Hello theplains. Including @InCognitus
The missionaries I met with explained it this way:
- Heavenly Father, like you and everyone else on our earth, is an eternal intelligence (Abraham 3). For simplicity sake, I
will refer to Heavenly Father as John.
- John, as an eternal intelligence, was organized into a spirit child of his heaven parents. In simple terms, this would be
Jesus' grandparents.
- John, then a spirit of his heavenly parents, progressed as much as he could in his premortal home, and then he was sent
to his earth to progress further. On this other earth, John married a woman. Marriage is a requirement to be exalted to
Godhood. John and his wife became Gods (reached exaltation) after they died and were resurrected. This correlates to what
Joseph Smith taught ( ... this is the way our Heavenly Father became God).
- John is a being from everlasting to everlasting (from eternity to eternity) since he has always existed in the past and
will exist into the future, but he is not God from all eternity. This lines up with what Joseph Smith taught (... We have
imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may
see. These ideas are incomprehensible to some, but they are simple).
- After his exaltation to Godhood, John and his wife organized other eternal intelligences into their own spirit children
and they informed their children of the plan of salvation and how their children could progress and climb the ladder to
Godhood like their heavenly parents had done earlier.
- "If we passed our tests, we would receive the fulness of joy that our heavenly parents have received. We learned that if
we placed our faith in him, obeying his word and following his example, we would be exalted and become like our heavenly
parents. We would receive a fulness of joy" (Gospel Principles, 1997).