Supreme and Ultimate—Time and Space

118:6.1God is truly om­nipo­tent, but he is not om­nif­i­cent—he does not per­son­ally do all that is done. Om­nipo­tence em­braces the power-po­ten­tial of the Al­mighty Su­preme and the Su­preme Be­ing, but the vo­li­tional acts of God the Su­preme are not the per­sonal do­ings of God the In­fi­nite.

118:6.2To ad­vo­cate the om­nif­i­cence of pri­mal De­ity would be equal to dis­en­fran­chis­ing well-nigh a mil­lion Cre­ator Sons of Par­a­dise, not to men­tion the in­nu­mer­able hosts of var­i­ous other or­ders of con­cur­ring cre­ative as­sis­tants. There is but one un­caused Cause in the whole uni­verse. All other causes are deriva­tives of this one First Great Source and Cen­ter. And none of this phi­los­o­phy does any vi­o­lence to the free-will­ness of the myr­i­ads of the chil­dren of De­ity scat­tered through a vast uni­verse.

118:6.3Within a lo­cal frame, vo­li­tion may ap­pear to func­tion as an un­caused cause, but it un­fail­ingly ex­hibits in­her­i­tance fac­tors which es­tab­lish re­la­tion­ship with the unique, orig­i­nal, and ab­so­lute First Causes.

118:6.4All vo­li­tion is rel­a­tive. In the orig­i­nat­ing sense, only the Fa­ther-I AM pos­sesses fi­nal­ity of vo­li­tion; in the ab­so­lute sense, only the Fa­ther, the Son, and the Spirit ex­hibit the pre­rog­a­tives of vo­li­tion un­con­di­tioned by time and un­lim­ited by space. Mor­tal man is en­dowed with free will, the power of choice, and though such choos­ing is not ab­so­lute, nev­er­the­less, it is rel­a­tively fi­nal on the fi­nite level and con­cern­ing the des­tiny of the choos­ing per­son­al­ity.

118:6.5Vo­li­tion on any level short of the ab­so­lute en­coun­ters lim­i­ta­tions which are con­sti­tu­tive in the very per­son­al­ity ex­er­cis­ing the power of choice. Man can­not choose be­yond the range of that which is choos­able. He can­not, for in­stance, choose to be other than a hu­man be­ing ex­cept that he can elect to be­come more than a man; he can choose to em­bark upon the voy­age of uni­verse as­cen­sion, but this is be­cause the hu­man choice and the di­vine will hap­pen to be co­in­ci­dent upon this point. And what a son de­sires and the Fa­ther wills will cer­tainly come to pass.

118:6.6In the mor­tal life, paths of dif­fer­en­tial con­duct are con­tin­u­ally open­ing and clos­ing, and dur­ing the times when choice is pos­si­ble the hu­man per­son­al­ity is con­stantly de­cid­ing be­tween these many courses of ac­tion. Tem­po­ral vo­li­tion is linked to time, and it must await the pass­ing of time to find op­por­tu­nity for ex­pres­sion. Spir­i­tual vo­li­tion has be­gun to taste lib­er­a­tion from the fet­ters of time, hav­ing achieved par­tial es­cape from time se­quence, and that is be­cause spir­i­tual vo­li­tion is self-iden­ti­fy­ing with the will of God.

118:6.7Vo­li­tion, the act of choos­ing, must func­tion within the uni­verse frame which has ac­tu­al­ized in re­sponse to higher and prior choos­ing. The en­tire range of hu­man will is strictly fi­nite-lim­ited ex­cept in one par­tic­u­lar: When man chooses to find God and to be like him, such a choice is super­fi­nite; only eter­nity can dis­close whether this choice is also super­ab­so­nite.

118:6.8To rec­og­nize De­ity om­nipo­tence is to en­joy se­cu­rity in your ex­pe­ri­ence of cos­mic cit­i­zen­ship, to pos­sess as­sur­ance of safety in the long jour­ney to Par­a­dise. But to ac­cept the fal­lacy of om­nif­i­cence is to em­brace the colos­sal er­ror of pan­the­ism.