Joseph Fielding Smith disagreed with the Prophet and changed the word co-equal to co-eternal in the book that he wrote. (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith)
However, this is where a member of the Kingdom can never be deceived because when I prayed about what Joseph Fielding Smith said to contradict the Prophet Joseph Smith I was told that the Prophet Joseph Smith was correct and Joseph Fielding Smith was the one that was erroneous. I also knew that the prophet Joseph Smith said that a spirit is eternal in nature and exists upon a self-existant principle and there was no creation about it.
Adding the three things together I can see that the only time in man's eternal history that we could have been totally equal with the God that first created man was the time before man ever came on the scene, or when we were all one of the spirit entities known as Intelligence.
As I was reading the verse in St. John I felt the spirit come over me and give me a totally different interpretation for this next verse than I had ever heard before.
Adam is our Father and our God, and the only God with which we have to do.St. John 1: 1 In the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was with God, and the WORD was GOD.
I took that to mean that an Intelligence had created some sort of means by which after using it, HE broke the awesome silence of the world of Intelligence by vocalizing the first word that resounded throughout the vast corridors of space.
Intelligence must not have had any of the senses that are common to man, otherwise they would have learned billions of millenniums ago the way to iteract with one another without commiting any act that would cause that individual or himself pain or suffering.
It is God work and glory to teach all men to live righteously, but just imagine an Intelligence being given all the powers that are common to man today, such as speaking, hearing, touching, seeing and so on, after never having such an experience. Just ponder how any individual would act when first feeling all the desires, appetites, and passions, that are common to man but uncommon to Intelligence.
If any Intelligence would have found the power to communicate wouldn't he then have all that was necessary to command. Would you believe it would be possible for that individual to create a biological computer for him to inhabit so as to be the first of the human family as Brigham Young so adamantly stated in Brigham Young's Journal of Discourses on page 50 just ten line under where he said;
The Adam of the first world, IF this is true, would be the only Adam ever created actually from the elements of the earth. All other people were figuratively created as is stated in Ezekiel. That would mean that all of us would have the blood of God flowing in our veins.
I just believe our prophets, but I do pray about their interpretation of things.
grampa75