As I’ve talked to Latter-day Saint friends or had online conversations with Latter-day Saints, I’ve often said that the biggest difference between the LDS faith and biblical Christianity is how the two understand the nature of God
I tell my friends how I came to see that God was far bigger, holier, and more majestic than I had ever imagined. I try to share the joy of worshiping a God who is infinitely beyond me—endlessly beautiful, endlessly glorious, endlessly worthy of awe.
What has surprised me the most is that the most common response I’ve gotten is not disagreement but rather indifference. To many of my friends, it doesn’t really matter if God was once a man. It doesn’t matter whether Brigham Young was right that Adam was the God of our spirits. It doesn’t matter if we become gods or simply become like God.
These questions are often seen as minor, speculative, or unimportant—secondary to living a good life and keeping commandments. I greatly respect my friends and their desire to focus on the here and now and to find common ground where they can.
But for me, it’s not just a disagreement.
It’s a tragedy. A blasphemy. Something as spiritually weighty as the gravest of moral evils.
I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because of how seriously Scripture treats the question of who God is.
Knowing God — The Greatest of All Commandments
The Bible repeatedly emphasizes that there is nothing more fundamental than knowing and worshiping the true God rather than idols. The first of the Ten Commandments is “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) showing how weighty and important this commandment is to God. Indeed, “At the root of all sin is idolatry—the worship of something other than God.”
The central confession of Jewish faith is Deuteronomy 6:4–5: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
This verse is so important that Jesus said this was the greatest commandment (Mark 12:29–30).
And Jesus said eternal life is this: “That they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3). Who God is, is not a minor issue that we can speculate about, it is a matter of everlasting importance for the eternal well-being of our soul
The Sin of Idolatry
The Bible warns with sobering clarity about the danger of putting anything or anyone on the same level as the eternal God.
As Jeremiah declared
“But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King… The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.” (Jeremiah 10:10–11)
Man’s idolatry is what kindles God’s fiercest wrath.
In Romans 1, Paul describes how “[t]he wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Paul explains that God has “made it plain” to all of us both “his eternal power and divine nature.” Nature and all of creation reveal the God who made them. But we do not glorify God and we do not thank him. Instead, we “claim[] to be wise” and we “exchange[] the glory of the immortal God.” We make God into our image. We pretend that he is just like “a mortal human being” or like the beasts. In all of this we “are without excuse.”
That’s the terrifying irony: we want a god who is like us. But in doing so, we strip God of his glory and exalt ourselves.
As Paul explains THIS sin of idolatry is the root of so many evils. When we fail to give honor and glory to the true and living God, we become “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity.” We are led by our pride and our lusts and our desires.
Elsewhere Paul describes this state as one of being “enslaved to those that by nature are not gods.” (Galatians 4:8-9). Truthfully, that was the state of all of us before God “rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear Son.” (Colossians 1:13).
The Gravity of Getting God Wrong
If I had a friend who was considering murder or contemplating an abortion, I would do everything I could to stop them. It would be wrong to stay silent in the face of a grave moral wrong.
But while these things are grevious evils, so too is idolatry.
It is no less serious to worship a god who is not the true God.
That’s why, when I came to see the holiness of God revealed in Scripture, I knew I had to reject the famous LDS teaching: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become.”
I had to repent before God and to mourn that I had ever believed such a thing. How could I have believed that God almighty was once a man like me or that I could ever become a God? I now see it for what it is: pride and blasphemy. The very lie that humanity has told itself since Eden.
But I praise God that he is rich in mercy. He forgives us for our rebellion and our pride. And even when we were yet sinners in rebellion and in the deep throes of idolatry, he came for us.
He died for us on a cross. He was lifted up so that we could look at him and live. He was lifted up to vanquish all idolatry in our hearts and to turn us to worship the true and living God.
If you still don’t see why this issue matters so much to me, I pray that God will awaken in your heart a sense of his holiness. I pray that you will see why diminishing him, or imagining him as less than he is, is a grave sin—not a minor one. May God “knock down the strongholds of human reasoning” and “destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God.” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5)
I wish I had the words to express this with angelic power. I wish I could lift your eyes to see the breathtaking, soul-shaking glory of the God who was never created, who never “became” God, but has always been—from everlasting to everlasting. And with the angels I long to cry out: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” (Revelation 4:8).