"God was once a man, and we can become gods too"

God was once a man like us who progressed to become God. Jesus is his firstborn spirit-son — and so, in a sense, are we and even Lucifer. Exaltation to godhood is the human destiny.

Scripture closes both ends of that story. "From everlasting to everlasting, you are God" — there was no time when the Father was not God. And through Isaiah he says it as plainly as language allows: "Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me… I am the first and I am the last, and besides me there is no god." A God who was once a man was, by definition, formed — and would be one god in a series. Isaiah rules out exactly that.

But the Bible calls angels and even human judges "gods." And 2 Peter says we become "partakers of the divine nature."

Those texts describe participation, not promotion. Psalm 82 calls Israel's corrupt judges "gods" ironically — and then says they will "die like men." "Partakers of the divine nature" in 2 Peter means being remade in God's moral likeness and brought into his life by grace — the same idea the Eastern fathers called being made like God, always by gift and never becoming another instance of God. No biblical writer imagines a human crossing over to be a God with his own world, because that would make more than one God, which they explicitly deny.

And Jesus? If he's just the first spirit-child who worked his way up, that's a coherent picture of him.

It is not the picture the New Testament gives. John says the Word was God in the beginning and made everything that exists. Paul says in Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and that he is before all things and holds all things together. Hebrews has the Father address the Son as "God" whose throne is forever. Jesus is not a graduate of a program; he is the eternal Son through whom the worlds were made, worshipped as God by people who had been raised to say God is one.