Steve
Dear Steve,
It is one thing to have an immortal body, and it is yet another thing to become a god. Not all immmortals are gods, and not all god’s have yet had the experience of mortality. Godhood is a position of ultimate authority and power. Before birth into mortality, Jesus Christ was known as Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. He was the first born of the Father in the spirit world, and because of his righteousness and intelligence he was the creator, under the direction of the Father, of the worlds. He had the strength and power while clothed with a mortal body to withstand an infinite suffering in payment for all the sins of all mankind. No man was able to kill him, yet he permitted himself to be put to death, following which, as a spirit, he had the power to cause his body to live again in a new form, never again to be subject to death. So great was this power that the effects of that resurrection accrue to all other living things.
Each of our Father’s children has the potential to grow to an eternal adulthood, i.e., to become like his Father in Heaven. That growth process includes, after our birth as spirit children to our Eternal Parents, the acquiring of a physical body by being born into mortality, growing in faith and righteousness during and after mortality, to fully and completely dominate the physical body by the power of the spirit, to overcome every temptation to evil to the extent that we become sanctified from sin, to make and live by sacred covenents available only in the holy temples of the Lord, including being sealed for eternity to a worthy companion by the power of the holy priesthood. Then we may inherit all that the Father has, and become heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17).
-Gramps
