Paper 6 Overview: The Eternal Son

The Eternal Son represents the perfect and final expression of the Universal Father's "first" personal and absolute concept: the divine personalization of the Father's primordial idea. As the Second Person of Deity, the Son functions as the absolute spiritual center of all creation, the living divine Word through whom the Father expresses himself to the universes. The Son embodies the complete spiritual revelation of the Father's divine reality, unqualified spirit, and absolute personality, serving as the perfect complement to the Universal Father's infinite attributes while focusing exclusively on the purely spiritual domains of universal existence.

Through his absolute grasp of spirit gravity, the Eternal Son exercises perfect control over all spiritual realities, beings, and values throughout creation. This spirit-gravity circuit forms the fundamental spiritual cohesion that holds the universe together at its most essential level. While the Eternal Son possesses certain definitive limitations, including his non-participation in physical domains and dependency on the Father for personality bestowal, these constraints in no way diminish his infinite spiritual sovereignty and divine perfection. The Son maintains an intimate relationship with creation through his mercy ministry, the bestowal activities of the Paradise Sons, and his role in the divine perfection plans that enable creature ascension through the spiritual levels of reality toward eventual Paradise attainment.

The Eternal Son constitutes the perfect and final expression of the Universal Father's "first" personal and absolute concept—a concept that transcends temporal origins and exists beyond the limitations of sequential thought. Whenever and however the Father expresses himself personally and absolutely, he does so through this Eternal Son who has eternally existed as the living divine Word. This Son is residential at the center of all things, immediately enshrouding the personal presence of the Eternal and Universal Father in a relationship of absolute spiritual intimacy and divine completeness.

The revelation speaks of God's "first" thought and suggests a time origin for the Eternal Son merely as a conceptual accommodation, a necessary linguistic distortion to facilitate human comprehension of these transcendent realities. For the time-bound minds of mortal creatures, sequential explanation provides an entry point into understanding eternal relationships. In absolute reality, however, the Universal Father never experienced a "first" thought, and the Eternal Son never had a beginning. Both exist in the perfect eternal now. The Son spiritually personalizes the Father's universal and infinite concept of divine reality, unqualified spirit, and absolute personality, thereby constituting the complete divine revelation of the creator identity of the Universal Father. The Son's perfect personality illuminates the truth that the Father represents the eternal and universal source of all meanings and values of the spiritual, volitional, purposeful, and personal across all creation.

The Eternal Son is the original and only-begotten Son of God, the Second Person of Deity and the associate creator of all things. As the Father is the First Great Source and Center, the Eternal Son is the Second Great Source and Center, forming the spiritual nucleus around which all true spirit realities revolve. The Eternal Son functions as the spiritual center and divine administrator of the spiritual government of the universe of universes, exercising sovereign authority throughout the spiritual domains of creation.

The functional differentiation between the Universal Father and Eternal Son reveals their complementary cosmic roles: the Father operates first as a creator and subsequently as a controller, while the Son functions first as a cocreator and then as a spiritual administrator. The Universal Father never personally engages in creative activities except in conjunction with the Son or through the coordinated action of the Son. This fundamental relationship echoes in the New Testament declaration: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made." The Eternal Son is known by different designations throughout the various regions of creation: in the central universe as the Co-ordinate Source, Cocreator, and Associate Absolute; in the superuniverse as the Co-ordinate Spirit Center and Eternal Spirit Administrator; in the local universe as the Second Eternal Source and Center. On Urantia, this Original Son has occasionally been confused with a coordinate Creator Son, Michael of Nebadon, who bestowed himself upon the mortal races of this world—a confusion stemming from the perfect reflection of the Father-Son relationship in the local universe manifestation of the Creator Son.

The Eternal Son exhibits the same changeless nature and infinite dependability that characterizes the Universal Father, sharing completely in the Father's absolute spiritual essence. The Son is just as truly an unlimited spirit as the Father, though he may appear more approachable to beings of lowly origin since he stands one step closer in the sequence of divine relationships. The Eternal Son is the eternal Word of God, wholly like the Father in every attribute and aspect of spiritual existence. In fact, the Son is so perfectly aligned with the Father that when we worship the Universal Father, we simultaneously worship God the Son and God the Spirit in an indivisible act of divine recognition.

The Son not only possesses all the Father's infinite and transcendent righteousness but also reflects the complete holiness of the Father's character. The Eternal Son shares in the Father's perfection and jointly assumes responsibility for assisting all creatures of imperfection in their spiritual endeavors toward divine perfection. The Son embodies the fullness of God's absoluteness in personality and spirit, managing the spiritual government of the universe through these divine qualities. As God is a universal spirit, this spirit nature finds its focus and personalization in the Deity of the Eternal Son, where all spiritual characteristics appear enhanced through differentiation from the universality of the First Source and Center. Together, the Father and Son unreservedly share the divine spirit with the Conjoint Actor, the Infinite Spirit. In matters concerning the love of truth and the creation of beauty, the Father and Son exist in perfect equality, though the Son appears particularly devoted to the exclusive realization of spiritual beauty in universal values. In divine goodness, the Father and Son demonstrate no discernible difference—the Father loving his universe children as a father, while the Eternal Son regards all creatures both as father and as brother.

The Eternal Son shares fully in the justice and righteousness of the Trinity while simultaneously embodying the infinite personalization of the Father's love and mercy, thereby serving as the universal revelation of divine love to all creation. While the Son cannot exceed the Father's capacity for love, he manifests mercy to creatures in an additional dimension, drawing from his unique position as both a primal creator like the Father and as the Eternal Son who shares experientially in the sonship nature of all other sons of the Universal Father. This dual perspective enriches the Son's ministry with a special quality of divine compassion.

The Eternal Son functions as the preeminent minister of mercy throughout all creation, with mercy constituting the essential character of his spiritual nature. The mandates issued by the Eternal Son across the spirit circuits of the Second Source and Center resonate with tones of compassion and understanding. To truly comprehend the love of the Eternal Son, one must first perceive its divine origin in the Father's nature, then observe its magnificent unfolding through the far-reaching ministry of the Infinite Spirit and its nearly limitless host of ministering personalities. The Son dedicates his ministry to revealing the God of love throughout the universe of universes, never engaging in the misconceived task of persuading the Father to love his creatures or show mercy to time-space wrongdoers. Such conceptualizations of God as requiring persuasion toward mercy represent crude and grotesque misunderstandings of the divine nature. Rather, all merciful ministrations performed by the Sons of God directly reveal the Father's heart of universal love and infinite compassion, with the Father's love serving as the eternal source of the Son's mercy. As God is love in essence, the Son personifies mercy in action: the Father's love manifested through the person of his Eternal Son. The love of this universal Son extends universally to all creatures, comparable in human terms to a father's love complemented by the nurturing affection characteristic of a mother's care.

The Eternal Son motivates and sustains the spirit level of cosmic reality, exercising absolute control over the interassociation of all undifferentiated spirit energy and actualized spirit reality through his perfect grasp of spirit gravity. Every pure, unfragmented spirit and all spiritual beings and values respond inexorably to the infinite drawing power of the primal Son of Paradise. This spirit-gravity function operates with absolute precision and effectiveness, ensuring the spiritual cohesion of the universe on its most fundamental level. Should the eternal future witness the emergence of an unlimited universe expanding beyond current comprehension, the spirit gravity and spiritual power of the Original Son would remain wholly adequate for the spiritual control and effective administration of such a boundless creation.

The Son's omnipotence operates exclusively within the spiritual domain, adhering to the eternal economy of universe administration that precludes wasteful duplication of function among the Deities. The omnipresence of the Original Son constitutes the spiritual unity of the universe of universes, with the spiritual cohesion of all creation resting upon his active presence throughout all realms. The spiritual presence of the Father and the Son are so intimately interconnected that distinguishing between them becomes conceptually challenging—the spirit of the Father eternally resides within the spirit of the Son. In all scenarios involving the Father-Son presence of dual spiritual nature, the spirit of the Son coordinates perfectly with the spirit of the Father. The Eternal Son maintains universal and spiritual self-consciousness, equaling the Father in wisdom and sharing omniscience in the realms of knowledge. Neither cosmic event nor universal occurrence surprises the Son, who comprehends the end from the beginning with perfect foreknowledge. The Father and Son, through their own omnipresent spirit and in conjunction with the reflectivity intelligence of the Supreme Being, maintain complete awareness of all spirits and spiritualized beings throughout the universe of universes. In his merciful personality attributes, the Eternal Son exhibits infinite equality with the Universal Father, demonstrating the same patience, kindness, and long-suffering toward ascending beings that characterize the Paradise Sons in the local universes who bestow themselves upon the evolutionary worlds of time.

The Eternal Son does not personally function within the physical domains of universal reality, nor does he operate, except through the Conjoint Actor, in the levels of mind ministry to creature beings. These circumscribed parameters, however, do not in any manner restrict the Son's complete and unrestricted exercise of his divine attributes of spiritual omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. While the Son's activities have specific boundaries that respect the functional differentiation among the Deities, these limitations in no way compromise his absolute spiritual sovereignty.

The Eternal Son does not personally pervade the potentials of spirit inherent within the infinity of the Deity Absolute, though as these potentials transform into actuality, they immediately come within the all-powerful grasp of the Son's spirit-gravity circuit. Personality remains the exclusive gift of the Universal Father; the Eternal Son derives his personality from the Father and cannot independently bestow personality. When the Son participates in personality creation, he does so in conjunction with either the Father or the Conjoint Creator acting on the Father's behalf. Although the Son cannot personally create beings with personality, he can fashion any and all types of other-than-personal reality. The Father, in eternalizing the Original Son, bestowed upon him the power of subsequently joining with the Father to produce additional Sons with creative attributes—a privilege they have exercised throughout universe history. However, the prerogatives of creatorship appear non-transmissible beyond this level; a Creator Son cannot further delegate true creative capacity to the orders of Sons he subsequently creates, though these local universe Sons do manifest a limited reflection of the creative attributes of a Creator Son. The Eternal Son, as an infinite and exclusively personal being, cannot fragmentize his nature or distribute individualized portions of his selfhood to other entities as the Universal Father and Infinite Spirit do. Nevertheless, the Son does bestow himself as an unlimited spirit that pervades all creation and unceasingly draws all spirit personalities and realities toward himself through his absolute spirit-gravity circuit.

The Eternal Son possesses spirit and mind, but of a nature and quality so transcendent that mortal mind cannot possibly comprehend their true essence. Human perception of mind operates primarily at finite, cosmic, material, and personal levels, struggling to grasp the nature of mind when associated with supermaterial beings or functioning as an exclusive component of spirit personalities. Mind requires fundamentally different conceptualization when referenced at the spirit level of existence or when describing spirit functions of intelligence. This transcendent form of mind bears little resemblance to the mind that coordinates spirit and matter or to that which functions solely in material contexts.

Spirit, by its inherent nature, maintains constant consciousness, mindedness, and various phases of identity. Without some manifestation of mind, spiritual consciousness could not exist among the fraternity of spirit beings. The equivalent of mind, the capacity to know and be known, exists as an intrinsic quality of Deity. Whether Deity expresses as personal, prepersonal, superpersonal, or impersonal, it invariably possesses the ability to communicate with similar entities, beings, or personalities. The mind of the Eternal Son mirrors that of the Father while differing from all other minds in the universe. Together with the Father's mind, it serves as the progenitor to the diverse and expansive minds of the Conjoint Creator. This relationship perhaps finds its best illustration in the premind of a Thought Adjuster. These Father fragments exist entirely outside the mind circuits of the Conjoint Actor yet possess a form of premind, knowing as they are known and enjoying the equivalent of human thinking. While the Eternal Son exists wholly in the spiritual realm and humans function primarily in the material domain, many aspects of the Son's spirit personality, the seven spiritual spheres encircling Paradise, and the nature of the Son's impersonal creations must await our attainment of spirit status following the completion of our morontia ascension. As we progress through the superuniverse and toward Havona, many of these spirit-concealed mysteries will clarify as we develop the "mind of the spirit"—the faculty of spiritual insight that transcends material comprehension.

The Eternal Son constitutes that infinite personality from whose unqualified personality fetters the Universal Father escaped through the technique of trinitization, thereby establishing the pattern and possibility for the Father's subsequent and endless bestowal of himself upon his ever-expanding universe of Creators and creatures. Every personal being derives personality from the Universal Father, just as the Original Son eternally derives his personality from the Paradise Father in a relationship that transcends temporal origins while establishing the template for all subsequent personality bestowal. This primordial relationship between the Father as the source of personality and the Son as the first expression of divine absolute personality forms the foundational paradigm for all personality throughout creation.

The personality of the Paradise Son exhibits absolute and purely spiritual qualities, serving as both the divine and eternal pattern for the Father's bestowal of personality upon the Conjoint Actor and, subsequently, for his bestowal of personality upon the myriads of his creatures throughout the far-flung universe. The Eternal Son truly embodies the qualities of a merciful minister, divine spirit, spiritual power, and real personality, representing the spiritual and personal nature of God made manifest to the universes. He constitutes the sum and substance of the First Source and Center, divested of all nonpersonal, extradivine, nonspiritual, and pure potential elements. Despite the Son's absolute spiritual perfection, the human mind struggles to form an adequate conceptual image of the beauty and grandeur of his supernal personality. The same factors that obscure our recognition of the Universal Father operate with almost equal influence to prevent our conceptual recognition of the Eternal Son. This limitation persists until we achieve Paradise attainment, at which point we will understand why finite minds cannot fully grasp the character of this absolute personality.

The Eternal Son stands as the full equal, perfect complement, and eternal counterpart of the Universal Father in all aspects of identity, nature, and personality attributes. In the same sense that God functions as the Universal Father of all creation, the Son embodies the qualities of a Universal Mother, with all beings throughout creation—from the highest to the lowest—constituting their universal family. To truly appreciate the character of the Son, one must study the revelation of the divine character of the Father, as they exist forever as an inseparable unity. As divine personalities, they remain virtually indistinguishable to lower orders of intelligence, though beings originating from the creative acts of the Deities themselves find it less difficult to recognize their separate identities.

Beings native to the central universe and Paradise can discern the Father and Son not merely as a unified personal entity of universal control but as two distinct personalities functioning in specific domains of universe administration. From a creature perspective, one may conceptualize the Universal Father and Eternal Son as separate individuals, which they truly are, yet in universal administration, their functions intertwine so completely that distinguishing between them often proves challenging. When encountering the Father and Son in confusing interassociations throughout universe affairs, remember this essential distinction: God initiates the thought, and the Son expresses the word. In each local universe, this inseparability manifests through the divinity of the Creator Son, who represents both Father and Son to the creatures of ten million inhabited worlds. The Eternal Son, while infinite, remains approachable through the persons of his Paradise Sons and the loving ministry of the Infinite Spirit. Without the bestowal service of the Paradise Sons and the ministry of the creatures of the Infinite Spirit, material beings could scarcely hope to attain the Eternal Son, yet with their guidance, God-conscious mortals will certainly reach Paradise and eventually stand in the personal presence of this majestic Son of Sons. Throughout the ascension journey, the personality of the Eternal Son becomes increasingly comprehensible as the mortal mind progressively spiritualizes, gradually discerning the reality of his infinitely spiritual mind and nature. The Creator Son of the local universe, whose personality remains comprehensible to humans because of his incarnation experience, compensates for our inability to grasp the fuller significance of the more exclusively spiritual Eternal Son of Paradise during our early ascension experience.