[The following is a letter I wrote to a friend a year ago. It repeats many ideas I have written elsewhere, it is a bit lengthy, but it is convenient to simply cut-and-paste it here.]
Jesus’ statement in the Garden of Gethsemane, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt,” is the supreme example of submission. Sacrifices are intimidating to say the least. But such submission brings a gift that comes through no other means. When we submit our wills to God’s, we receive the Holy Ghost to a greater extent, to the point that it actually begins to change us. Much has been said about receiving light in our eyes, of having Jesus’ image “graven upon our countenances” (Alma 5:19). John records Jesus’ prayer the night he entered Gethsemane: “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5). His sacrifice was linked somehow to His premortal glory.
Moses’ face shone when he came off from the mountain, and the people were so fearful that they requested he wear a veil. What was the circumstance in which this manifestation occurred? The people had just sinned by making the golden calf, and Moses was going before the Lord, pleading for the Lord to “forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written” (Deut. 32:32). In other words, Moses requested that if the Lord sent them to hell, send Moses there too. He was not just risking death; he was risking spiritual death. He was willing to give all, to die in every sense to “make an atonement for” their sin (Deut. 32:30). “And he said unto Moses, Thou canst not see my face at this time, lest mine anger be kindled against thee also, and I destroy thee, and thy people; for there shall no man among them see me at this time, and live, for they are exceeding sinful. And no sinful man hath at any time, neither shall there be any sinful man at any time, that shall see my face and live” (JST Deut. 33:20). Deut 34:30 “And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him.” Moses’ willingness to risk harm to himself, to put it all on the line, to die, preceded the radiant beams of light coming from his face.
Abinadi also scared people with the immense glory shining from his face. Abinadi begins to recite the Ten Commandments (like Moses), and King Noah decides it is time to kill him: “…now when the king had heard these words, he said unto his priests: Away with this fellow, and slay him…” Upon hearing his death sentence pronounced, Abinadi’s face begins to shine: “…the people of king Noah durst not lay their hands on him, for the Spirit of the Lord was upon him; and his face shone with exceeding luster, even as Moses’ did while in the mount of Sinai, while speaking with the Lord.” What was it that caused his face to shine? I believe it was his willingness to die. “Ye see that ye have not power to slay me, therefore I finish my message…and then it matters not whither I go, if it so be that I am saved.” He believed his life was still forfeit: “But this much I tell you, what you do with me, after this, shall be as a type and a shadow of things which are to come” (Mosiah 13:1, 5, 7-10).
There are many recorded instances when Joseph Smith’s face shone with that same kind of luster. Wilford Woodruff recorded that “he called the Twelve together the last time he spoke to us, and his face shone like amber. And upon our shoulders he rolled the burden of the Kingdom, and he gave us all the keys and powers and gifts to carry on this great and mighty work. He told us that he had received every key, every power and every gift for the salvation of the living and the dead, and he said: ‘Upon the Twelve I seal these gifts and powers and keys from henceforth and forever. No matter what may come to me. And I lay this work upon your shoulders. Take it and bear it off, and if you don’t you’ll be damned.’” President Woodruff spoke into an early phonographic recorder in 1897: “At that meeting he stood on his feet for about three hours and taught us the things of the kingdom. His face was as clear as amber, and he was clothed with a power that I had never seen in any man in the flesh before.” Joseph’s words from that same meeting: “It may be that my enemies will kill me. And in case they should and the keys and power which rest on me not be imparted to you, they will be lost from the earth. But if I can only succeed in placing them upon your heads, then let me fall a victim to murderous hands if God will suffer it, and I can go with all pleasure and satisfaction, knowing that my work is done, and the foundation laid on which the kingdom of God is to be reared in this dispensation of the fulness of times” (In Declaration of the Twelve, Brigham Young Office Files, 1832–1878, Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah).
He was willing to die. Benjamin F. Johnson recorded the following private conversation between him and Joseph: “‘Oh! I am so tired—so tired that I often feel to long for my day of rest. For what has there been in this life but tribulation for me? From a boy I have been persecuted by my enemies, and now even my friends are beginning to join them, to hate and persecute me! Why should I not wish for my time of rest?’ His words to me were ominous, and they brought a shadow as of death over my spirit, and I said: ‘Oh, Joseph! how could you think of leaving us? How as a people could we do without you?’ He saw my feelings were sorrowful and said kindly: ‘Bennie, if I were on the other side of the veil I could do many times more for my friends than I can do while I am with them here” (They Knew the Prophet: Personal Accounts From Over 100 People Who Knew Joseph Smith, Hyrum L. Andrus and Helen Mae Andrus, pg. 94).
Jesus is called “The Lamb of God,” Moses is associated with the death of the first born and the blood of the Pascal lamb, Abinadi taught from Isaiah 53 about the Savior, “…he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter…,” and Joseph Smith said “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter” (D&C 135:4).
The ability and willingness to part with one’s most precious possession seems to be a trait of God. Jesus speaks to His Father throughout the ordeal of the Atonement, yet we do not hear the Father responding. But the incident of Abraham offering Isaac gives us a symbolic look at Father in heaven during the Savior’s ordeal. Both of them were making a sacrifice, not just the Savior. Just as Abraham and Isaac were willing to go through with the sacrifice God required of them, the Father and the Son were also willing to make their Ultimate Sacrifice. Doing the right thing, no matter how painful, seems to be a trait of Godhood. God’s actions are dictated by truth, not by convenience, instinct, or comfort. For Abraham, and Jesus, the outcomes of their offering were visible with an eye of faith. God gave His Only Begotten Son, His only perfectly obedient child, for the possibility of reclaiming His other children. Abraham received a promise of unlimited posterity when he showed his willingness to offer Isaac.
We are not left out of the loop. Rev. 12:7-11 “And there was war in heaven…and Satan…was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.” How did we triumph in the war in heaven? “And [we] overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of [our] testimony; and [we] loved not [our] lives unto the death.” Jesus’ prayer for premortal glory to be restored (John 17) was also in the context of His own death and sacrifice.
Sacrifice and the Pattern of the Old Temple
The Old Temple shows us a pattern of sacrifice and reward, repeated over and over again. There are various objects and stations in the Old Temple. Each was set up to teach the people through symbolism. But it was not the familiar Menorah or the table of Shewbread the Lord ordained for His people to see day and night. It was the Altar of Sacrifice, placed right next to the gate in the open air courtyard, visible to all. This large, square platform was connected to the ground by a ramp, was almost cube-shaped, and resembled a giant barbeque grill. Blood, fire, and smoke, along with the smell of burning hair, fat, and flesh, the bleating of sheep and the bellowing of cattle, all accompanied the Altar.
It stood as a vivid reminder that if one were determined to approach God, sacrifice was a requirement. It also echoed the beginnings of the world—Jesus had to agree to pay for our sins even before creation could proceed. The blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on everything; the priest himself, and all the furniture of the Temple, even the Ark of the Covenant, were all touched by the blood. It is as if the sacrifice legitimized everything that happened from that point forward.
After the initial sacrifice, the next piece of furniture we come to is the Brazen Sea, what we would immediately recognize as a baptismal font upon twelve oxen. We sacrifice first, and then we receive a cleansing and a new birth as a reward. Smoke and blood are washed away as we emerge from the water, clean and whole and new. We abase ourselves in a prominent public place, and receive our reward in a submissive, almost hidden point representing a grave.
The Table of Shewbread is also square-shaped, and altars are sometimes called “The table of the Lord.” We know what sacrifices are connected with partaking of the sacrament—a kind of intermediate righteousness in which we struggle with less carnal commandments. No one who murders or commits sexual sins, or is dishonest, can partake of the bread and water. But those who struggle with the refining process, giving up profane language, taking the gospel seriously, getting out of bed early, not overeating, and other mid-range sins, partake of the sacrament to get a weekly wash and a fresh start. We evaluate our progress at giving up the little sins that cause us to stumble. We remember the Savior, and our great dependence on Him to be saved.
The sacrifice associated with partaking of bread and water is followed, in the Old Temple, by a massive increase in light—the Candlestick, or Menorah, representing the Tree of Life. Made of solid gold, its seven lamps burn olive oil continuously. Water, or refreshing and cleansing and rebirth are the reward for our first offering; oil, the substance used to anoint kings, and the light it produces, is our reward for our intermediate offering.
The next offering is one of prayer and unity. The process of going through the Temple to this point has been one of getting cleaned up—shedding sins at the Altar and the Table, and receiving washing and light in return. Now we come to another altar, the Altar of Incense, a miniature version of the giant Altar of Sacrifice outside. The Table had twelve loaves of bread, one for each tribe. There were also twelve rocks of incense on the Table. When we are clean enough, what we have left to offer God is clean enough to be used to build, rather than be destroyed. Sacrifice is destructive (throw away those movies, books, magazines, friendships, behaviors, etc.) Consecration is constructive, because what is left behind is so refined that the Lord can actually use it to build something.
The priest would enter the Temple and put stones of incense on the Altar of Incense. All twelve tribes were symbolically offered up in this manner. The outer Altar was smoking black and noisy, covered in blood and hair. This inner Altar was quiet, private, and the smoke was white and sweet, ascending up before the veil of the Temple separating the Holy of Holies from everything else. The priest would pray for himself, for Israel, and for the strangers who knew not God. This prayer was offered day and night. Zachariah was offering this prayer at the Altar of Incense when Gabriel appeared and told him that he and his wife were healed of their infertility. Consecration involves offering our all to God in order to build up his kingdom, and Zachariah and Elizabeth got that opportunity.
The reward for this last sacrifice is the presence of Jehovah Himself. One day of the year, the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies, and the elements of each sacrifice were present. Blood from the outer Altar, incense from the Table lit with the fire of the inner Altar, were present in the Holy of Holies. The blood was placed on the Ark, and the smoking incense was put through the veil in a pan to fill the room with smoke. The room was entirely dark, but the High Priest would enter, and if the all was well in the ordinances of the Temple, the Shekinah, the presence of Jehovah, would light the darkness of the room. (The admitted differences between Solomon’s Temple and the Temple of Herod were 1. The absence of the Ark, and 2. The absence of God’s presence.)
Sacrifice, reward, sacrifice, reward—that was the pattern of the Old Temple.
Sacrifice and the First Principles and Ordinances
Sacrifice requires faith in God. If all action is dependent on faith, how much more is the action which requires submission and childlike trust towards Father in Heaven? Our faith in Christ leads us to make a sacrifice “in the similitude of the Only Begotten” (D&C 138:13).
Repentance and sacrifices are inextricably bound up, not only because repentance involves giving up sin, but because of the requirements of the plan of salvation. Moses 5:4-9 “And Adam and Eve, his wife, called upon the name of the Lord, and they heard the voice of the Lord from…the Garden of Eden…And he gave unto them commandments, that they should worship the Lord their God, and should offer the firstlings of their flocks, for an offering unto the Lord. And Adam was obedient unto the commandments of the Lord. And after many days an angel of the Lord appeared unto Adam, saying: Why dost thou offer sacrifices unto the Lord? And Adam said unto him: I know not, save the Lord commanded me. And then the angel spake, saying: This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father, which is full of grace and truth. Wherefore, thou shalt do all that thou doest in the name of the Son, and thou shalt repent and call upon God in the name of the Son forevermore. And in that day the Holy Ghost fell upon Adam, which beareth record of the Father and the Son, saying: I am the Only Begotten of the Father from the beginning, henceforth and forever, that as thou hast fallen thou mayest be redeemed, and all mankind, even as many as will.” We are to sacrifice, not matter how righteous we seem by comparison to others. Our repentance and sacrifice link us to the Atonement.
Baptism requires a sacrifice. It represents the death of the old man, and the resurrection or birth of a new man. It represents a bath, a cleansing from sin. It also denotes great humility, since being dipped backwards in water is an extremely compromising position. The sacrificial animals in the Old Temple were washed at various ceremonial lavers by the priests before they were offered. Jesus (THE Lamb of God, the actual Sacrifice for sin) was also baptized by an Aaronic priest, John the Baptist. John bore witness that Jesus was in fact the Lamb, and was called to do so.
Our ability to obey the commandment, “…receive the Holy Ghost,” is directly tied to our willingness to sacrifice. We no longer shed blood when we offer sacrifices. (Killing a sheep back then was parting with wealth, a source of livelihood and life itself; food, clothing, and status were proportional to the size of one’s flocks. Imagine driving a new car into the parking lot of the Temple, and having a deacon flip a switch to crush it into a cube of scrap metal.) 3Ne. 9:19-20 “And ye shall offer up unto me no more the shedding of blood; yea, your sacrifices and your burnt offerings shall be done away, for I will accept none of your sacrifices and your burnt offerings. And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, him will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost, even as the Lamanites, because of their faith in me at the time of their conversion, were baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost, and they knew it not.” I know of only one phrase in the scriptures that uses stronger language to describe the reception of the Holy Ghost. D&C 109:13-15 “And that all people who shall enter upon the threshold of the Lord’s house may feel thy power, and feel constrained to acknowledge that thou hast sanctified it…And that they may grow up in thee, and receive a fulness of the Holy Ghost…” (emphasis added). Notice the shift from outward, public sacrifice, to an inward, deeper one? This is characteristic of all Jesus’ modifications to the old law—he intensifies the commandments by making them a matter of the mind and heart as well as behavior. “Don’t commit murder” is easy—“Don’t get angry” requires much more of us. This shift reflects Aaronic and Melchizedek functions—Aaronic is outward ordinances, Melchizedek, inner.
Willing Sacrifice and a Changed Heart
Humility does not generate homogeneity. This attitude sets the greatest leaders and prophets in the kingdom apart from others. It is one thing you can point to, amidst people of different mindsets, professions, and gifts, as a common element. Below are some quotes from modern prophets that reflect their submission to God. Notice how each quote embodies humility, yet the individual expressing the submission gives it his own personal flavor.
Joseph Smith
“I made this my rule: When the Lord commands, do it” (Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church, 2:170).
President Thomas S. Monson
“The sweetest experience I know in life is to feel a prompting and act upon it and later find out that it was the fulfillment of someone’s prayer or someone’s need. And I always want the Lord to know that if He needs an errand run, Tom Monson will run that errand for Him” (President Monson, “On the Lord’s Errand”).
Gordon B. Hinckley
President Hinckley’s struggles as a missionary are well known, but only half of the story is told. Some mistake his father’s letter for the punch line of the story—that President Hinckley, through his own strength and diligence, gritted his teeth and pulled himself up by his bootstraps through his tireless work ethic. His penchant for tireless work was real, but that is not the main point. He described what happened:
“When I arrived there I was not well. I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere in the missionary work. I became discouraged. I wrote a letter to my father and said ‘I’m wasting my time and your money. I don’t see any point in my staying here. And in due time a letter came back from him, in which he simply said, ‘Dear Gordon, I have your letter of such-and-such a date. I have only one suggestion: Forget yourself and go to work.’”
“I pondered that, and next morning in our scripture class, we read that great statement of the Lord: ‘He that saveth his life shall lose it; he that loseth his life for my sake and the Gospel’s shall find it.’ It touched me—that statement, that promise, in conjunction with my father’s letter, prompted me to go upstairs in the little bedroom at 15 Wadham Road, Preston, Lancashire where we lived, and get on my knees and make a covenant with the Lord that I would try to forget myself and go to work. I count that as the day of decision in my life. Everything good that’s happened to me since then, I can trace back to the decision I made at that time” (From the video Gordon B. Hinckley: Man of Integrity). Another description of the experience gives further insight: “That July day in 1933 was my day of decision. A new light came into my life and a new joy into my heart. The fog of England seemed to lift, and I saw the sunlight. I had a rich and wonderful mission experience, for which I shall ever be grateful” (“Taking the Gospel to Britain: A Declaration of Vision, Faith, Courage, and Truth,” Ensign, July 1987, 7). He met the qualification of a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and was subsequently baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost.
President Boyd K. Packer
“I’ve found in my life that it has been critically important that this was established between me and the Lord so that I knew that He knew which way I had committed my agency. I went before Him and in essence said, ‘I’m not neutral, and You can do with me what You want. If You need my vote, it’s there. I don’t care what You do with me, and You don’t have to take anything from me because I give it to You—everything, all I own, all I am.’ And that makes the difference.” (President Boyd K. Packer, That All May Be Edified, pg. 272).
“Just after my call as a General Authority 16 years ago, in a stake conference where I accompanied President Boyd K. Packer, he said something I have not forgotten. As he addressed the congregation, he said, ‘I know who I am.’ Then after a pause, he added, ‘I am a nobody.’ He then turned to me, sitting on the stand behind him, and said, ‘And, Brother Andersen, you are a nobody too.’ Then he added these words: ‘If you ever forget it, the Lord will remind you of it instantly, and it won’t be pleasant.’” (President Packer, quoted by Elder Anderson, “Come Unto Him,” April 2009 General Conference).
President Henry B. Erying
“We are safe on the rock which is the Savior when we have yielded in faith in Him, have responded to the Holy Spirit’s direction to keep the commandments long enough and faithfully enough that the power of the Atonement has changed our hearts. When we have, by that experience, become as a child in our capacity to love and obey, we are on the sure foundation.
“From King Benjamin we learn what we can do to take us to that safe place. But remember: the things we do are the means, not the end we seek. What we do allows the Atonement of Jesus Christ to change us into what we must be. Our faith in Jesus Christ brings us to repentance and to keeping His commandments. We obey and we resist temptation by following the promptings of the Holy Ghost. In time our natures will change. We will become as a little child, obedient to God and more loving. That change, if we do all we must to keep it, will qualify us to enjoy the gifts which come through the Holy Ghost. Then we will be safe on the only sure rock.
“Like you, I have felt what King Benjamin meant when he said that we could become like a little child before God. I have prayed, as you have, to know what to do when choices that I faced would have eternal consequences. Over many years I have seen a recurring pattern in the times when the answers to such a prayer have come most clearly.
“Once, for instance, I prayed through the night to know what I was to choose to do in the morning. I knew that no other choice could have had a greater effect on the lives of others and on my own. I knew what choice looked most comfortable to me. I knew what outcome I wanted. But I could not see the future. I could not see which choice would lead to which outcome. So the risk of being wrong seemed too great to me.
“I prayed, but for hours there seemed to be no answer. Just before dawn, a feeling came over me. More than at any time since I had been a child, I felt like one. My heart and my mind seemed to grow very quiet. There was a peace in that inner stillness.
“Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself praying, ‘Heavenly Father, it doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t care anymore what I want. I only want that Thy will be done. That is all that I want. Please tell me what to do.'"
(Conditional surrender is not surrender at all in this context. Our submission cannot have conditions and stipulations and price tags all over it.)
“In that moment I felt as quiet inside as I had ever felt. And the message came, and I was sure who it was from. It was clear what I was to do. I received no promise of the outcome. There was only the assurance that I was a child who had been told what path led to whatever He wanted for me” (President Eyring, “As a Child,” April 2006 General Conference).
Ezra T. Benson
“Men and women who turn their lives over to God will find out that he can make a lot more out of their lives than they can. He will deepen their joys, expand their vision, quicken their minds, strengthen their muscles, lift their spirits, multiply their blessings, increase their opportunities, comfort their souls, raise up friends, and pour out peace. Whoever will lost his life to God will find he has eternal life” (President Benson, New Era, May 1975, p. 20).
Wilford Woodruff
“Be it known that I Willford Woodruff do freely covenant with my God that I freely consecrate and dedicate myself together with all my properties and affects unto the Lord for the purpose of assisting in building up his kingdom even Zion on the earth that I may keep his law and lay all things before the bishop of his Church that I may be a lawful heir to the Kingdom of God even the Celestial Kingdom,” and then lists his property (Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1:16, Dec. 31, 1834). (This was the first anniversary of his baptism.) “I made a firm resolution that I would seek the Lord to know His will, to keep His commandments, and to follow the dictates of His Holy Spirit….I was determined to…spend my future life in the maintenance of these convictions” (Wilford Woodruff, His Life and Labors, 26-27).
Brigham Young
“I have heard a great many tell about what they have suffered for Christ’s sake. I am happy to say I never had occasion to. I have enjoyed a great deal, but so far as suffering goes I have compared it a great many times, in my feelings and before congregations, to a man wearing an old, worn-out, tattered and dirty coat, and somebody comes along and gives him one that is new, whole and beautiful. This is the comparison I draw when I think of what I have suffered for the Gospel’s sake—I have thrown away an old coat and have put on a new one” (Discourses of Brigham Young, 348).
These are modern examples of prophets with submissive, humble, obedient attitudes. There are also venerable non-priesthood holders who express this attitude of submission. Scripture records this attitude of humility in sacrifice. When Mary was hailed by Gabriel, she also submitted to the Lord’s will for her. Her response echoes her Son’s later statement of submission to God’s will: “…Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). Again, each person listed above puts their signature spin on the central principle of submissiveness and humble obedience to the Lord.
Unprofitable Servants
God owns everything already. Why are we asked to give Him things? In all this giving, offering, and sacrificing, the thing the Lord wants is us, our whole being, our total love and devotion. Things we offering as sacrifices are things He already possesses. Giving them up shows ourselves and the Lord that we love Him more than what we part with at His request. This is the idea of a “heave” offering. You take the item and throw it over a wall into an enclosure, showing you no longer have access to it. The Lord can take anything from us, whether it is on our side of the wall or not. Our agency is inviolable to Him; that is what He is really after, the only thing we really CAN give Him. The worth of gold and silver, sheep and cattle and oxen and cars and money is negligible to the creator and owner of stars and planets. But the worth of souls is great in the eyes of God.
William Tyndale expressed it beautifully, that sense of unconditional surrender to the Lord, and the acknowledgement that we are “unprofitable servants.” As difficult as our sacrifices may seem to us, we really are not doing anything for the Lord He cannot already do for Himself. King Benjamin calls us “unprofitable servants” even when we are giving our best. Tyndale says, “Faith, when she prayeth, setteth not her good deeds before her, saying, ‘Lord, for my good deeds do this or that’; nor bargaineth with God, saying ‘Lord, grant me this, or do this or that, and I will do this or that for thee,’…But she setteth her infirmities and her lack before her face, and God’s promises, saying, ‘Lord, for thy mercy and truth, which thou hast sworn, be merciful unto me’” (S. Michael Wilcox, Fire In The Bones: William Tyndale, Martyr, Father of the English Bible, pg. 101). All things are God’s anyway; He is just asking us to return a few of them to Him to show we love Him more than the things we are sacrificing. (Often the Lord will give us more after one sacrifice, and see if we are willing to then give THAT up; this can go on over a lifetime.)
Notice also in Tyndale’s quote the absence of any conditions for sacrifice. Daniel 3:5-12 “Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of…all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?” 14-18 ...if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” They are in fact cast into the furnace, AND delivered from it. Verse 25: “Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” Mosiah 24:14 “And I will also ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders, that even you cannot feel them upon your backs, even while you are in bondage; and this will I do that ye may stand as witnesses for me hereafter, and that ye may know of a surety that I, the Lord God, do visit my people in their afflictions.”
The real opportunity of sacrifice is not God’s; it is ours. “For this cause came I into the world,” said Jesus of His own sacrifice, and it is the same test we are undergoing. Abr. 3:25 “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.” The antecedent for “herewith” is the materials of which this earth is made, including the elements of our mortal bodies. Do we horde them, love them, and serve them, or do we subordinate that tendency in favor of God’s commands? This life is our time to prove our willingness to do that very thing, though the opportunity to demonstrate loyalty to God is rarely mentioned in talks about trails and pain. Occasionally, we get a happy physical body, and a joyful Father in heaven, at the same time. But in sacrifice, God pulls us in one direction, the flesh pulls us in another direction, and we must sacrifice one to hold onto the other.
Sacrifice Makes Obedience Real
All sacrifice is obedience, but not all obedience is sacrifice. If we get some strange command from the prophet, such as “Everyone is to wear blue on their person every Sabbath,” we shrug our shoulders, ask why, but we wear blue anyway. “No big deal,” we say. But if the prophet were to say, “Ice cream is prohibited under the Word of Wisdom,” how many of us would surrender our recommends rather than comply? “Ouch! That’s hard!” Sacrifice makes obedience real to us, vivid in our hearts and minds. It calls on us to assess our priorities. How is my heart organized? Is the Lord at the top of the pile, or is he subordinate to my affections for this or that thing?
I believe spiritual rebirth is a process for most people, not because we are waiting for the Lord, but because the Lord is waiting for us to reach the point where we are willing to give up anything in preference to Him. The instant we meet that qualification, we are reborn. Alma the Younger and Lamoni’s Father are examples of this. They deposited their whole soul, sincerely, in the Lord’s hands, and were immediately blessed with instantaneous rebirth. The rest of us mumble and fumble, halting between two opinions, and the Lord marks our progress as we reorder our hearts with Him at the front of the line.
Upon understanding this idea—rebirth is a function of our willingness to give all—we may be tempted to think that we can make a one-time convenient deposit of our own choosing, and “get it over with.” But a broken heart and a contrite spirit means giving our whole self, including our futures. That means that we are always on call. We cannot make a one-time deposit, and then go out to play.
The Lord can ask for sacrifices through Church leaders, as at Kirtland:
“Now go with me to a place called Kirtland, Ohio, and recall that on one occasion when the people are asking ‘Why, O why when we hardly have enough for hominy and milk do we have to build a temple? What is a temple? And why at such great cost?’ At one point the prophet replied, ‘The Angel Gabriel couldn’t explain it to you now. But have faith and continue and the Lord will make it plain.’ Well, according to the late Elder John A. Widtsoe, the cost of that building, using the measuring rod of the widow’s mite—what they had proportional to what they gave—the Kirtland Temple cost more per capita than any building in American religious history. An unprecedented sacrifice! That sacrifice was met, as you all know, with an unprecedented outpouring of the Lord’s Spirit” (The Temple and the Atonement, Truman G. Madsen, Abridged from a lecture delivered in Saratoga, California, October 16, 1994).
The outpouring of the Spirit and heavenly manifestations are proportional to the magnitude of the sacrifice.
Also, the Lord demands specific, tailor-made sacrifices of individuals. We do not determine what or when we sacrifice to the Lord. (Cain paid dearly for trying to sacrifice, yet not at the Lord’s request.) We must stand like waiters in a restaurant, and wait upon the Lord. We hand Him the menu of our possessions, time, talents, bodies, and everything else, and wait for Him to pick something. Often he will ask, through the Holy Ghost, for the thing we are least ready to part with. “Don’t attend that college, refuse that scholarship, don’t date that person,” are all potential sacrifices the Lord can ask us to make through the still small voice of the Spirit. And we can argue that there is nothing bad about them. Indeed, education and marriage are commandments, things we must wisely pursue. But there is one law that trumps all others—obedience to God. Nephi and Abraham were asked to take human life rather than follow the injunctions of the written law, and they followed that voice of the Spirit as though it were commandment from Sinai on stone tablets, or booming voice from the sky.
“God will feel after you, and He will take hold of you and wrench your very heart strings, and, if you cannot stand it you will not be fit for an inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom of God” (Joseph Smith, quoted by John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, 24:264). Sacrifice often means giving up good things as well as sins.
Abraham is the greatest mortal example of this. How could he kill his own son at God’s request? He was not just sacrificing Isaac, but all the house of Israel (we were on that altar too!). Sarah would have left Abraham. All of their converts would have rejected the Gospel on hearing what Abraham had done to his miraculously-born son. What kept that knife suspended in the air? “How could Abraham undertake the task?...How did his heart not break? How did not…Abraham…fall dead on the altar?...It is by the power of faith he stands there, the knife…raised to strike” (W. P. F. Noble, quoted by E. Douglas Clark, “The Blessings of Abraham,” pg 214-15).
We do not determine what or when we sacrifice to the Lord. But the more willing we are to sacrifice, the more we become like the Lord. I believe that the essence of humility is strict deference to the truth. Whatever the truth indicates is best, that is what God does. Eternity, worlds, bodies, lives, pain, sacrifice, all conform to invisible, weightless, intangible truth. You cannot hold a pound of truth. What does it smell like? Yet it is the hinge on which eternity swings. (Compare that to our world, wherein the truth is mutilated to accommodate anything, to deceive and get rich and powerful, to avoid discomfort and sacrifice.) But in heaven, truth is followed with exactness, and the result is the discomfort of sacrifice. God and Christ did not want to sacrifice, but they knew that for God to give His Only Begotten, and for Him to Suffer, would ultimately lead to the most good down the road. They could see the end result of the sacrifice before it was visible materially in the present. Faith precedes our sacrifices, too.
Isaiah 53:11 “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.” There is the sacrifice.
12 “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” There is the payoff—we, His children, are able to be saved from sin.
John 3:14-16 “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Love for us was the motivation behind the great and last sacrifice, and it is easy to forget that it was our pain Jesus was bearing in the garden and on the cross. Perfect love casts out fear; maybe that is what propels us through the sacrifices we are called on to make—the intimidation is real, but the love for God and others gives us courage to face our sacrifices.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Solid Works, Liquid Grace
Elder Bednar seemed to confuse everyone by saying that the mighty change of heart mentioned in Mosiah 5:2 "...is not simply the result of working harder or developing greater individual discipline. Rather, it is the consequence of a fundamental change in our desires, our motives, and our natures made possible through the Atonement of Christ the Lord” (Clean Hands and a Pure Heart, Oct. 2007 General Conference). This was Mormon heresy—to imply that there were important parts of salvation beyond the scope of our individual effort. Rather than ask questions, the majority of members seemed to sweep this statement under the rug. I believe there is a divine "division of labor"—things we do, and things only the Lord can do. Changing our behavior is something we can do ("deny yourselves of all ungodliness"). Changing our natures is something only God can do. While we must "work out our salvation," we also find many moments when the Lord has prepared gifts for us to take, free of charge.
Grace and Works in the Old Temple
I am slightly obsessed with the Old Temple, partly because there is so much we can learn from it about our modern Temples, and the gospel in general. It gives a 3D feel to abstract principles. If you follow the floor plan of the Old Temple, it seems that the pattern is sacrifice, reward, sacrifice, reward, sacrifice, reward. We surrender one thing, and God blesses us with another thing in return. Sacrifices occur at altars, rectangular stands or tables, in the Temple. The enormous Altar of Sacrifice is the first altar, the Table of Shewbread (also rectangular; see Mal. 1:7, 12) is the second; the small Altar of incense is third; the Ark of the Covenant may also represent an altar. We sacrifice at altars, but there are other articles of furniture in the Temple. To me, they seem to denote a response by God to our sacrifice.
For one who has just sacrificed a ram, lamb, ox, or pigeons on the Altar of Sacrifice, nine thousand gallons of water are provided in the Brazen Sea to wash blood and ash from skin and cloth. Both of these items are in the courtyard where all may see them.
Inside the building, we are first greeted by another altar, the Table of Shewbread. Bread is the quintessential food of civilization. It represents work. Adam was commanded to obtain bread by sweat. To cultivate grain and turn it into bread requires all the trappings of civilization. It requires knowledge of the seasons, in other words, a calendar, which implies written communication. It requires irrigation, which means settling in houses near rivers or lakes. It means plowing, which requires technology sufficient to build a plow, as well as domestication of livestock. It means sowing, continued watering, control of pests, harvesting, winnowing, storage in silos, grinding, leavening, and baking. These activities imply fire-based technology, metallurgy, and especially an economy, since those who do all this work need to eat something other than the grain they are cultivating to stay alive. An economy is a network of agreements about how labor will be expended to produce, distribute, and consume commodities; one man alone could not grow, tend, and harvest a massive field of grain. The Book of Mormon tells us measures of grain were used to determine weights of gold and silver, a good idea since grains are fairly consistent in size.
All these connotations are worldly, telestial in nature. Elder Oaks interprets the statement that “Satan desireth to have you, that he may sift you as wheat,” to mean that Satan wants to make us mediocre, wants to deactivate the miraculous operation of the Spirit in our lives, and rob us of our spiritual gifts thereby. “We had become weak like unto our brethren,” laments Mormon of his godless soldiers. To make bread is to toil with one’s face to the ground, eeking out mortal subsistence as a cog in the worldly economy presided over largely by Satan. To become bread is to be destroyed through becoming commonplace, relying on the arm of the flesh.
Work and toil are good for us, but do they get us to heaven? I believe the layout of the Old Temple gives us a hint about that. Just as there are twelve tribes in Israel, so there are twelve loaves of showbread on the Table. That represents each tribe sitting down together, and (I believe) learning etiquette, table manners. Sharing, saying “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me,” and so on, and their worldly corollaries of politeness towards God and man, are all implied.
We take the sacrament each week of our lives, which shows us how universal the command to repent is, and how long we must often spend on the plateau of what Elder Maxwell called “reasonable righteousness.” We are neither committing murder, nor are we walking on water. But please do not confuse this with permanence; there is a quantum bump coming our way, if we stay in this path of work.
Immediately after the Table comes the Menorah, a representation of the Tree of Life. While bread is a labor-intensive food, fruit is a gift of God. Trees bear fruit of their own accord; when it ripens, we pick it and eat it. To me there is one potential symbolism that is obvious—works and grace. But this tree, the Menorah, has no literal fruit on it. Instead, it has seven glowing lamps powered by olive oil. While Adam was commanded to toil for bread, Jesus was the source of what this oil symbolizes. He suffered in Gethsemane, literally “Oil Press.” The sheer pressure necessary in the process of extracting oil from olives is symbolic of the weight of our sins bearing down on Christ. Light itself is the fruit we pick from this golden tree. Lehi’s dream gives us a closer look at the Tree of Life, and he tells us that the fruit was “sweet above all that was sweet, pure above all that is pure, white above all that is white.” Lehi stooped down and ate freely, no fee, no toiling. Could Lehi have grown such a tree through any human means anyway?
It seems to me that the four main liquids associated with the Old Temple (water, wine, blood, and olive oil) are all related to grace, to the things God does for us that we cannot do for ourselves. It also seems to me that the solids associated with the Temple (flesh, bread, and incense) are mainly symbolic of our human efforts or works. Sheep and the other animals roasted on the Altar were bred, raised, defended, etc., through human efforts on farms or in pastures. Though the blood was part of the animal, its blood was shed as a proxy for the priest who slew the animal, vicarious and merciful intervention. Rather than die for our own sins, another takes our place. The blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on everything in the Temple, legitimizing everything that happened there from that point forward. (Another ingredient, intangible though it is, gave legitimacy to the ceremonies, namely, a broken heart and a contrite spirit.)
Grace in the Sacrament
Just because we are getting gifts for free does not mean they were not paid for. Jesus died for us, and His blood was shed on our behalf. (He "trod the winepress alone.") We memorialize this sacrifice each week when we take the sacrament. The prayer on the bread binds us to “take his name upon us,” “always remember him,” and “keep his commandments which he has given [us].” In return for all this effort, we are promised to “always have his Spirit to be with [us].” Chewing bread is not unpleasant, but it requires work. We eat little pieces of bread, but imagine Jesus’ disciples eating a larger portion, part of a dry, unleavened pita loaf used in the Passover. After following His command to “eat,” the only thing I would be able to think about after trying to down that dry loaf would be liquid refreshment.
In the prayer on the water (wine was used by Jesus), we merely witness that we are willing to “always remember him.” In return, we are told that for simply thinking about Him, we “may have his Spirit to be with [us].” Our promise here is only to remember, without the harder works; His promise is not to always have His Spirit, but to simply have his Spirit. What happens when we are struggling to chew that dry bread? We have sweet, colorful, salubrious wine (or clear water) to ease the passage. What happens when our ability to take His name upon us and keep His commandments is weak? When we struggle, it is still easy to look in His direction, to remember Him, and even if we do not receive a fullness of His Spirit, we still get a portion. This means we have access to grace. Just as drinking wine or water makes eating dry bread easier, so grace makes our works possible, even enjoyable. Wine, if fermented properly, might have also soothed jangled nerves. As a community, we demonstrate our dependence on the Lord each week by partaking of the emblems of water and bread.
The good Samaritan poured oil and wine, an emollient and a disinfectant, into the wounds of the man on the roadside.
The Spring of Life
Water in the Old Temple may have appeared as food on the Table, but it is most prominently a cleansing agent there. Where does water come from? The sun heats the ocean, clouds form, pass over mountains, and fall as rain. Rain fills lakes and streams, and all civilizations are built around these bodies of fresh water.
What is round, filled with water, and is meant to contain an entire human being? The Egyptians might have answered “the eye.” It can see an entire person at once. “The womb” is another correct answer; each of us spends nine months before birth floating in water. The baptismal font, the Brazen Sea, is another answer to the riddle. Immersion in water, and reemergence, represent birth, bath, and burial. Like the sacrament prayers, the words of the baptismal ordinance refer to the mortals participating in the ordinance. The baptizer calls the one being baptized by name, refers to himself as a representative acting in the name of Jesus Christ, and performs the ordinance in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The one blessing the sacrament refers to self and others with the pronouns “we” and “they,” but still prays in the name of Jesus Christ, and refers to God the Eternal Father, His Son, and the Spirit.
In a sense, it is all grace; a roasted lamb commemorates Jesus’ sacrifice; we call to remembrance His body when we eat the bread. To participate in any ordinance at the request of our Father in Heaven is to be privileged to shed the sense of being lost, and to acquire the sense of having one’s ladder propped against the correct wall.
It seems to me that the liquids of prominence in the Old Temple are still rife with their original imagery. Incense has no ceremonial use in or out of modern Temples, but we can still learn from its use in the Old. On the Table were twelve stones of incense. I do not know if those specific twelve stones were burned, or left as reminders, but incense was burned morning and evening, as part of the daily prayers in the Temple. Zacharias was offering such a prayer when Gabriel appeared and announced that he and Elizabeth were healed of their infertility, and would have a son named John, a forerunner to the Messiah. The twelve stones (one for each tribe) imply that everyone is involved, even if the priest is the only one inside the building. In other words, we are sacrificing ourselves. Notice the difference between the first altar and the third; one is drenched in blood, smells of animals and smoke, is noisy and public; the other is private, small, orderly, with delicious scented, clean white smoke. The outer sacrifice is for sin; the inner sacrifice is giving all we have to God, after it has been cleansed from sin and is therefore worthy of acceptance. One sacrifice per sinner outside; one sacrifice representing everyone inside.
After the priest offers this incense, there is a reward, but it was only reaped one day of the entire year in the Old Temple, on the Day of Atonement. The priest went into the Holy of Holies to meet the Lord and find out whether all their sacrifices and ordinances were acceptable in His sight. I find it interesting that the Lord loves his children, but under the special circumstances of mortal probation, He only interacts directly with us when official business warrants it. Yes, the Father and the Son appeared to Joseph in part because they loved Him, and He felt that love buoy him up for the rest of his life. But the fuller purpose of that visit was not just to console a nervous teen about his salvation—they answered His prayer to reestablish their true church on the earth, a work that would affect billions. It seems to me that the Lord follows that pattern in the intimate manifestations to His servants. They are enfolded in light, love, and joy; they overcome the fall, and bask in the joy of His countenance. But there are formal, official reasons behind the loving kindness—and so, if we want to be close to the Lord, to have miraculous experiences, we must be on the Lord’s errand.
Adam was forcibly removed from God’s presence, and (probably) learned to love it by its absence. Only in his old age did Adam once again experience a direct visitation from the Savior, but that was when Adam prophesied about his posterity, down to the latest generation. If the Old Temple seems formal or stuffy, or outright bizarre, remember that in the process of contracting all this business, the Lord was required to appear, if only to put His stamp of approval and make the formality officially acceptable. “In the ordinances…the power of godliness is manifest.” I wonder if maybe the Lord uses the necessity of legalistic contracts and covenant-making to piggy-back opportunities just to spend time with us, to interact with His sons and daughters.
Grace and Works in the Old Temple
I am slightly obsessed with the Old Temple, partly because there is so much we can learn from it about our modern Temples, and the gospel in general. It gives a 3D feel to abstract principles. If you follow the floor plan of the Old Temple, it seems that the pattern is sacrifice, reward, sacrifice, reward, sacrifice, reward. We surrender one thing, and God blesses us with another thing in return. Sacrifices occur at altars, rectangular stands or tables, in the Temple. The enormous Altar of Sacrifice is the first altar, the Table of Shewbread (also rectangular; see Mal. 1:7, 12) is the second; the small Altar of incense is third; the Ark of the Covenant may also represent an altar. We sacrifice at altars, but there are other articles of furniture in the Temple. To me, they seem to denote a response by God to our sacrifice.
For one who has just sacrificed a ram, lamb, ox, or pigeons on the Altar of Sacrifice, nine thousand gallons of water are provided in the Brazen Sea to wash blood and ash from skin and cloth. Both of these items are in the courtyard where all may see them.
Inside the building, we are first greeted by another altar, the Table of Shewbread. Bread is the quintessential food of civilization. It represents work. Adam was commanded to obtain bread by sweat. To cultivate grain and turn it into bread requires all the trappings of civilization. It requires knowledge of the seasons, in other words, a calendar, which implies written communication. It requires irrigation, which means settling in houses near rivers or lakes. It means plowing, which requires technology sufficient to build a plow, as well as domestication of livestock. It means sowing, continued watering, control of pests, harvesting, winnowing, storage in silos, grinding, leavening, and baking. These activities imply fire-based technology, metallurgy, and especially an economy, since those who do all this work need to eat something other than the grain they are cultivating to stay alive. An economy is a network of agreements about how labor will be expended to produce, distribute, and consume commodities; one man alone could not grow, tend, and harvest a massive field of grain. The Book of Mormon tells us measures of grain were used to determine weights of gold and silver, a good idea since grains are fairly consistent in size.
All these connotations are worldly, telestial in nature. Elder Oaks interprets the statement that “Satan desireth to have you, that he may sift you as wheat,” to mean that Satan wants to make us mediocre, wants to deactivate the miraculous operation of the Spirit in our lives, and rob us of our spiritual gifts thereby. “We had become weak like unto our brethren,” laments Mormon of his godless soldiers. To make bread is to toil with one’s face to the ground, eeking out mortal subsistence as a cog in the worldly economy presided over largely by Satan. To become bread is to be destroyed through becoming commonplace, relying on the arm of the flesh.
Work and toil are good for us, but do they get us to heaven? I believe the layout of the Old Temple gives us a hint about that. Just as there are twelve tribes in Israel, so there are twelve loaves of showbread on the Table. That represents each tribe sitting down together, and (I believe) learning etiquette, table manners. Sharing, saying “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me,” and so on, and their worldly corollaries of politeness towards God and man, are all implied.
We take the sacrament each week of our lives, which shows us how universal the command to repent is, and how long we must often spend on the plateau of what Elder Maxwell called “reasonable righteousness.” We are neither committing murder, nor are we walking on water. But please do not confuse this with permanence; there is a quantum bump coming our way, if we stay in this path of work.
Immediately after the Table comes the Menorah, a representation of the Tree of Life. While bread is a labor-intensive food, fruit is a gift of God. Trees bear fruit of their own accord; when it ripens, we pick it and eat it. To me there is one potential symbolism that is obvious—works and grace. But this tree, the Menorah, has no literal fruit on it. Instead, it has seven glowing lamps powered by olive oil. While Adam was commanded to toil for bread, Jesus was the source of what this oil symbolizes. He suffered in Gethsemane, literally “Oil Press.” The sheer pressure necessary in the process of extracting oil from olives is symbolic of the weight of our sins bearing down on Christ. Light itself is the fruit we pick from this golden tree. Lehi’s dream gives us a closer look at the Tree of Life, and he tells us that the fruit was “sweet above all that was sweet, pure above all that is pure, white above all that is white.” Lehi stooped down and ate freely, no fee, no toiling. Could Lehi have grown such a tree through any human means anyway?
It seems to me that the four main liquids associated with the Old Temple (water, wine, blood, and olive oil) are all related to grace, to the things God does for us that we cannot do for ourselves. It also seems to me that the solids associated with the Temple (flesh, bread, and incense) are mainly symbolic of our human efforts or works. Sheep and the other animals roasted on the Altar were bred, raised, defended, etc., through human efforts on farms or in pastures. Though the blood was part of the animal, its blood was shed as a proxy for the priest who slew the animal, vicarious and merciful intervention. Rather than die for our own sins, another takes our place. The blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on everything in the Temple, legitimizing everything that happened there from that point forward. (Another ingredient, intangible though it is, gave legitimacy to the ceremonies, namely, a broken heart and a contrite spirit.)
Grace in the Sacrament
Just because we are getting gifts for free does not mean they were not paid for. Jesus died for us, and His blood was shed on our behalf. (He "trod the winepress alone.") We memorialize this sacrifice each week when we take the sacrament. The prayer on the bread binds us to “take his name upon us,” “always remember him,” and “keep his commandments which he has given [us].” In return for all this effort, we are promised to “always have his Spirit to be with [us].” Chewing bread is not unpleasant, but it requires work. We eat little pieces of bread, but imagine Jesus’ disciples eating a larger portion, part of a dry, unleavened pita loaf used in the Passover. After following His command to “eat,” the only thing I would be able to think about after trying to down that dry loaf would be liquid refreshment.
In the prayer on the water (wine was used by Jesus), we merely witness that we are willing to “always remember him.” In return, we are told that for simply thinking about Him, we “may have his Spirit to be with [us].” Our promise here is only to remember, without the harder works; His promise is not to always have His Spirit, but to simply have his Spirit. What happens when we are struggling to chew that dry bread? We have sweet, colorful, salubrious wine (or clear water) to ease the passage. What happens when our ability to take His name upon us and keep His commandments is weak? When we struggle, it is still easy to look in His direction, to remember Him, and even if we do not receive a fullness of His Spirit, we still get a portion. This means we have access to grace. Just as drinking wine or water makes eating dry bread easier, so grace makes our works possible, even enjoyable. Wine, if fermented properly, might have also soothed jangled nerves. As a community, we demonstrate our dependence on the Lord each week by partaking of the emblems of water and bread.
The good Samaritan poured oil and wine, an emollient and a disinfectant, into the wounds of the man on the roadside.
The Spring of Life
Water in the Old Temple may have appeared as food on the Table, but it is most prominently a cleansing agent there. Where does water come from? The sun heats the ocean, clouds form, pass over mountains, and fall as rain. Rain fills lakes and streams, and all civilizations are built around these bodies of fresh water.
What is round, filled with water, and is meant to contain an entire human being? The Egyptians might have answered “the eye.” It can see an entire person at once. “The womb” is another correct answer; each of us spends nine months before birth floating in water. The baptismal font, the Brazen Sea, is another answer to the riddle. Immersion in water, and reemergence, represent birth, bath, and burial. Like the sacrament prayers, the words of the baptismal ordinance refer to the mortals participating in the ordinance. The baptizer calls the one being baptized by name, refers to himself as a representative acting in the name of Jesus Christ, and performs the ordinance in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The one blessing the sacrament refers to self and others with the pronouns “we” and “they,” but still prays in the name of Jesus Christ, and refers to God the Eternal Father, His Son, and the Spirit.
In a sense, it is all grace; a roasted lamb commemorates Jesus’ sacrifice; we call to remembrance His body when we eat the bread. To participate in any ordinance at the request of our Father in Heaven is to be privileged to shed the sense of being lost, and to acquire the sense of having one’s ladder propped against the correct wall.
It seems to me that the liquids of prominence in the Old Temple are still rife with their original imagery. Incense has no ceremonial use in or out of modern Temples, but we can still learn from its use in the Old. On the Table were twelve stones of incense. I do not know if those specific twelve stones were burned, or left as reminders, but incense was burned morning and evening, as part of the daily prayers in the Temple. Zacharias was offering such a prayer when Gabriel appeared and announced that he and Elizabeth were healed of their infertility, and would have a son named John, a forerunner to the Messiah. The twelve stones (one for each tribe) imply that everyone is involved, even if the priest is the only one inside the building. In other words, we are sacrificing ourselves. Notice the difference between the first altar and the third; one is drenched in blood, smells of animals and smoke, is noisy and public; the other is private, small, orderly, with delicious scented, clean white smoke. The outer sacrifice is for sin; the inner sacrifice is giving all we have to God, after it has been cleansed from sin and is therefore worthy of acceptance. One sacrifice per sinner outside; one sacrifice representing everyone inside.
After the priest offers this incense, there is a reward, but it was only reaped one day of the entire year in the Old Temple, on the Day of Atonement. The priest went into the Holy of Holies to meet the Lord and find out whether all their sacrifices and ordinances were acceptable in His sight. I find it interesting that the Lord loves his children, but under the special circumstances of mortal probation, He only interacts directly with us when official business warrants it. Yes, the Father and the Son appeared to Joseph in part because they loved Him, and He felt that love buoy him up for the rest of his life. But the fuller purpose of that visit was not just to console a nervous teen about his salvation—they answered His prayer to reestablish their true church on the earth, a work that would affect billions. It seems to me that the Lord follows that pattern in the intimate manifestations to His servants. They are enfolded in light, love, and joy; they overcome the fall, and bask in the joy of His countenance. But there are formal, official reasons behind the loving kindness—and so, if we want to be close to the Lord, to have miraculous experiences, we must be on the Lord’s errand.
Adam was forcibly removed from God’s presence, and (probably) learned to love it by its absence. Only in his old age did Adam once again experience a direct visitation from the Savior, but that was when Adam prophesied about his posterity, down to the latest generation. If the Old Temple seems formal or stuffy, or outright bizarre, remember that in the process of contracting all this business, the Lord was required to appear, if only to put His stamp of approval and make the formality officially acceptable. “In the ordinances…the power of godliness is manifest.” I wonder if maybe the Lord uses the necessity of legalistic contracts and covenant-making to piggy-back opportunities just to spend time with us, to interact with His sons and daughters.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Wicked and Foolish Traditions
I cannot number the moments I have longed for a time machine in recent years. There are so many things I want to say to my younger self, so many course corrections, simple choices, I want to re-make. This is unwise fantasizing, crippling in its emotional effects, hobbling in its tendency to kill time. Here and now is all we have; wallowing in melancholy nostalgia or daydreaming about the distant future are often self-defeating behaviors.
Such lines of thought lead naturally into the assignment of blame for unwanted outcomes and present unfavorable circumstances. Adam and Eve played hot potato with blame as Heavenly Father questioned them about why they were hiding, and what they had done. Elder Bednar noted that the Lord asked them questions, not to interrogate them, but to help Adam and Eve better understand their own choices and actions. The Lord did not command Adam to come out of hiding; He asked him where he was (which the Lord knew perfectly well). Adam blamed Eve for his choice; Eve blamed the serpent.
It seems to me that blaming others for our bad circumstances and choices smacks of Satan's version of the plan of salvation. His plan destroys the freedom to choose, making some remote puppeteer responsible for everything. To shift blame to others suggests that we are somehow not free to choose; we are not culpable because of bad parenting, poor schooling, etc. At what point do we cease to be acted upon, and begin to act for ourselves? Eight years of age has been given as the standard age of accountability; some never mentally achieve accountability.
One scriptural concept that seems to defy pure free will is the concept repeated frequently in the Book of Mormon, "wicked" and "foolish traditions" of ancestors. D&C 123 cites the "creeds of the fathers" as a source of spiritual blindness among more modern peoples. When the pie of justice is sliced, how big of a percentage will we each merit? Fortunately, God is fully qualified to answer this question. "Judgement is mine," and I am comfortable letting the Lord untangle the knot of assigning blame and punishments. But it seems that parents who neglect to teach their children the gospel properly will be culpable for their children's sins (D&C 68:25; see also Moses 6:58-59).
But do flaws in the parents themselves keep the kids from being fully responsible for their choices, even after such proper instruction has occurred? I can think of two extreme examples: Heavenly Father is a perfect parent, yet a full third of His children rebelled against Him. On the other extreme, Abraham's father was an idolatrous man who volunteered him for sacrifice, yet Abraham somehow transcended his father's wicked traditions and became a model for us all. We are commanded to emulate him, "to do the works of Abraham" (D&C 132:32). Being "agents unto ourselves" means that we do not require perfect parents to turn out well in the end. We have choice, and can put our feet on most any path we want.
I heard of a woman who converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who became deeply disturbed about what she had read about the Prophet Joseph Smith. She took her concerns to the Lord, and the answer she got back was something like the following: "No one is perfect. Which imperfection would you prefer Joseph Smith to have?" The same could be said of parents. No matter how pure their intentions and valiant their attempts, their flaws will impair their ability to parent. Toes will be stepped on; mistakes will be made; blame and heartache and accusation will flow from children's lips until they raise their own children, at which point accusation melts into awe at how much their parents actually accomplished.
Preoccupation with "whose fault is it?" puts us in Satan's role, that of accuser. The title "devil" means "accuser," "slanderer," or perhaps, "gossip." It also implicitly denies the ability of self or others to overcome circumstances. All men, everywhere are commanded to repent, and so it follows that the Lord has prepared a way for all men, everywhere, to obey this commandment. Only the most extreme cases seem to fall outside of this qualification.
It seems to me that a more incisive question than "who is to blame for my circumstances?" might be, "how shall I get out of these circumstances?" Abuse or other negative treatment can be blamed for where we are, but not for whether we extricate ourselves from the mud. Does dwelling on the source of the problem help us find the solution? No, in most cases, unless abuse is currently happening. I believe that the problems of character flaws and depression are like the Rubic's Cube puzzle; it is not necessary to back-track every twist and flip that led to things being mixed up to restore order in the puzzle; likewise, it is not necessary to identify and assign blame to every culprit and villain responsible for our current misery.
The solution, of course, is Jesus Christ. Just as Abraham was saved from the wicked traditions of his father by angelic ministrations, we see the Lord solving the same problem among the Nephites with the same solution: "Jesus groaned within himself, and said: Father, I am troubled because of the wickedness of the people of the house of Israel." What is the cause of this wickedness? Wicked and foolish traditions passed on from fathers to children, mostly. And Jesus sets about solving the problem, breaking the cycle:
"And when he had said these words, he himself also knelt upon the earth; and behold he prayed unto the Father, and the things which he prayed cannot be written, and the multitude did bear record who heard him. And after this manner do they bear record: The eye hath never seen, neither hath the ear heard, before, so great and marvelous things as we saw and heard Jesus speak unto the Father; And no tongue can speak, neither can there be written by any man, neither can the hearts of men conceive so great and marvelous things as we both saw and heard Jesus speak; and no one can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us unto the Father. And it came to pass that when Jesus had made an end of praying unto the Father, he arose; but so great was the joy of the multitude that they were overcome. And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise. And they arose from the earth, and he said unto them: Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, my joy is full. And when he had said these words, he wept, and the multitude bare record of it, and he took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and prayed unto the Father for them. And when he had done this he wept again; And he spake unto the multitude, and said unto them: Behold your little ones. And as they looked to behold they cast their eyes towards heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw angels descending out of heaven as it were in the midst of fire; and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they were encircled about with fire; and the angels did minister unto them" (3Ne. 17:14-24).
Jesus went from groaning in Himself, being troubled by wickedness, to saying, "Behold, my joy is full." The solution to wickedness was not assigning blame or distributing justice to parents or children, though major destruction had recently culled the more wicked portion of the populace. The solution was interface, direct interaction, between Jesus and heavenly messengers, and the rising generation.
It must be easy to forget that the children we raise are actually God's children. Of course He will help us raise them, if we are willing to let go of the steering wheel, follow the Spirit, and trust God's steadying influence. Covenants kept will seal wayward children to parents, and this is a concept I also have trouble reconciling with agency. "The Prophet Joseph Smith declared—and he never taught a more comforting doctrine—that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice; they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if it leads them at last, like the penitent Prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain. Pray for your careless and disobedient children; hold on to them with your faith. Hope on, trust on, till you see the salvation of God" (Orson F. Whitney, in Conference Report, Apr. 1929, 110).
I believe that when parents sealed in the Temple keep their covenants, it exerts a protective influence on their offspring, allowing them to remain safe both physically, and spiritually, and even recover from serious wounds. Abraham received great promises regarding his posterity (Gen. 22:17-18) because of his faithfulness, and I believe that similar blessings can be extended to our children because of our faithfulness as well. It seems that all the blessings of Abraham are necessary, and are given, specifically because of the promise of limitless posterity. Promised lands, including new worlds, are necessary to care for limitless posterity; material possessions are necessary to provide for them; priesthood is necessary to bless them and seal them and preside over them; eternal sealing to spouse is necessary for their benefit as well; exaltation itself is necessary to be a sufficient father over such an innumerable posterity. All the accoutrements of Matriarchs, like Sarah, probably spring similarly from the exigencies of eternal and infinite parenthood. We are not exalted merely for our own agrandizment or consolation; talents are proportional to the enormity of stewardship, and eternal increase is the greatest stewardship of all.
Trivializing the hurt of wayward parents or wayward children was not my intention in writing what I have written; my intent here is to remind myself and others that Jesus is the ultimate table-turner, that He can turn Joseph's imprisonment into salvation for Israel and Egypt; that the Lord can work similar miracles in all our lives, turning black, ironic, bitter coal into diamonds. I hope we can let go of the blame game, and see the big picture.
Such lines of thought lead naturally into the assignment of blame for unwanted outcomes and present unfavorable circumstances. Adam and Eve played hot potato with blame as Heavenly Father questioned them about why they were hiding, and what they had done. Elder Bednar noted that the Lord asked them questions, not to interrogate them, but to help Adam and Eve better understand their own choices and actions. The Lord did not command Adam to come out of hiding; He asked him where he was (which the Lord knew perfectly well). Adam blamed Eve for his choice; Eve blamed the serpent.
It seems to me that blaming others for our bad circumstances and choices smacks of Satan's version of the plan of salvation. His plan destroys the freedom to choose, making some remote puppeteer responsible for everything. To shift blame to others suggests that we are somehow not free to choose; we are not culpable because of bad parenting, poor schooling, etc. At what point do we cease to be acted upon, and begin to act for ourselves? Eight years of age has been given as the standard age of accountability; some never mentally achieve accountability.
One scriptural concept that seems to defy pure free will is the concept repeated frequently in the Book of Mormon, "wicked" and "foolish traditions" of ancestors. D&C 123 cites the "creeds of the fathers" as a source of spiritual blindness among more modern peoples. When the pie of justice is sliced, how big of a percentage will we each merit? Fortunately, God is fully qualified to answer this question. "Judgement is mine," and I am comfortable letting the Lord untangle the knot of assigning blame and punishments. But it seems that parents who neglect to teach their children the gospel properly will be culpable for their children's sins (D&C 68:25; see also Moses 6:58-59).
But do flaws in the parents themselves keep the kids from being fully responsible for their choices, even after such proper instruction has occurred? I can think of two extreme examples: Heavenly Father is a perfect parent, yet a full third of His children rebelled against Him. On the other extreme, Abraham's father was an idolatrous man who volunteered him for sacrifice, yet Abraham somehow transcended his father's wicked traditions and became a model for us all. We are commanded to emulate him, "to do the works of Abraham" (D&C 132:32). Being "agents unto ourselves" means that we do not require perfect parents to turn out well in the end. We have choice, and can put our feet on most any path we want.
I heard of a woman who converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who became deeply disturbed about what she had read about the Prophet Joseph Smith. She took her concerns to the Lord, and the answer she got back was something like the following: "No one is perfect. Which imperfection would you prefer Joseph Smith to have?" The same could be said of parents. No matter how pure their intentions and valiant their attempts, their flaws will impair their ability to parent. Toes will be stepped on; mistakes will be made; blame and heartache and accusation will flow from children's lips until they raise their own children, at which point accusation melts into awe at how much their parents actually accomplished.
Preoccupation with "whose fault is it?" puts us in Satan's role, that of accuser. The title "devil" means "accuser," "slanderer," or perhaps, "gossip." It also implicitly denies the ability of self or others to overcome circumstances. All men, everywhere are commanded to repent, and so it follows that the Lord has prepared a way for all men, everywhere, to obey this commandment. Only the most extreme cases seem to fall outside of this qualification.
It seems to me that a more incisive question than "who is to blame for my circumstances?" might be, "how shall I get out of these circumstances?" Abuse or other negative treatment can be blamed for where we are, but not for whether we extricate ourselves from the mud. Does dwelling on the source of the problem help us find the solution? No, in most cases, unless abuse is currently happening. I believe that the problems of character flaws and depression are like the Rubic's Cube puzzle; it is not necessary to back-track every twist and flip that led to things being mixed up to restore order in the puzzle; likewise, it is not necessary to identify and assign blame to every culprit and villain responsible for our current misery.
The solution, of course, is Jesus Christ. Just as Abraham was saved from the wicked traditions of his father by angelic ministrations, we see the Lord solving the same problem among the Nephites with the same solution: "Jesus groaned within himself, and said: Father, I am troubled because of the wickedness of the people of the house of Israel." What is the cause of this wickedness? Wicked and foolish traditions passed on from fathers to children, mostly. And Jesus sets about solving the problem, breaking the cycle:
"And when he had said these words, he himself also knelt upon the earth; and behold he prayed unto the Father, and the things which he prayed cannot be written, and the multitude did bear record who heard him. And after this manner do they bear record: The eye hath never seen, neither hath the ear heard, before, so great and marvelous things as we saw and heard Jesus speak unto the Father; And no tongue can speak, neither can there be written by any man, neither can the hearts of men conceive so great and marvelous things as we both saw and heard Jesus speak; and no one can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us unto the Father. And it came to pass that when Jesus had made an end of praying unto the Father, he arose; but so great was the joy of the multitude that they were overcome. And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise. And they arose from the earth, and he said unto them: Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, my joy is full. And when he had said these words, he wept, and the multitude bare record of it, and he took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and prayed unto the Father for them. And when he had done this he wept again; And he spake unto the multitude, and said unto them: Behold your little ones. And as they looked to behold they cast their eyes towards heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw angels descending out of heaven as it were in the midst of fire; and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they were encircled about with fire; and the angels did minister unto them" (3Ne. 17:14-24).
Jesus went from groaning in Himself, being troubled by wickedness, to saying, "Behold, my joy is full." The solution to wickedness was not assigning blame or distributing justice to parents or children, though major destruction had recently culled the more wicked portion of the populace. The solution was interface, direct interaction, between Jesus and heavenly messengers, and the rising generation.
It must be easy to forget that the children we raise are actually God's children. Of course He will help us raise them, if we are willing to let go of the steering wheel, follow the Spirit, and trust God's steadying influence. Covenants kept will seal wayward children to parents, and this is a concept I also have trouble reconciling with agency. "The Prophet Joseph Smith declared—and he never taught a more comforting doctrine—that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice; they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if it leads them at last, like the penitent Prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain. Pray for your careless and disobedient children; hold on to them with your faith. Hope on, trust on, till you see the salvation of God" (Orson F. Whitney, in Conference Report, Apr. 1929, 110).
I believe that when parents sealed in the Temple keep their covenants, it exerts a protective influence on their offspring, allowing them to remain safe both physically, and spiritually, and even recover from serious wounds. Abraham received great promises regarding his posterity (Gen. 22:17-18) because of his faithfulness, and I believe that similar blessings can be extended to our children because of our faithfulness as well. It seems that all the blessings of Abraham are necessary, and are given, specifically because of the promise of limitless posterity. Promised lands, including new worlds, are necessary to care for limitless posterity; material possessions are necessary to provide for them; priesthood is necessary to bless them and seal them and preside over them; eternal sealing to spouse is necessary for their benefit as well; exaltation itself is necessary to be a sufficient father over such an innumerable posterity. All the accoutrements of Matriarchs, like Sarah, probably spring similarly from the exigencies of eternal and infinite parenthood. We are not exalted merely for our own agrandizment or consolation; talents are proportional to the enormity of stewardship, and eternal increase is the greatest stewardship of all.
Trivializing the hurt of wayward parents or wayward children was not my intention in writing what I have written; my intent here is to remind myself and others that Jesus is the ultimate table-turner, that He can turn Joseph's imprisonment into salvation for Israel and Egypt; that the Lord can work similar miracles in all our lives, turning black, ironic, bitter coal into diamonds. I hope we can let go of the blame game, and see the big picture.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Cleansing the Temple
During His mortal life, Jesus did only two things I know of that could be construed as acts of violence: He cursed a fig tree, and cleansed the Temple.
I have heard Jesus' cleansing of the Temple used as an excuse to be belligerent or even violent. "See, Jesus did it too; I am allowed to get mad at others," seems to be the argument. "Nevertheless, he has sinned; but verily I say unto you, I, the Lord, forgive sins unto those who confess their sins before me and ask forgiveness, who have not sinned unto death. My disciples, in days of old, sought occasion against one another and forgave not one another in their hearts; and for this evil they were afflicted and sorely chastened. Wherefore, I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin. I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men. And ye ought to say in your hearts—let God judge between me and thee, and reward thee according to thy deeds" (D&C 64:7-11).
It seems to me that the One most qualified to judge is slowest of all to judge. Why is it that the "greater sin" is in the one who will not forgive, rather than in the perpetrator of the first sin? Jesus gave a parable of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents, an astronomical sum. Initially, the lord was about to sell the servant and his family into slavery to at least cover part of the debt, but the servant begged for clemency, and the master simply wrote off his servant's debt. Yet the same servant found someone who owed him a dollar, and took him by the throat, demanding to have his debt paid. The master heard of this behavior in the recently-forgiven servant: "Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses" (Matt. 18:23-35).
I have heard Jesus' cleansing of the Temple used as an excuse to be belligerent or even violent. "See, Jesus did it too; I am allowed to get mad at others," seems to be the argument. "Nevertheless, he has sinned; but verily I say unto you, I, the Lord, forgive sins unto those who confess their sins before me and ask forgiveness, who have not sinned unto death. My disciples, in days of old, sought occasion against one another and forgave not one another in their hearts; and for this evil they were afflicted and sorely chastened. Wherefore, I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin. I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men. And ye ought to say in your hearts—let God judge between me and thee, and reward thee according to thy deeds" (D&C 64:7-11).
It seems to me that the One most qualified to judge is slowest of all to judge. Why is it that the "greater sin" is in the one who will not forgive, rather than in the perpetrator of the first sin? Jesus gave a parable of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents, an astronomical sum. Initially, the lord was about to sell the servant and his family into slavery to at least cover part of the debt, but the servant begged for clemency, and the master simply wrote off his servant's debt. Yet the same servant found someone who owed him a dollar, and took him by the throat, demanding to have his debt paid. The master heard of this behavior in the recently-forgiven servant: "Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses" (Matt. 18:23-35).
No matter how large a debt anyone owes us, we can never repay the debt we owe to Jesus, who ransomed all of us, including the people we hate, in Gethsemane and on the cross. He paid a price more dear than anyone else, both for our sins, and the sins committed against us. To demand our dollar, or else, from those who owe us, when Jesus is eager and willing to forgive sins we commit on a regular basis, is the essence of hypocrisy. What does it mean to be in heaven? To be like God. What is a major part of being like God? Forgiving sin, all day long, every day. He has commanded all men, everywhere, to repent; it must follow that God is eager to FORGIVE all men, everywhere, including the people who annoy or harm us personally.
Even though Jesus had a blank check regarding the condemnation of anyone He met, He did not come into the Temple like an enraged bull, blind and senseless in its distribution of pain and damage: "...and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise. And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up" (John 2:13-17).
Notice that Jesus took time to deliberately braid a whip; He was in control of Himself. He drove the men and cattle out, but instructed those who had birds in cages to carry them away; knocking over cages could injure the animals.
No one condemned Jesus for doing this, though they were perturbed. Rather, they wanted to see His credentials. "Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:18-19). In other words, "Kill me, and I will be resurrected in three days." I have never heard of anyone else saying something like that when asked why they became angry or administered some form of correction or retribution.
When are we permitted to correct others? D&C 121:43 makes it clear when we are allowed to tell someone what to do: "...when moved upon by the Holy Ghost..." There is no other time when correcting others is approved, at least none I am aware of in scripture. And we are also required to show forth an increase of love after the reproval, that the one receiving reproof will know "...that thy faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death" (v. 44). Jesus invited his critics to murder Him after He drove the merchandisers out of the Temple, and they did. He also performed the Atonement in the process, which made it possible for these critics to repent and be forgiven. His faithfulness and love for them was literally stronger than the cords of death.
Is this kind of command performance useful in justifying our petty criticism? Does it bear the slightest resemblance to the vitriol, mockery, and vilifying that define talk radio? Does it make my grudges respectable instead of infantile?
Righteous men become angry in the Book of Mormon, but I believe their wrath is only justified because it was good and appropriate for them to imprison or take the lives of the objects of their hate. "...there is nothing that the Lord thy God shall take in his heart to do but what he will do it (Abraham 3:17). This valuable insight into God's nature shaves enormous amounts of nonsense and waste off from our emotional lives and internal workings. God does not entertain desires in His heart unless He plans to ACT on them. I believe this separates much anger from the so-called "righteous wrath" of Moroni and various other warriors in the Book of Mormon. Anger is the desire to do harm; they were justified in this desire toward certain men. Even then, in the midst of war, Moroni will always avoid harming his enemies when he can help it.
Do these virtues characterize political discourse today?
The Book of Mormon says that "fools mock," (Ether 12:26), yet Elijah mocks the priests of Baal (1Kings 18:27). Is it good to mock, or bad? The men Elijah mocked apparently deserved death, because Elijah ordered the people to kill them all. We hear Elijah grieving to the Lord: "...the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away" (1Kings 19:10). "Fools mock, but they shall mourn..." is the rest of the scripture. Elijah was no fool, but he mourned afterward anyway. It seems that a let-down, a kind of depression after the buzz, may be part of the price of light-mindedness and loud laughter (something I experienced last night; it also shows up in a talk by President Hinckley. It begins on a very humorous note, yet descends into painful descriptions of what people went through because of their memberships in the Church. In any case, what behavior do we expect in heaven? Mockery? Not a bit, and if we insist on keeping it in our repertoire, we may find ourselves locked outside the door, mourning with the other foolish virgins.
I believe the cleansing of the Temple could only have been performed by Jesus, because He was the only one with the credentials of being able to resurrect Himself. He needed a way to get the elders of the Jews to conspire against him, to kill him, and he kicked the biggest hornets' nest of all by interfering with the corrupted economics of Herod's Temple. We are each, individually, a Temple, and Jesus will drive the animals and corruption out of our natures, if we let Him. Animals DID belong in the Temple, but only in an orderly fashion, according to law. Jesus forcefully reminded everyone of this fact. (They were all mutually tolerating the inappropriate arrangement; I wonder how many friendships are based on the mutual acceptance of bad behavior.) We bridle our passions, mastering them, letting them serve us, rather than hoping to be rid of our physical bodies one day. I believe this is the greater, symbolic meaning behind this controversial act.
Rather than look to exceptions to justify our bad behavior and negative tendencies, let us embrace the Lord's definition of being "perfect, even as [our] Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). The context for that statement is the idea of loving our enemies. The natural man is an enemy to God (Mosiah 3:19), and yet God loves His enemies. If we cannot muster the same maturity and forgive the petty infractions against us, we will not be fit to enter His presence. There are so many scriptures stating forgiveness of others as a prerequisite for our own forgiveness that it is pointless to catalog them. Many, if not most, came straight from Jesus, who exemplified love, compassion, kindness, forbearance, patience, and long suffering, rather than hostility or compulsion.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Dynamic Mary
It seems that we tend to conflate the figurine in the nativity creche with the actual Mary, and treat her the same way we treat the figurine. We bring her out once a year, think of her as permanently cast in the particular role of young mother beneath a star, with adoring shepherds and magi arriving on cue, have cuddly feelings about the moment of Jesus' birth, and then we shut her up in the box we pulled her from, invisible for another year. I have been inside barn yards and dairy farms with piles of manure, and I could not imagine a woman giving birth in any of the cattle pens I have seen. Words like "squalor" and "unsanitary" hardly touch the reality of the concept. Yet it warms our sentimental hearts each year, as we happily ignore the distress Mary surely felt. She is, by and large, frozen in the Christian mind as the young mother in a sanitized narrative.
But the scriptures describe a changing, dynamic individual, filling multiple roles, even if only as a background participant in the gospel writers' accounts of Jesus' life. Unlike many who turned from Jesus (including recalcitrant siblings), Mary was there at many important events, filling various roles ignored by the one-dimensional Christmas depiction.
Mary composed a psalm, traditionally referred to as the "Magnificat," because she exclaims in its opening line, "My soul doth magnify the Lord..." (Luke 1:46). It is a literary masterpiece, evidence of a close brush with the divine, ably described by an articulate, educated, well-read, and poetic mind.
We see Mary in charge of a wedding feast in Cana. Jesus created the world as the premortal Jehovah under the direction of His Heavenly Parent; now we see Jesus rectifying an oversight in the supply of a wedding feast, this time under the direction of His mortal, earthly mother. She trusts Him completely with the commission, telling the servants, "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it" (John 2:5). Just as the earth was a wedding present to Adam and Eve, and everyone else, the stone waterpots turned to wine were a miraculous gift to the Bride, Groom, and all others attending the wedding. When asked which was the first miracle Jesus performed, Joseph Smith responded, "He created the earth." Six days of creation; six waterpots turned to wine; both construed in various circles as Jesus' first miracle; Mary was present for both, presumably.
Mary is one of only four people mentioned individually in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon: Jesus (of course); John the Beloved; and John the Baptist (though not by name) and Mary. She is also one of only six women mentioned by name in the Book of Mormon (Eve, Sarah, Sariah, Isabelle, Abish, and Mary). She is referred to as "...being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel..." (Alma 7:10). We usually see the scene of Mary cradling newborn Jesus in sentimental terms; Nephi sees the scene in vision, and is suddenly filled with understanding as to the interpretation of the Tree of Life in his father Lehi's vision-dream: "...it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things" (1Ne. 11:22). I have seen the nativity creche my whole life, and have yet to derive anything so doctrinally rich or profound from it; how did Nephi glance at that scene and suddenly know the correct interpretation?
We see Mary and Joseph in a horrifying circumstance, frantically scrambling to locate Jesus, a charge given directly to Mary by heavenly messengers. The twelve-year-old Jesus had stayed behind after the Passover feast in Jerusalem, and his earthly parents "sought [him] sorrowing." How many gray hairs would I generate in such a situation, even if it were not the Messiah I had lost?
After Jesus' birth, Mary and Joseph take Him to the Temple to be circumcised. Simeon and Anna, two elderly Temple workers, prophesy about the Child. Simeon predicts that Mary will be pierced with a figurative sword as she copes with the sorrow of watching Jesus die (Luke 2:35). One possible meaning of the name Mary (Miriam) is "bitterness," or "bitter tears." This is far from the cuddly depiction of her we see each winter.
The prophet Isaiah speaks of her in poetic predictions: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isa. 7:14). Joseph was given the name for their child in a dream-vision. Mary was risking her life (see John 8:4-5) by accepting the charge to be the mother of Jesus, because she was formally espoused to Joseph, yet she "[knew] not a man" (Luke 1:34). Mary's bravery, submission, and faith appear in her acceptance of the charge from Gabriel: "And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). She was the center of a much larger family than what appears in the Nativity Creche; she had other children with Joseph after Jesus birth. Jesus had four brothers, and at least two sisters (Matt. 13:55-56). Jesus gives John responsibility to care for His mother from the cross; we can therefore assume that she was a widow at this point (John 19:26-27).
After the shepherds arrived to inspect the actual Lamb, Luke says that "...Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart" (2:19). I heard someone interpret this to mean that Mary had no one to confide in. I give her more credit that that: "The reason we do not have secrets of the Lord revealed unto us is because we do not keep them but reveal them; We do not keep our own secrets, but reveal our difficulties to the world, even to our enemies, then how would we keep the secrets of the Lord? I can keep a secret till Doomsday" (Joseph Smith, TPJS pg. 195). Mary's experience parallels Joseph Smith's in many respects; they both had visions when they were young; they both accepted enormous responsibilities from God in youth; they both prophesied about their reputations spreading to the future world; they both paid dearly for their loyalty to God; they both stayed faithful to the ends of their mortal lives. Mary is mentioned as being among the faithful after the resurrection, praying with the other disciples (Acts 1:14).
She filled many roles besides the familiar one we imagine each Christmas. Life asks much of each of us as scripts change and new stages come and go. Mary fulfilled her callings at each new stage with exemplary dedication, never balking at a new assignment, however painful, and we can better learn from her when we peel back the label and stereotype we have placed on her.
But the scriptures describe a changing, dynamic individual, filling multiple roles, even if only as a background participant in the gospel writers' accounts of Jesus' life. Unlike many who turned from Jesus (including recalcitrant siblings), Mary was there at many important events, filling various roles ignored by the one-dimensional Christmas depiction.
Mary composed a psalm, traditionally referred to as the "Magnificat," because she exclaims in its opening line, "My soul doth magnify the Lord..." (Luke 1:46). It is a literary masterpiece, evidence of a close brush with the divine, ably described by an articulate, educated, well-read, and poetic mind.
We see Mary in charge of a wedding feast in Cana. Jesus created the world as the premortal Jehovah under the direction of His Heavenly Parent; now we see Jesus rectifying an oversight in the supply of a wedding feast, this time under the direction of His mortal, earthly mother. She trusts Him completely with the commission, telling the servants, "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it" (John 2:5). Just as the earth was a wedding present to Adam and Eve, and everyone else, the stone waterpots turned to wine were a miraculous gift to the Bride, Groom, and all others attending the wedding. When asked which was the first miracle Jesus performed, Joseph Smith responded, "He created the earth." Six days of creation; six waterpots turned to wine; both construed in various circles as Jesus' first miracle; Mary was present for both, presumably.
Mary is one of only four people mentioned individually in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon: Jesus (of course); John the Beloved; and John the Baptist (though not by name) and Mary. She is also one of only six women mentioned by name in the Book of Mormon (Eve, Sarah, Sariah, Isabelle, Abish, and Mary). She is referred to as "...being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel..." (Alma 7:10). We usually see the scene of Mary cradling newborn Jesus in sentimental terms; Nephi sees the scene in vision, and is suddenly filled with understanding as to the interpretation of the Tree of Life in his father Lehi's vision-dream: "...it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things" (1Ne. 11:22). I have seen the nativity creche my whole life, and have yet to derive anything so doctrinally rich or profound from it; how did Nephi glance at that scene and suddenly know the correct interpretation?
We see Mary and Joseph in a horrifying circumstance, frantically scrambling to locate Jesus, a charge given directly to Mary by heavenly messengers. The twelve-year-old Jesus had stayed behind after the Passover feast in Jerusalem, and his earthly parents "sought [him] sorrowing." How many gray hairs would I generate in such a situation, even if it were not the Messiah I had lost?
After Jesus' birth, Mary and Joseph take Him to the Temple to be circumcised. Simeon and Anna, two elderly Temple workers, prophesy about the Child. Simeon predicts that Mary will be pierced with a figurative sword as she copes with the sorrow of watching Jesus die (Luke 2:35). One possible meaning of the name Mary (Miriam) is "bitterness," or "bitter tears." This is far from the cuddly depiction of her we see each winter.
The prophet Isaiah speaks of her in poetic predictions: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isa. 7:14). Joseph was given the name for their child in a dream-vision. Mary was risking her life (see John 8:4-5) by accepting the charge to be the mother of Jesus, because she was formally espoused to Joseph, yet she "[knew] not a man" (Luke 1:34). Mary's bravery, submission, and faith appear in her acceptance of the charge from Gabriel: "And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). She was the center of a much larger family than what appears in the Nativity Creche; she had other children with Joseph after Jesus birth. Jesus had four brothers, and at least two sisters (Matt. 13:55-56). Jesus gives John responsibility to care for His mother from the cross; we can therefore assume that she was a widow at this point (John 19:26-27).
After the shepherds arrived to inspect the actual Lamb, Luke says that "...Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart" (2:19). I heard someone interpret this to mean that Mary had no one to confide in. I give her more credit that that: "The reason we do not have secrets of the Lord revealed unto us is because we do not keep them but reveal them; We do not keep our own secrets, but reveal our difficulties to the world, even to our enemies, then how would we keep the secrets of the Lord? I can keep a secret till Doomsday" (Joseph Smith, TPJS pg. 195). Mary's experience parallels Joseph Smith's in many respects; they both had visions when they were young; they both accepted enormous responsibilities from God in youth; they both prophesied about their reputations spreading to the future world; they both paid dearly for their loyalty to God; they both stayed faithful to the ends of their mortal lives. Mary is mentioned as being among the faithful after the resurrection, praying with the other disciples (Acts 1:14).
She filled many roles besides the familiar one we imagine each Christmas. Life asks much of each of us as scripts change and new stages come and go. Mary fulfilled her callings at each new stage with exemplary dedication, never balking at a new assignment, however painful, and we can better learn from her when we peel back the label and stereotype we have placed on her.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Repentance
Jesus arrived in the Americas, and among the first things He told the Nephites was that all men, everywhere, needed to repent. I have wondered if there are different kinds or levels of repentance, since "all men, everywhere" are at different points in their spiritual progression. ALL is an inclusive and absolute word, and so there must be something to improve in all of us.
I want to talk about three categories of sinners, or perhaps, categories of repenters.
Vilest of Sinners
If there is an advantage to falling into this category, it is that you know you need to repent. How sad to believe the "all" does not apply to one's self, to forgo the opportunity to improve. Those who violate the Ten Commandments generally are in this category. A young woman once said, "People will be surprised by what keeps them out of heaven." The scriptures (see Matt. 7:22-23) seem to agree. Some of the Ten Commandments are so obvious and easy for the average person to keep, we often forget the subtler ways to break the others. The hardest commandment to keep, in my opinion, is the first: No other gods before God. Anything that interferes with our relationship with our Father in heaven, or supplants Him in our affections, becomes a violation of the first commandment. It is easy to break the second—cars and boats and houses and other expensive toys become idols. The names of Deity are bandied about carelessly today, and I am glad to say I wince a little more than I used to when I hear such language.
The young woman speaking about being kept out of heaven had reference to the fourth commandment, to keep the Sabbath Day holy. It is very easy to slip into worldly behaviors on this day, to consider it just another day for laundry or shopping or playing. I would rather be alone on Sunday if I cannot find company who will keep this commandment after Church. Friends can help the process of "always [having] his Spirit to be with [me]," which is the main reason we attend Church meetings in the first place.
Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Bill Cosby might interpret that promise to mean respecting parents' wishes will keep them from losing their tempers and slaying you. I wonder, as I have seen elderly relatives do genealogy and family history research, if their lives are being preserved because family history is the epitome of keeping this commandment. Those beyond the veil must be praying fervently for their lives to be preserved until they can finish assignments, perform ordinances, and pass on the torch.
Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery—these two rules are linked. The portals of entry and exit in this mortal life are guarded by the strictest of commandments. Alma lists these sins as second only to the unpardonable sin (Alma 39:5). They are linked in the body; testosterone increases aggression and intensifies the capacity for lust. James 4:1: "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" Indeed, lust sees people as disposable objects; violence merely follows through with the mindset. Throughout the scriptures, these two sins and all their variations are co-morbid. The hints of a sex industry in the Book of Mormon ("...she did steal away the hearts of many...") are followed by a hundred pages of non-stop war. David's life reads like a soap opera; he was denied the privilege of building the Temple as a resting place for the Ark because of his violent life.
Thou shalt not steal is a rule that would save America billions of dollars a year if we would abide by it. Closely linked are the commandments to tell the truth and not covet. Coveting denotes deep ingratitude, a sin in itself. Coveting impels theft and lying; theft requires dishonesty. Dishonesty seems to be the first character trait acquired by anyone seeking to circumvent the law of the harvest. "Wo unto the liar, for he shall be thrust down to hell" (2Ne. 9:34). To enter heaven, one must be thoroughly honest. "I am the...truth..." said Jesus Christ.
I want to talk about three categories of sinners, or perhaps, categories of repenters.
Vilest of Sinners
If there is an advantage to falling into this category, it is that you know you need to repent. How sad to believe the "all" does not apply to one's self, to forgo the opportunity to improve. Those who violate the Ten Commandments generally are in this category. A young woman once said, "People will be surprised by what keeps them out of heaven." The scriptures (see Matt. 7:22-23) seem to agree. Some of the Ten Commandments are so obvious and easy for the average person to keep, we often forget the subtler ways to break the others. The hardest commandment to keep, in my opinion, is the first: No other gods before God. Anything that interferes with our relationship with our Father in heaven, or supplants Him in our affections, becomes a violation of the first commandment. It is easy to break the second—cars and boats and houses and other expensive toys become idols. The names of Deity are bandied about carelessly today, and I am glad to say I wince a little more than I used to when I hear such language.
The young woman speaking about being kept out of heaven had reference to the fourth commandment, to keep the Sabbath Day holy. It is very easy to slip into worldly behaviors on this day, to consider it just another day for laundry or shopping or playing. I would rather be alone on Sunday if I cannot find company who will keep this commandment after Church. Friends can help the process of "always [having] his Spirit to be with [me]," which is the main reason we attend Church meetings in the first place.
Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Bill Cosby might interpret that promise to mean respecting parents' wishes will keep them from losing their tempers and slaying you. I wonder, as I have seen elderly relatives do genealogy and family history research, if their lives are being preserved because family history is the epitome of keeping this commandment. Those beyond the veil must be praying fervently for their lives to be preserved until they can finish assignments, perform ordinances, and pass on the torch.
Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery—these two rules are linked. The portals of entry and exit in this mortal life are guarded by the strictest of commandments. Alma lists these sins as second only to the unpardonable sin (Alma 39:5). They are linked in the body; testosterone increases aggression and intensifies the capacity for lust. James 4:1: "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" Indeed, lust sees people as disposable objects; violence merely follows through with the mindset. Throughout the scriptures, these two sins and all their variations are co-morbid. The hints of a sex industry in the Book of Mormon ("...she did steal away the hearts of many...") are followed by a hundred pages of non-stop war. David's life reads like a soap opera; he was denied the privilege of building the Temple as a resting place for the Ark because of his violent life.
Thou shalt not steal is a rule that would save America billions of dollars a year if we would abide by it. Closely linked are the commandments to tell the truth and not covet. Coveting denotes deep ingratitude, a sin in itself. Coveting impels theft and lying; theft requires dishonesty. Dishonesty seems to be the first character trait acquired by anyone seeking to circumvent the law of the harvest. "Wo unto the liar, for he shall be thrust down to hell" (2Ne. 9:34). To enter heaven, one must be thoroughly honest. "I am the...truth..." said Jesus Christ.
After seeing the Ten Commandments spelled out, and seeing myself in them, I am even more amazed at how forgiving the Lord is. Instead of casting us off, he COMMANDS us to repent, so that we can be healed, forgiven, and brought home again, even after all the mischief described above. But most people are not embroiled in gross or grievous iniquity.
Ninety and Nine
Each week we attend sacrament meeting. Those in attendance may not be witnessing miracles, but they are also not breaking major commandments. They are in a middle of the road place, a kind of long plateau where Elder Maxwell's "reasonable righteousness" is the watchword for life. Imperfections are there, but they are well-managed for the most part. These rank-and-file members hold Temple recommends, and use them often. They feel the gravity of the world and its temptations, along with the upward pull of the Lord. These people desire a seat in the kingdom, and the sacrament is where we sit down together at the table, as a family, and learn table manners. We repent of our shallowness and petty sins. It is not enough to forsake murder; we must also forgive and love those who hurt us. It is not enough to be faithful to our spouse physically; we must also be chaste in thought and feeling. It is not enough not to steal; we must also cultivate gratitude for what we have, and be generous despite the financial pinch. Outward observance begins to be coupled with inward observance, and these "ninety and nine" sheep also look out for those who have strayed far afield.
Of course, "we all like sheep have gone astray." It is dangerous to be in this middle place if we assume that we are better than gross sinners, or that we would not be equally lost without the Savior. Grace is dependent upon loving God, and upon not denying His power (Moroni 10:32-33). Denying that Jesus is keeping you afloat at your current level of righteousness via grace is a quick route to sin. That is not to say that there is no work involved; bread requires work. From plowing to planting to watering to harvest to threshing to grinding to baking to chewing, bread represents work. And our own personal efforts are required to get us onto this plateau. The first sacrament emblem is bread, and work is what we demonstrate our willingness to perform when we partake of it: "...they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him and keep his commandments which he has given them..." (D&C 20:77).
Bread is tasty, but the first thing I crave when I have a mouthful of dry bread to chew is liquid refreshment to easy the process. And that is what we get. Jesus gave his disciples wine to wash down the bread He gave them at the last supper. We drink water. In any case, the prayer on the water reflects this: "...they may witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they do always remember him..." When the work of keeping His commandments and taking His name upon us is too hard, we can still "always remember him," and receive a portion of His Spirit. We still have access to grace. Just as liquid makes eating bread into a manageable and even joyful task, so grace makes the difficult work of keeping the commandments possible.
Sanctified
The D&C distinguishes between "the church," and "those who are sanctified" (20:33-34). I suggest that the distinction between these two groups is comparable to the people of Alma before they were delivered from the Lamanites, and after they were delivered from the Lamanites. "And now it came to pass that the burdens which were laid upon Alma and his brethren were made light; yea, the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease, and they did submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord" (Mosiah 24:15). Notice that they are still carrying their burdens, but the Lord is giving them grace, the enabling, strengthening power to carry their burdens with ease. Then the complete removal of the burdens:
"And it came to pass that so great was their faith and their patience that the voice of the Lord came unto them again, saying: Be of good comfort, for on the morrow I will deliver you out of bondage...And Alma and his people departed into the wilderness; and when they had traveled all day they pitched their tents in a valley...Yea, and in the valley...they poured out their thanks to God because he had been merciful unto them, and eased their burdens, and had delivered them out of bondage; for they were in bondage, and none could deliver them except it were the Lord their God" (Mosiah 24:16, 20-21).
We can compare their bondage to the impulse to commit sin, or to addiction. It is one thing to feel the desire to sin, yet receive grace to completely resist temptation. It is even better to be delivered from the desire to commit sin at all. This may sound amazing, but the Lord tells Alma the Younger to "marvel not," that ALL people must experience this mighty change of heart. "Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually" (Mosiah 5:2).
I recently heard a well-intentioned speaker conflate this mighty change with the enthusiasm and renewed determination a good fireside speaker can instill. Far from being a mutable or temporary change of mood, "Please note that the conversion described in these verses is mighty, not minor—a spiritual rebirth and fundamental change of what we feel and desire, what we think and do, and what we are. Indeed, the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ entails a fundamental and permanent change in our very nature made possible through our reliance upon “the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah” (2 Nephi 2:8). As we choose to follow the Master, we choose to be changed—to be spiritually reborn" (Elder David A. Bednar, Ye Must Be Born Again, April 2007 General Conference). This change is akin to waking up one morning loathing chocolate and craving broccoli. That is not a change one can "practice" or "work on;" it is so radical that one might feel the need to receive a brain-scan after it had occurred.
Despite being radical, it is also seamless enough that those who are not paying attention may miss the fact that it has occurred. 3Ne. 9:20 tells us that the Lamanites who experienced this mighty change of heart "new it not." They were unaware of it. Indeed, you would have to be exposed to old temptations and realize you were not tempted by them anymore to know the change had taken place.
If we no longer have the desire to sin, what do we have to repent of?
"Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of" (Gen. 22:2). In order to receive this level of grace, this sanctification, this mighty change of heart, we must "offer for a sacrifice unto [Christ] a broken heart and a contrite spirit...And...[come] unto [Christ] with a broken heart and a contrite spirit..." We must also have faith in Christ, and "love God with all your might, mind and strength," (Moroni 10:32), before the change will happen. From that point forward, testing takes on a new hue. Are we really as dedicated as we claim? Is God really first in our affections? Are we really willing to put our most beloved possessions on the altar when God asks us to?
Pride is always a possibility, even for those who have no bodies. Since agency is always a component of our eternal makeup, the option to rebel is also present. This makes our good choices genuinely good, but it leaves us "in peril every hour." What would have happened if Abraham had told the Lord "no" when He asked for Isaac? Abraham was very high; he would have had a great distance to fall off the mountain. It is dangerous to get close to the Lord, because as Heber C. Kimball told the newly-endowed saints, "You can't sin so cheap no more." Sanctification is a high-stakes blessing; rebellion afterward is rebelling against greater light and knowledge. Deliverance from baser temptations does not mean deliverance from trials and testing. (If anything, it means we are more responsible to help those around us, unburdened as we are, and also that we will be hit with more Abrahamic trials.)
Brigham Young taught, "We must have our day of trial—an opportunity to become acquainted with the bitter and the sweet. We are so organized as to be able to choose or to refuse. We can take the downward road that leads to destruction, or the road that leads to life. We can constantly act upon the principles that tend to death, or refuse them and act upon the principles that pertain to life and salvation. This is a day of trial; our faith and patience can now be tried: now is the time for your fortitude and integrity to be tried. Let the trials come; for if we should be so unspeakably happy as to obtain a crown of eternal life, we shall be like gold tried seven times in the fire. Let the fiery furnace burn, and the afflictions come, and the temptations be presented;—if we wish to be crowned with crowns of glory and exalted to dwell with our elder brother Jesus Christ, we must choose the good and refuse the evil" (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 7, p.203).
Ninety and Nine
Each week we attend sacrament meeting. Those in attendance may not be witnessing miracles, but they are also not breaking major commandments. They are in a middle of the road place, a kind of long plateau where Elder Maxwell's "reasonable righteousness" is the watchword for life. Imperfections are there, but they are well-managed for the most part. These rank-and-file members hold Temple recommends, and use them often. They feel the gravity of the world and its temptations, along with the upward pull of the Lord. These people desire a seat in the kingdom, and the sacrament is where we sit down together at the table, as a family, and learn table manners. We repent of our shallowness and petty sins. It is not enough to forsake murder; we must also forgive and love those who hurt us. It is not enough to be faithful to our spouse physically; we must also be chaste in thought and feeling. It is not enough not to steal; we must also cultivate gratitude for what we have, and be generous despite the financial pinch. Outward observance begins to be coupled with inward observance, and these "ninety and nine" sheep also look out for those who have strayed far afield.
Of course, "we all like sheep have gone astray." It is dangerous to be in this middle place if we assume that we are better than gross sinners, or that we would not be equally lost without the Savior. Grace is dependent upon loving God, and upon not denying His power (Moroni 10:32-33). Denying that Jesus is keeping you afloat at your current level of righteousness via grace is a quick route to sin. That is not to say that there is no work involved; bread requires work. From plowing to planting to watering to harvest to threshing to grinding to baking to chewing, bread represents work. And our own personal efforts are required to get us onto this plateau. The first sacrament emblem is bread, and work is what we demonstrate our willingness to perform when we partake of it: "...they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him and keep his commandments which he has given them..." (D&C 20:77).
Bread is tasty, but the first thing I crave when I have a mouthful of dry bread to chew is liquid refreshment to easy the process. And that is what we get. Jesus gave his disciples wine to wash down the bread He gave them at the last supper. We drink water. In any case, the prayer on the water reflects this: "...they may witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they do always remember him..." When the work of keeping His commandments and taking His name upon us is too hard, we can still "always remember him," and receive a portion of His Spirit. We still have access to grace. Just as liquid makes eating bread into a manageable and even joyful task, so grace makes the difficult work of keeping the commandments possible.
Sanctified
The D&C distinguishes between "the church," and "those who are sanctified" (20:33-34). I suggest that the distinction between these two groups is comparable to the people of Alma before they were delivered from the Lamanites, and after they were delivered from the Lamanites. "And now it came to pass that the burdens which were laid upon Alma and his brethren were made light; yea, the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease, and they did submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord" (Mosiah 24:15). Notice that they are still carrying their burdens, but the Lord is giving them grace, the enabling, strengthening power to carry their burdens with ease. Then the complete removal of the burdens:
"And it came to pass that so great was their faith and their patience that the voice of the Lord came unto them again, saying: Be of good comfort, for on the morrow I will deliver you out of bondage...And Alma and his people departed into the wilderness; and when they had traveled all day they pitched their tents in a valley...Yea, and in the valley...they poured out their thanks to God because he had been merciful unto them, and eased their burdens, and had delivered them out of bondage; for they were in bondage, and none could deliver them except it were the Lord their God" (Mosiah 24:16, 20-21).
We can compare their bondage to the impulse to commit sin, or to addiction. It is one thing to feel the desire to sin, yet receive grace to completely resist temptation. It is even better to be delivered from the desire to commit sin at all. This may sound amazing, but the Lord tells Alma the Younger to "marvel not," that ALL people must experience this mighty change of heart. "Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually" (Mosiah 5:2).
I recently heard a well-intentioned speaker conflate this mighty change with the enthusiasm and renewed determination a good fireside speaker can instill. Far from being a mutable or temporary change of mood, "Please note that the conversion described in these verses is mighty, not minor—a spiritual rebirth and fundamental change of what we feel and desire, what we think and do, and what we are. Indeed, the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ entails a fundamental and permanent change in our very nature made possible through our reliance upon “the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah” (2 Nephi 2:8). As we choose to follow the Master, we choose to be changed—to be spiritually reborn" (Elder David A. Bednar, Ye Must Be Born Again, April 2007 General Conference). This change is akin to waking up one morning loathing chocolate and craving broccoli. That is not a change one can "practice" or "work on;" it is so radical that one might feel the need to receive a brain-scan after it had occurred.
Despite being radical, it is also seamless enough that those who are not paying attention may miss the fact that it has occurred. 3Ne. 9:20 tells us that the Lamanites who experienced this mighty change of heart "new it not." They were unaware of it. Indeed, you would have to be exposed to old temptations and realize you were not tempted by them anymore to know the change had taken place.
If we no longer have the desire to sin, what do we have to repent of?
"Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of" (Gen. 22:2). In order to receive this level of grace, this sanctification, this mighty change of heart, we must "offer for a sacrifice unto [Christ] a broken heart and a contrite spirit...And...[come] unto [Christ] with a broken heart and a contrite spirit..." We must also have faith in Christ, and "love God with all your might, mind and strength," (Moroni 10:32), before the change will happen. From that point forward, testing takes on a new hue. Are we really as dedicated as we claim? Is God really first in our affections? Are we really willing to put our most beloved possessions on the altar when God asks us to?
Pride is always a possibility, even for those who have no bodies. Since agency is always a component of our eternal makeup, the option to rebel is also present. This makes our good choices genuinely good, but it leaves us "in peril every hour." What would have happened if Abraham had told the Lord "no" when He asked for Isaac? Abraham was very high; he would have had a great distance to fall off the mountain. It is dangerous to get close to the Lord, because as Heber C. Kimball told the newly-endowed saints, "You can't sin so cheap no more." Sanctification is a high-stakes blessing; rebellion afterward is rebelling against greater light and knowledge. Deliverance from baser temptations does not mean deliverance from trials and testing. (If anything, it means we are more responsible to help those around us, unburdened as we are, and also that we will be hit with more Abrahamic trials.)
Brigham Young taught, "We must have our day of trial—an opportunity to become acquainted with the bitter and the sweet. We are so organized as to be able to choose or to refuse. We can take the downward road that leads to destruction, or the road that leads to life. We can constantly act upon the principles that tend to death, or refuse them and act upon the principles that pertain to life and salvation. This is a day of trial; our faith and patience can now be tried: now is the time for your fortitude and integrity to be tried. Let the trials come; for if we should be so unspeakably happy as to obtain a crown of eternal life, we shall be like gold tried seven times in the fire. Let the fiery furnace burn, and the afflictions come, and the temptations be presented;—if we wish to be crowned with crowns of glory and exalted to dwell with our elder brother Jesus Christ, we must choose the good and refuse the evil" (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 7, p.203).
Friday, August 3, 2012
"How Long Does It Take?"
As a missionary, I encountered a security guard at a hospital where the missionaries did regular weekly service. As we would walk by his post, he would ask us aloud, "How long does it take?" We thought this was strange; I said nothing. Other missionaries asked him what he meant while I and my companion were absent. His complete question was, "How long does it take to become a god?" At the time, I was uncertain about how to answer that question. Something like this quote came to mind: "When you climb up a ladder, you must begin at the bottom, and ascend step by step, until you arrive at the top; and so it is with the principles of the Gospel—you must begin with the first, and go on until you learn all the principles of exaltation. But it will be a great while after you have passed through the veil before you will have learned them. It is not all to be comprehended in this world; it will be a great work to learn our salvation and exaltation even beyond the grave" (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 348).
But my answer today would be significantly different. Not surprisingly, the Pharisees attacked Jesus for claiming divinity: "I and my Father are one. Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God." Jesus then quotes to them from Psalm 82:6: "Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" (John 10:30-36).
Jesus' enemies (eager and ready to shed his blood at the time he was speaking) have the same reaction to the doctrine of man becoming divine that this security guard I met on my mission, though he was more physically genteel and civil towards us. Blasphemy. My response to him today would be the same as Jesus' response: WE ARE ALREADY GODS, technically speaking. Here is Psalm 82:6 in its entirety: "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High." Kittens ARE cats; they are just not fully developed cats. We ARE gods; we are the children of God, and so are poised to inherit with Christ. "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Romans 8:16-17).
A quick survey of humanity, rather than a survey of the scriptures, is the quickest way to cast doubt on the possibility of fully becoming like God, and I find it sad and strange to hear Christians unwittingly playing the role of the Devil (literally, "the Accuser") as they seek to break down what they view as a blasphemous assertion. In a video about C. S. Lewis' life, a panel of four LDS scholars, and one Baptist scholar, talked about Lewis' description of becoming like God. There was a subtle smugness in the Baptist scholar's demeanor when he asked the four LDS scholars to comment on how we can become like God through obedience. He seemed certain that he had stumped them. His view seemed to be that the main function of the Holy Spirit is to "convict" us in our hearts; to remind us of our unworthy and fallen state, our need for a Savior. This is a legitimate role of the Holy Ghost, but it is not the only role. It seems to me that many people imagine riding a wave of guilt into heaven. Recognizing our shortcomings and sins is the beginning of repentance, not the end.
Without even realizing it, this man had become a spokesman for Satan, who "accuse[d]...our brethren...before our God day and night" (Rev. 10:12). He, along with many contemporary Christians, revel in their lost and fallen state, happily and mistakenly abdicating the responsibility the scriptures places on the shoulders of those who are essaying to be disciples of Christ. They also mock and criticize any who take the mandate seriously. Jesus preached unceasingly that we should "sin no more" and do good; this scholar seemed glad that such an enterprise was unrealistic, perhaps because it absolved him of the difficult work of even trying to obey, or at least because it allowed him to present these Mormons as deluded.
There are levels of grace, gifts that allow us to accomplish the things the Lord has commanded. First, the Spirit will nudge us, and we feel guilt and sorrow for sin. Then we exercise faith in Christ, and repent—we stop doing the bad stuff, and begin doing good. Our own efforts will only take us so far in this mode; even if we had the willpower to quit cold turkey and "white-knuckle" our way through mortality, successfully resisting all temptations, we would still be unfit for heaven because the inhabitants of heaven are not tempted at all—it is not in their nature. The first shot of grace gives us strength beyond our own to resist the temptations that easily beset us. The longer we go in this state, keeping our behavior above the demarcation line between sin and obedience, the more apt we are at receiving more grace, because the effects of the Atonement are delivered to our hearts, minds, and spirits by the Holy Ghost. The final stage of grace is to have the desire for sin purged out of us. When this happens, our hearts are fit (fitted) to enter heaven.
"...Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming his sons and daughters; And thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this, they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God" (Mosiah 27:25-26).
I was told that artificial diamond makers can turn peanut butter into diamonds. Surveying the foibles and outright evil of humanity makes deification seem improbable, but we do not make ourselves into Gods. Our work is to show up and do what we are told with all our heart and a willing mind. This is a prerequisite to the change described above, but it does not negate the fact that Jesus effects the change; it is beyond human capacity or control. (We cannot even make one hair black or white.)
Eternal life is to know God and His Christ, and if the creeds have done one thing better than anything else, it is to obscure the true nature of God until He is beyond comprehension. Not so with Brother Joseph; he said that the FIRST principle of revealed religion is an accurate understanding of God's attributes. Not only is it possible to know about God, at least in a basic sense; that knowledge is mandatory to even begin a spiritual journey on the right foot, so to speak. The Baptist scholar I mentioned above seemed to revel in the incomprehensibility of God and Christ. In light of Jesus' statement in John 17:3, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent," such glorying in confusion is thoroughly un-Christian. Mercifully, this dispensation began when God and Christ manifested themselves to Joseph Smith in person, corporeal and separate, ending forever the confusion established by men.
When Joseph asked them which church to join, he was told, "...that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: 'they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof'" (JSH, 1:19). Not only did the "professors" have no clue about who Jesus and His Father were, but they denied their power. Professors still deny God's power to make us like Him. It is convenient to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in one sense—we have no fixed creed; everything is subject to whatever the Lord wants to tell us next. Building a fortress of sandbags to defend shoddy creeds has not only kept missiles of truth from properly demolishing them; it has also kept the builders trapped inside their bulwarks, unable to find an exit.
I wonder if the Lord allowed circumstances in C. S. Lewis' life to deteriorate to the point that he became an atheist for the purpose of divesting him of his Anglican creed, or any other creed. When Lewis experienced conversion back to Christianity, he was unencumbered by the temptation to defend a position. He brought a keen mind, as well as a blank slate, to his study of the Bible, and here is a sample of one conclusion he reached:
"...On the one hand we must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on to carry us through the next twenty-four hours as 'decent people.' If He does not support us, not one of us is safe from some gross sin. On the other hand, no possible degree of holiness or heroism which has ever been recorded of the greatest saints is beyond what He is determined to produce in every one of us in the end. The job will not be completed in this life; but He means to get us as far as possible before death...
"I find I must borrow . . . [a] parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way the hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
"The command 'Be ye perfect' is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He well make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said" (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 173-74; quoted in Robert Millet, By Grace Are We Saved, pp. 87-8).
-----------------------------------------------------------
Update, 29 August 2012
A recent anti-Mormon ad campaign on this very subject prompts this update. The gist of the campaign is that Jesus' command to be perfect like our Father in Heaven is designed to induce despair in us, and that it is a sin to try and keep the command. I take this as evidence that they have not experienced the great blessing of being strengthened beyond their own abilities to keep a commandment, nor have they experienced a change of heart, in which the desire for sin is "rooted out" of the heart.
As C. S. Lewis indicates, life itself contradicts the philosophy that all God wants from us is a declaration of faith in Him. Wrenching, testing, trials, problems, sickness, estrangement from friends, all continue to a lesser or greater degree after conversion. All but one of Jesus' twelve apostles was brutally killed. A Baptist minister, a neighbor of mine, suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak articulately, and my mother told me that his friends and congregation have largely shunned him. His problems are a contradiction of the idea that God stops making demands of us after we declare faith in Christ and accept Him as our Savior. Either God is sadistic, or pain is serving a purpose, and we are being prepared for more than arm-chair discipleship here, and drowsy drifting and harp-strumming in the afterlife.
The recommendation that we stop trying because Jesus has set the bar too high is reminiscent of the attitudes of various wayward and stubborn servants whom Jesus brings to life in His parables. Jesus cursed the fig tree for not producing any fruit; is this similar to what we can expect? If we bury our talent, will we receive a happy reception by Jesus when we stand before Him?
The Greek word for "perfect" found in Matt. 5:48 is teleios. Strong's Concordance gives us the following explanation:
"...(an adjective, derived from télos, "consummated goal") – mature (consummated) from going through the necessary stages to reach the end-goal, i.e. developed into a consummating completion by fulfilling the necessary process (spiritual journey).
[This root (tel-) means "reaching the end (aim)." It is well-illustrated with the old pirate's telescope, unfolding (extending out) one stage at a time to function at full-strength (capacity effectiveness).]"
Notice the deeper meaning implied—goal, mature, consummated, process, spiritual journey. One of the assertions made by the ad campaign is that we are commanded to be perfect immediately. Our relationship with God as our Father, rather than our pet-owner or worm-cultivator, can shed light on the meaning of the command from Jesus in Matt. 5:48. Children are born with the innate, yet undeveloped, capacities and attributes of their parents. When an infant first attempts to walk, parents are overjoyed. Of course the child will fall. But the parents are delighted by the attempt to walk. Each successive attempt brings the child closer to being able to walk effortlessly.
Applying the logic employed by the ad campaign's author[s], parents would recommend that their children give up on walking, and lie in bed like jello while mother and father do everything for them because they are not yet able to walk. Jesus gave us a command because He intended us to become like our Father. The purpose of His Atonement was not to make our efforts unnecessary; it was (among many things) to keep our failing in the midst of our efforts from damning us. Damage done, laws broken, in the process of growth, are compensated for by Jesus. He will "sit as a refiner of silver." A refiner of silver heats the ore in the crucible until dross is burnt and He can see His own reflection in the molten metal. Life is similar—it is hard specifically because it is for our benefit, a first-class education away from our heavenly Parents.
The assertions made in the ad campaign can be harmonized with parts of the Bible, but not with the demands and rigors of life. A religion's teachings must be able to straddle both the intricate inner world of the scriptures, yet find practical application in the rough-and-tumble arena of life.
But my answer today would be significantly different. Not surprisingly, the Pharisees attacked Jesus for claiming divinity: "I and my Father are one. Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God." Jesus then quotes to them from Psalm 82:6: "Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" (John 10:30-36).
Jesus' enemies (eager and ready to shed his blood at the time he was speaking) have the same reaction to the doctrine of man becoming divine that this security guard I met on my mission, though he was more physically genteel and civil towards us. Blasphemy. My response to him today would be the same as Jesus' response: WE ARE ALREADY GODS, technically speaking. Here is Psalm 82:6 in its entirety: "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High." Kittens ARE cats; they are just not fully developed cats. We ARE gods; we are the children of God, and so are poised to inherit with Christ. "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Romans 8:16-17).
A quick survey of humanity, rather than a survey of the scriptures, is the quickest way to cast doubt on the possibility of fully becoming like God, and I find it sad and strange to hear Christians unwittingly playing the role of the Devil (literally, "the Accuser") as they seek to break down what they view as a blasphemous assertion. In a video about C. S. Lewis' life, a panel of four LDS scholars, and one Baptist scholar, talked about Lewis' description of becoming like God. There was a subtle smugness in the Baptist scholar's demeanor when he asked the four LDS scholars to comment on how we can become like God through obedience. He seemed certain that he had stumped them. His view seemed to be that the main function of the Holy Spirit is to "convict" us in our hearts; to remind us of our unworthy and fallen state, our need for a Savior. This is a legitimate role of the Holy Ghost, but it is not the only role. It seems to me that many people imagine riding a wave of guilt into heaven. Recognizing our shortcomings and sins is the beginning of repentance, not the end.
Without even realizing it, this man had become a spokesman for Satan, who "accuse[d]...our brethren...before our God day and night" (Rev. 10:12). He, along with many contemporary Christians, revel in their lost and fallen state, happily and mistakenly abdicating the responsibility the scriptures places on the shoulders of those who are essaying to be disciples of Christ. They also mock and criticize any who take the mandate seriously. Jesus preached unceasingly that we should "sin no more" and do good; this scholar seemed glad that such an enterprise was unrealistic, perhaps because it absolved him of the difficult work of even trying to obey, or at least because it allowed him to present these Mormons as deluded.
There are levels of grace, gifts that allow us to accomplish the things the Lord has commanded. First, the Spirit will nudge us, and we feel guilt and sorrow for sin. Then we exercise faith in Christ, and repent—we stop doing the bad stuff, and begin doing good. Our own efforts will only take us so far in this mode; even if we had the willpower to quit cold turkey and "white-knuckle" our way through mortality, successfully resisting all temptations, we would still be unfit for heaven because the inhabitants of heaven are not tempted at all—it is not in their nature. The first shot of grace gives us strength beyond our own to resist the temptations that easily beset us. The longer we go in this state, keeping our behavior above the demarcation line between sin and obedience, the more apt we are at receiving more grace, because the effects of the Atonement are delivered to our hearts, minds, and spirits by the Holy Ghost. The final stage of grace is to have the desire for sin purged out of us. When this happens, our hearts are fit (fitted) to enter heaven.
"...Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming his sons and daughters; And thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this, they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God" (Mosiah 27:25-26).
I was told that artificial diamond makers can turn peanut butter into diamonds. Surveying the foibles and outright evil of humanity makes deification seem improbable, but we do not make ourselves into Gods. Our work is to show up and do what we are told with all our heart and a willing mind. This is a prerequisite to the change described above, but it does not negate the fact that Jesus effects the change; it is beyond human capacity or control. (We cannot even make one hair black or white.)
Eternal life is to know God and His Christ, and if the creeds have done one thing better than anything else, it is to obscure the true nature of God until He is beyond comprehension. Not so with Brother Joseph; he said that the FIRST principle of revealed religion is an accurate understanding of God's attributes. Not only is it possible to know about God, at least in a basic sense; that knowledge is mandatory to even begin a spiritual journey on the right foot, so to speak. The Baptist scholar I mentioned above seemed to revel in the incomprehensibility of God and Christ. In light of Jesus' statement in John 17:3, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent," such glorying in confusion is thoroughly un-Christian. Mercifully, this dispensation began when God and Christ manifested themselves to Joseph Smith in person, corporeal and separate, ending forever the confusion established by men.
When Joseph asked them which church to join, he was told, "...that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: 'they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof'" (JSH, 1:19). Not only did the "professors" have no clue about who Jesus and His Father were, but they denied their power. Professors still deny God's power to make us like Him. It is convenient to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in one sense—we have no fixed creed; everything is subject to whatever the Lord wants to tell us next. Building a fortress of sandbags to defend shoddy creeds has not only kept missiles of truth from properly demolishing them; it has also kept the builders trapped inside their bulwarks, unable to find an exit.
I wonder if the Lord allowed circumstances in C. S. Lewis' life to deteriorate to the point that he became an atheist for the purpose of divesting him of his Anglican creed, or any other creed. When Lewis experienced conversion back to Christianity, he was unencumbered by the temptation to defend a position. He brought a keen mind, as well as a blank slate, to his study of the Bible, and here is a sample of one conclusion he reached:
"...On the one hand we must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on to carry us through the next twenty-four hours as 'decent people.' If He does not support us, not one of us is safe from some gross sin. On the other hand, no possible degree of holiness or heroism which has ever been recorded of the greatest saints is beyond what He is determined to produce in every one of us in the end. The job will not be completed in this life; but He means to get us as far as possible before death...
"I find I must borrow . . . [a] parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way the hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
"The command 'Be ye perfect' is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He well make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said" (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 173-74; quoted in Robert Millet, By Grace Are We Saved, pp. 87-8).
-----------------------------------------------------------
Update, 29 August 2012
A recent anti-Mormon ad campaign on this very subject prompts this update. The gist of the campaign is that Jesus' command to be perfect like our Father in Heaven is designed to induce despair in us, and that it is a sin to try and keep the command. I take this as evidence that they have not experienced the great blessing of being strengthened beyond their own abilities to keep a commandment, nor have they experienced a change of heart, in which the desire for sin is "rooted out" of the heart.
As C. S. Lewis indicates, life itself contradicts the philosophy that all God wants from us is a declaration of faith in Him. Wrenching, testing, trials, problems, sickness, estrangement from friends, all continue to a lesser or greater degree after conversion. All but one of Jesus' twelve apostles was brutally killed. A Baptist minister, a neighbor of mine, suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak articulately, and my mother told me that his friends and congregation have largely shunned him. His problems are a contradiction of the idea that God stops making demands of us after we declare faith in Christ and accept Him as our Savior. Either God is sadistic, or pain is serving a purpose, and we are being prepared for more than arm-chair discipleship here, and drowsy drifting and harp-strumming in the afterlife.
The recommendation that we stop trying because Jesus has set the bar too high is reminiscent of the attitudes of various wayward and stubborn servants whom Jesus brings to life in His parables. Jesus cursed the fig tree for not producing any fruit; is this similar to what we can expect? If we bury our talent, will we receive a happy reception by Jesus when we stand before Him?
The Greek word for "perfect" found in Matt. 5:48 is teleios. Strong's Concordance gives us the following explanation:
"...(an adjective, derived from télos, "consummated goal") – mature (consummated) from going through the necessary stages to reach the end-goal, i.e. developed into a consummating completion by fulfilling the necessary process (spiritual journey).
[This root (tel-) means "reaching the end (aim)." It is well-illustrated with the old pirate's telescope, unfolding (extending out) one stage at a time to function at full-strength (capacity effectiveness).]"
Notice the deeper meaning implied—goal, mature, consummated, process, spiritual journey. One of the assertions made by the ad campaign is that we are commanded to be perfect immediately. Our relationship with God as our Father, rather than our pet-owner or worm-cultivator, can shed light on the meaning of the command from Jesus in Matt. 5:48. Children are born with the innate, yet undeveloped, capacities and attributes of their parents. When an infant first attempts to walk, parents are overjoyed. Of course the child will fall. But the parents are delighted by the attempt to walk. Each successive attempt brings the child closer to being able to walk effortlessly.
Applying the logic employed by the ad campaign's author[s], parents would recommend that their children give up on walking, and lie in bed like jello while mother and father do everything for them because they are not yet able to walk. Jesus gave us a command because He intended us to become like our Father. The purpose of His Atonement was not to make our efforts unnecessary; it was (among many things) to keep our failing in the midst of our efforts from damning us. Damage done, laws broken, in the process of growth, are compensated for by Jesus. He will "sit as a refiner of silver." A refiner of silver heats the ore in the crucible until dross is burnt and He can see His own reflection in the molten metal. Life is similar—it is hard specifically because it is for our benefit, a first-class education away from our heavenly Parents.
The assertions made in the ad campaign can be harmonized with parts of the Bible, but not with the demands and rigors of life. A religion's teachings must be able to straddle both the intricate inner world of the scriptures, yet find practical application in the rough-and-tumble arena of life.
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