What Is the Urantia Book? 

The Urantia Book contains a Foreword and four parts: Part I The Central and Superuniverses; Part II The Local Universe; Part III The History of Urantia (which is the celestial name of our planet); Part IV The Life and Teachings of Jesus.

The Foreword is an encyclopedia of concepts and terms found within the Papers of the book. When we study, the Foreword is a great place to turn for an in depth summary of God and his eternal plan. It is a definitive guide designed to assist those who read the accompanying papers dealing with Deity and the universe of universes.

We find that we comprehend divinity through the highest truth, beauty, and goodness. We personally associate divinity with love, mercy, and ministry. And, on impersonal levels, divinity discloses justice, power, and sovereignty.

We are also introduced to the many levels of reality starting with unqualified Infinity. God the Father is the Infinite One of Infinity. To create this Eternity, we are shown his absolute level of reality and then down to finite realities, where we are in time and space. The Urantia Book teaches us using sequence, building a mental scaffolding for our finite understanding.

This revelation depicts the nature of Deity, the reality of Paradise, the organization and working of the central and superuniverses, the personalities of the grand universe, and the high destiny of evolutionary mortals. We have an amazing journey and eternal reality that is beyond our imagination. This mortal life is the very beginning of a gigantic cosmic adventure.

We learn about the three absolute persons of Paradise Deity – the Universal Father, the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit. The Father gives us unconditional love, the Son bestows the love in mercy, and through ministry, the Spirit showers this love and mercy to all creation.

We are also taught about Paradise Isle and Havona. Part I also reveals God’s organization of eternity, the physical administration, as well as the personalities who are created at the Paradise level of existence.

"God is love, but love is not God." The greatest manifestation of the divine love for us is found in the gift of God’s Indwelling Spirit, which he gives of himself to us. This is the meaning of the phrase, we are made in "God’s image." We learn more about the Indwelling Spirit of God in Part III.

In Part I, we are shown how God delegates. He creates many Paradise beings perfect for the job that they do. We are introduced to Paradise Creator Sons and Creative Mother Spirits who create, uphold, and sustain local universes in time and space. As creation continues to unfold, the plans for time and space reveal seven superuniverses, of which each will contain 100,000 local universes. And, each local universe will contain approximately 10,000,000 inhabited worlds. It is revealed that our local universe Creator Son bestowed himself on our planet as Jesus of Nazareth. All Creator Sons must go through seven bestowals to experience the life of their creatures. Only after all seven bestowals do they earn sovereignty, to rule in their local universe. Before this, they rule as Vicegerents of the Paradise Father.

We learn of our own Local Universe of Nebadon, where our Creator parents, Michael of Nebadon (our Creator Son) and the Creative Mother Spirit, create, organize, and sustain constellations, systems, and inhabited worlds of mortals, who are like us spiritually and mentally. All mortals go through the same experiences of personal growth through free will decisions.

The march of the universes through space serves a grand and glorious purpose. Our mortal struggles are not in vain. We are all part of a massive plan, a massive undertaking, and the enormity of the undertaking makes it impossible to see much of it at any one time or during any one life. We are all part of an eternal project that the Gods (the Paradise Father, Son, and Spirit) oversee and carry out.

At the end of Part II, we are told that truth, beauty, and goodness embrace the full revelation of divinity reality to finite humans. The fruits of divinity have been yielded as this love-comprehension of deity finds spiritual expression in the lives of God-knowing mortals: intellectual peace, social progress, moral satisfaction, spiritual joy, and cosmic wisdom. The advanced mortals on a world in the seventh stage of light and life have discovered that love is the most important thing in the universe – and that God is love.

Love is the desire to do good to others.

After the formation of our solar system, our planet finally attained its present size by 1,000,000,000 BCE. Life was planted on our world around 550,000,000 BCE, in shallow seas. Humans appeared about 1,000,000 years ago.

The story of man's rise from seaweed to earthly lordship is a romance of biological struggle and mental survival. Man's ancestors were literally the "slime and ooze of the ocean bed in the sluggish and warm-water bays and lagoons" of the ancient inland seas' vast shorelines.

Part III reveals God’s amazing divine plan of progressive evolution, how life evolves from the first life implantation up through plants, to animals, and then finally to mortals with personality, bestowed by our Creator.

In the history of our planet, there have been five epochal (eventful) revelations:The Dalamatian Teachings. About 500,000 years ago, Calagastia, our first planetary prince and his staff of one hundred helpers came to teach about God. People could not see this spirit prince, but his staff of fifty women and fifty men were in human form. For 300,000 years, they taught a moral law of seven commands known as "The Father’s Way." All was well until 200,000 years ago when Prince Caligastia sided with the System Sovereign Lucifer, and Lucifer’s assistant Satan. They plunged our planet into rebellion against the Paradise Father and all of his rule. (When Jesus was on Urantia, he "wrestled in spirit and defeated in power" all the rebels, which ended the rebellion on our world. Lucifer, Satan, Caligastia, and all other rebellious persons have no power to enter the minds of humans. Only by free will can a person invite evil, sin, and iniquity into their mind.)The Edenic Teachings. Almost 38,000 years ago, Adam and Eve came to this planet, to become the biologic uplifters of humankind. The spiritual plan was for their descendants to increase to 500,000. After that, each descendant was to mate for life with a person from one of the different races. Thus the progeny of Adam and Eve would uplift human DNA, eventually blending all races into one! Misfortune struck when Eve, then Adam impatiently defaulted on the entire plan.Melchizedek of Salem. This local universe personality appeared as an adult human male, 1973 BCE, living ninety-four years in Salem, now known as Jerusalem. He taught trust in the goodness of God, and that faith is the way people "earn God’s favor." Melchizedek is mentioned in the Bible in Genesis 14:18, Psalms 110:4, and Hebrews 5–7.Jesus of Nazareth. Our Creator Son of God, Michael of Nebadon, incarnated as the human baby Jesus. He grew up through adulthood to experience what it is like to be human. Jesus was born of Mary and Joseph, on August 21, 7 BCE. Part IV of The Urantia Book tells the wonderful story of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as witnessed by the spiritual beings on our planet.The Urantia Book was first printed in 1955. God’s eternal plan for us is one of progressive evolution. That includes spiritual, intellectual, and material progression. Humanity is now at the point where we need a new upstepping of spiritual information. This revelation gives us a new understanding of where we are in the eternal plan, and the many spiritual beings that help us on our journey inward to Paradise, the geographic center of all things.

Our planet, Urantia, has not had the progressive evolution of a normal inhabited world. In our spiritual government, we had rebellion by our Planetary Prince Caligastia and the default of our Adam and Eve. In this part of The Urantia Book, many questions are answered so that we begin to understand why there is so much chaos in our world, even though we have progressed from cave dwelling, hunter-gatherers to a fast-paced, technology-assisted existence.

Part III also reveals in-depth information about the evolution of religion on our world, our Indwelling Spirit of God, our survival, guardian angels, and the spiritual government of our planet.

This is the amazing history of Jesus of Nazareth (before Christianity was ever formulated.) The Urantia Book reveals that Jesus was born in Bethlehem at noon on August 21st, 7 BCE, of Mary and Joseph. We are told amazing details of Jesus' life, from birth through his entire life, death, and resurrection.

His mission was twofold. First as a powerful Creator Son (Michael of Nebadon) he needed to experience life as one of his local universe children – a mortal. And second, he was to reveal God as a Father to his earth children. "His one ideal of living was the revelation of the Father, while his one idea in teaching was to present to his universe the personification of that supreme wisdom which can only be comprehended by living it. He came that we all might have life and have it more abundantly."

Jesus taught that God is our perfect parent, which makes us brothers and sisters in God’s spiritual family of mortals and heavenly beings. He also taught that each of us has a unique, personal relationship with God.

This revelation shows the four stages of Jesus’ life. The first stage was his childhood, when he was only vaguely aware of his origin, nature, and destiny as a human being. The second stage was his increasingly self-conscious years of youth and manhood, during which he came to understand his divine nature and human mission more clearly. This second stage concluded with his baptismal experiences and revelations. The third stage of the Master's earthly experience began with his baptism and continued through his years of ministry as a teacher and healer until the pivotal hour of Peter's confession at Caesarea-Philippi. This third period of his earthly life encompassed the times when his apostles and immediate followers recognized him as the Son of Man and saw him as the Messiah. The fourth and final period of his earthly career began at Caesarea-Philippi and lasted until his crucifixion. This stage of his ministry was distinguished by his recognition of divinity and embrace of the labors of his final year in the flesh. During the fourth period, while the majority of his followers still saw him as the Messiah, the apostles recognized him as the Son of God. Peter's confession marked the beginning of a new era in which his chosen ambassadors recognized, albeit hazily, the truth of his supreme ministry as a bestowal Son on Urantia and for an entire universe.

Throughout this last section of The Urantia Book, we understand more about Jesus, the way that he lived his life and ministered to people along the way. He lived a life of the highest form of unselfish service, the supreme devotion of the full bestowal of a righteous life in the service of wholehearted ministry.

The last paragraph in the book underscores the enduring nature of all that is true, beautiful, and good, and the value of the Father concept when conceptualizing God. "Only the spirit content of any value is imperishable. Even that which is true, beautiful, and good may not perish in human experience. If man does not choose to survive, then does the Indwelling Spirit conserve those realities born of love and nurtured in service. And all these things are a part of the Universal Father. The Father is living love, and this life of the Father is in his Sons. And the spirit of the Father is in his Sons’ sons – mortal men. When all is said and done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God."

A commission of spiritual beings from many universe levels of reality, or dimensions, wrote this revelation. To think about dimensions, consider the qualities of water. Boil the water, and it turns to steam, evaporating from our eyesight. Beneficent spiritual beings (who each have a unique personality) are all around us, but we can not usually see them because they are in higher dimensions of reality. The personalities that wrote The Urantia Book are from the dimension right above our material reality all the way up to the Paradise dimension, where the Universal Father, the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit dwell. It’s fascinating to find that as we grow spiritually, our understanding of The Urantia Book increases.

The Urantia Book materialized in the mid 1930’s by a phenomenon that cannot be comprehended by us. The group of people that saw the handwritten papers did not understand how it got here.The real test of The Urantia Book is for each reader to study it with an open mind, to allow the Spirit of Truth to assure that person of the highest truth, universal beauty, and greatest goodness found within this revelation.