[On Isaiah 43:10:]
Those who become gods never are formed as gods; they
are made gods. So it is also with LDS beliefs. Gods aren’t either born
gods or formed into gods. They become gods and are made equal with
Christ, becoming gods by the will of the Father and by the grace of Christ, by
his imparting of the fulness of the Father to those who are joint heirs with
Christ. No one in LDS beliefs actually is, or has been, either created or
formed a god.
Yet still, though there is more to say about this verse, the
utility of this verse of scripture to Evangelicals to attack LDS beliefs just
received a further handicap. Since we do not believe that any god was formed a
god, or created a god, the passage is irrelevant to us and doesn’t address our
doctrine at all) as Evangelicals tend to think when they decide to use this
verse to elicit unbelief in an unwary Latter-day Saint, or to cause doubt in an
investigator of the Gospel message as presented by the Church). There are other
nuances as well that may be seen in this form of the word, for this form of the
word also can have several senses, most typically perfect and passive in
meaning but which can also take a reflexive sense, which sense then
would become “has created oneself,” or, “has formed oneself.” Sometimes the
niphal perfect form just has a basic sense (“was formed,” or, “was created”),
but if the reflexive meaning were applied one to easily could make the argument
that the passage implies that gods don’t just form themselves (because people
mold them, or otherwise form them into their varied shapes). One thus also
could argue from this that God existed before humans on Earth molded idols, and
that God will continue to exist even after all molded idols are gone.
This sense would bring us relatively closer to the real
underlying meaning found in the Targum of Jonathan . . .
How did Jonathan ben Uzziel, who is attributed as the ancient
author of the Targum of Jonathan, handle the text and its referents to time?
That author simply interpreted the text of Isaiah 43:10 thus:
You are witnesses
before me, says the LORD, and my servant, the Messiah, in whom is my desire, is
that you may know and that you may believe before me, and be made to understand
that I am he: I am he who is from the beginning; even ages of
ages are mine, and apart from me there is no god.
D. Charles Pyle, I Have Said Ye Are Gods:
Concepts Conducive to the Early Christian Doctrine of Deification in Patristic
Literature and the Underlying Strata of the Greek New Testament (Revised and
Supplemented)
(North Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace, 2018), 106-7, 105
