The Infinite I AM

THE Universal Father is the God of all creation, the First Source and Center of all things and beings. First think of God as a creator, then as a controller, and lastly as an infinite upholder. The truth about the Universal Father had begun to dawn upon mankind when the prophet said: “You, God, are alone; there is none beside you. You have created the heaven and the heaven of heavens, with all their hosts; you preserve and control them. By the Sons of God were the universes made. The Creator covers himself with light as with a garment and stretches out the heavens as a curtain.” Only the concept of the Universal Father—one God in the place of many gods—enabled mortal man to comprehend the Father as divine creator and infinite controller.

God—the Universal Father—is the personality of the First Source and Center and as such maintains personal relations of infinite control over all coordinate and subordinate sources and centers. Such control is personal and infinite in potential, even though it may never actually function owing to the perfection of the function of such co-ordinate and subordinate sources and centers and personalities. The First Source and Center is, therefore, primal in all domains: deified or undeified, personal or impersonal, actual or potential, finite or infinite. No thing or being, no relativity or finality, exists except in direct or indirect relation to,  and dependence on, the primacy of the First Source and Center.

The concept of the I AM is a philosophic concession which we make to the time-bound, space-fettered, finite mind of man, to the impossibility of creature comprehension of eternity existences—non-beginning, nonending realities and relationships. To the time-space creature, all things must have a beginning save only the ONE UNCAUSED—the primeval cause of causes. Therefore do we conceptualize this philosophic value-level as the I AM, at the same time instructing all creatures that the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit are coeternal with the I AM; in other words, that there never was a time when the I AM was not the Father of the Son and, with him, of the Spirit. The Infinite is used to denote the fullness—the finality—implied by the primacy of the First Source and Center. The theoretical I AM is a creature philosophic extension of the “infinity of will,” but the Infinite is an actual value level representing the eternity-intension of the true infinity of the absolute and unfettered free will of the Universal Father. This concept is sometimes designated the Father-Infinite. Much of the confusion of all orders of beings, high and low, in their efforts to discover the Father-Infinite, is inherent in their limitations of comprehension.   Source: The Urantia Book