Q: Here’s my Question: What do you say to an individual if he asks. Some people believe that God became man. God has attributes of perfection such as being All-Knowing, All-powerful, and Ever-living. Man, however, lacks such perfection. Man has limited knowledge and power, and is mortal. How can anything be two complete opposites at the same time? This is not rational. Could you respond using some quotes in The Urantia Book as well as your own personal voice?

A:

Thanks so much for your note. Glad you are enjoying our site! The questions that you ask are good, important questions – ones that any thoughtful person might ask when presented with this prospect of God becoming man – as you say, two complete opposites, one seeming to cancel the other … two natures, one human one divine, somehow becoming blended in one personality 

I cannot answer your question with logic or any reasonable explanation; if I could, I would be clearing up something that has been at the forefront of Christianity from the beginning. This question is age-old. Even the revelators do not claim to understand HOW it was done – but they do tell us WHY it was done, which is an explanation that I had never heard of before I found The Urantia Book. It was, and remains, a satisfying and much more reasonable explanation of the “why” than the atonement doctrine, which I always felt was fundamentally difficult to believe.

But as for assuming that no human can have supernatural abilities: The human/divine Jesus actually did (does) have all of those prerogatives of God. And that is certainly part of the mystery of his combined nature. That he did not use them or demonstrate all of them during his lifetime here does not mean he did not have them. He chose NOT to use them preliminary to his embarking on his public ministry, although he did perform a number of deliberate miracles. You can read more about those decisions that Jesus made during his experience of the Forty Days  HERE

Here are two passages about the WHY that you might find interesting to share with your hypothetical inquirer. The inquirer should first know that Jesus is a Creator Son – the creator of the universe in which we live:

119:0.4 The purpose of these creature incarnations is to enable such Creators to become wise, sympathetic, just, and understanding sovereigns. These divine Sons are innately just, but they become understandingly merciful as a result of these successive bestowal experiences; they are naturally merciful, but these experiences make them merciful in new and additional ways. These bestowals are the last steps in their education and training for the sublime tasks of ruling the local universes in divine righteousness and by just judgment.

119:0.5 Though numerous incidental benefits accrue to the various worlds, systems, and constellations, as well as to the different orders of universe intelligences affected and benefited by these bestowals, still they are primarily designed to complete the personal training and universe education of a Creator Son himself. These bestowals are not essential to the wise, just, and efficient management of a local universe, but they are absolutely necessary to a fair, merciful, and understanding administration of such a creation, teeming with its varied forms of life and its myriads of intelligent but imperfect creatures.

You can read more about this lengthy process of bestowal HERE

And here is the mystery:

119:7.5 Joshua ben Joseph, the Jewish baby, was conceived and was born into the world just as all other babies before and since except that this particular baby was the incarnation of Michael of Nebadon, a divine Son of Paradise and the creator of all this local universe of things and beings. And this mystery of the incarnation of Deity within the human form of Jesus, otherwise of natural origin on the world, will forever remain unsolved. Even in eternity you will never know the technique and method of the incarnation of the Creator in the form and likeness of his creatures. That is the secret of Sonarington, and such mysteries are the exclusive possession of those divine Sons who have passed through the bestowal experience.

And this:

120:4.5 Urantia mortals have varying concepts of the miraculous, but to us who live as citizens of the local universe there are few miracles, and of these by far the most intriguing are the incarnational bestowals of the Paradise Sons. The appearance in and on your world, by apparently natural processes, of a divine Son, we regard as a miracle—the operation of universal laws beyond our understanding. Jesus of Nazareth was a miraculous person.120:4.6 In and through all this extraordinary experience, God the Father chose to manifest himself as he always does—in the usual way—in the normal, natural, and dependable way of divine acting.

Personally, I find a little mystery a refreshing sidelight to the spiritual journey. It could be a holdover from my Catholic upbringing, when “it’s a mystery” was the answer to a number of questions. I guess I came to accept that we are surrounded by mystery insofar as spirituality is concerned. And that’s okay by me.

In some ways, God was always the biggest mystery, but The Urantia Book helps so much to personalize God and make him accessible. Being introduced to the concept of the Indwelling God is a true revelation that is helpful. And understanding that Jesus personified God for us makes God even more accessible, as we have the human Jesus as our bridge connecting man and God forever more. The experience of coming to know God through Jesus is pretty compelling, mystery or no…

I hope that this reply is somewhat helpful…I am no scholar, nor do I have any special knowledge of these things; nevertheless, I am a long-time reader/student of The Urantia Book. I have a good deal of personal experience in acting out and experiencing some of the truths that I have gotten from that study.  And that is also a point that might be helpful to your hypothetical inquirer: even though we may not be able to grasp these “mysteries” with our rational minds, we CAN grasp the realities of them in our daily living, as we continue to seek for God and the truth of God, through the study of Jesus and his matchless life.