our Father, which is why the Book of Mormon calls Him the very Eternal Father — because Christ has to be your father in order to escape the doom which belongs to Adam. If you track the genealogy back of every one of us, you’re going to find that the head of all that is a dead man who offended ‘the Father.’ When Christ worked out His salvation right down here, among us, we read in John — He’s talking about Himself — He said, I can of my own self do nothing. What I see the Father do, that do I. [In] the closing verses of Matthew — after He’s resurrected, after He’s ascended back to the Father, after He’s reported to the throne — He comes back and says, All power is given unto me in Heaven and on earth (Matthew 13:4). He no longer says, ‘I need to follow what the Father did.’ He says, in essence, ‘I’ve completed the ascent. I am at the throne of God. I’m now the one who will rescue you. I have the power to rescue you. I have conquered death on your behalf.’

“Christ is ‘the Father’ when you think of it as role instead of personality or identity. When you get into personality or identity, you wind up with a mess on your hands. [In our prayers] there is no reason why that Father, to whom you address, should not be expected to have wounds in His hands and in His side and in His feet. When you hope to be rescued from the grave, He’s going to be the Father that gets you out of there. You address the Father, but He has become the Father. The problem we have is that we want to assign a personality, we want to assign a role, we do not want to accept a status. We want personality instead of a role that gets played.

“Christ is the Father; Christ was the Son. He had to come in a subordinate position; He had to come into the world contaminated with blood; He had to have within Him the seeds of mortality in order to have the capacity to die because without the capacity to die He couldn’t die. But His death had to be unjust so that it violated the law of justice. Justice had to be offended by the death of the Lord so that He, going into the grave, could say, ‘An eternal wrong has been committed, because the wages of sin is death and I’ve committed no sin. I did not earn the wages of death, therefore I have the power to lay claim upon my life and take it up again, because that is the law of justice.’ And justice had to surrender to His resurrection. So Christ comes out of the grave and is resurrected, and He wants to pull you out of the grave. And Justice says, ‘No, she is a sinner.’ And Christ says, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute; justice has been satisfied. I was entitled to eternally live. What you took away from me when you killed me, when you took my life, was eternal: you robbed me of eternal life. Therefore I can claim her, too. Because the infinite of what you stole from me satisfied you infinitely. I am giving her a pass because, Justice, you offended me infinitely.’ And Christ did this in order to bring us all back. But the only way we’re getting out of here, after we shed these [bodies] and return from the grave, is through Him. And He becomes the Father.

“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 1:63). He’s going to give it as a free gift to everyone. The only question is: What will the quality of the afterlife then be? Because that’s based upon a law that was predicated before the foundation of the world upon which infinite blessings are conferred.”¹

“The ‘Father’ of your eternal life will be Christ (T&C 18:1). He is your Father who is in Heaven, because your continuation after the grave will come through His sacrifice. He will literally provide you with the resurrected body you will inherit. This makes Him the Father (Mosiah 3:2.) Secondly, they are His teachings which will provide you with more than just resurrection. He will provide the further possibility of glory to you on the conditions He has made possible through obedience to Him. The one you follow, whose teachings you accept, whose ordinances you accept, is also your Father (1 Corinthians 1:17). The role of the Father is to raise His seed in righteousness. Christ’s teachings are given in His capacity of a Father to all who will follow Him. Through His teachings you can have a new life here and now. You can be ‘born again’ as His seed (1 Peter 1:5). To do that you must first accept His role as your Father/guide. Then you must further accept His role as Father/Redeemer. When you do that, He gives you a new life by His teachings and new life by His ordinances. Here, excluded from the presence of Heavenly Father Ahman, we have no way back except through Christ (Mosiah 1:15). He must become our Father to bring us back again into the Ahman’s presence. Christ visits here. Christ labored here, lived among us, ministers still among us, and though resurrected, still walked alongside two of His disciples. He appeared in an upper room, cooked and ate fish on the lake’s shore, and appeared to many. He will come to dwell here again. The Father Ahman, however, only appears in a state of glory, has not stood here since the Fall of Adam, and awaits the completion of the work of Christ before He will again take up His abode here. Christ is not the same person as Father Ahman. Christ becomes the Father of all who are redeemed through Him. Therefore, by redeeming you Christ has become your Father in Heaven. You will have many fathers, including Christ, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and in our dispensation, Joseph Smith as well. And all these will also be children of Father Ahman.”²

Though Christ is a glorified, eternal God, reigning in Heaven and holding the power to exist from eternity to eternity, king Benjamin is informed by an angel that He will condescend to dwell in a tabernacle of clay (Mosiah 1:14). To be “exalted” is to already be in possession of what one hopes to acquire in mortality; that is, Christ was already exalted — He did not come here for His advancement, according to this angel, but He came and descended into a “tabernacle of clay” in order to serve us.³ “Christ lives! He is the One who redeemed all of us. He has a rightful claim as the Father of us all. In the resurrection we come forth out of the grave as His children, because He purchased with His blood our continued life. We symbolize that future event when we are baptized by going under the water and coming up again. It symbolizes resurrection. It is to be born again a new creature in Christ. Baptism is a preliminary, ceremonial, necessary sign that we accept Him as our Father. He is real. I bear witness of Him. I have stood in His presence. I have spoken with Him. He speaks in plain humility.”⁴