As a Christian, I have a lot of LDS friends who want to insist that we worship the same God. It isn’t asserted right away, but it doesn’t take long in a theological discussion for this statement to come out. It’s like when you’re playing streetfighter with your friend for the first time and you’re both keeping the secret moves under your sleeve to see who pulls theirs first. Maybe you’re LDS and you’ve either said this yourself, or you’ve been taught that your God is the same as my God. If this is you, I want to communicate why they are not.

If God of the Bible is not the same as the God of the LDS faith then they couldn’t be the same person. If we both know someone named Dustin, for example, and the Dustin you know is 6’3” with blonde hair and blue eyes, and the Dustin I know is 5’6” with black hair and brown eyes; they might share a name, but the other features make it obvious that we are talking about two different people. To know if we worship the same God or not, we would only need to identify a significant difference in nature to make that conclusion.

Let’s examine the God you know: The god you know was once just like you and me. He lived in a world similar to ours, and in obedience to the redemption plan of his god in the world he was born into, your god exalted himself (eventually) into a god and that’s why he is the god you worship.

Let’s examine the God I know: The God I know has never existed as anything but God. All time, space and matter exist because he created them. All life comes from him and all beings that exist (myself included) exist because he created them. Because he is the author of life, in the most complete sense, he is the God I worship.

Now I’m going to keep my word and let you come the conclusion whether we do or do not worship the same god. If you can maintain that they are still the same god, well I admire your resolve, but, if you can agree that they are not, then you are ready to read my next blog post entitled: “Why Mine is Better”.