The Creation
(As taken from the 1989 Jan and Feb Ensign Magazine Articles entitled, The Restoration of Major Doctrine Through Joseph Smith, Part One & Two. This is the concluding installment. Only a small part of that message is included here).
Hand in hand with the doctrine that man is eternal came Joseph Smith’s teachings about the creation of the world. While others taught that God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing), he taught that God formed the earth from material that already existed.
In defining creation as “organization,” the Prophet made a distinct contribution to our understanding of the nature of physical matter and bodies, the attributes of God, and the purposes of this mortal existence.
Understanding the creation helps us to see that God is a God of order and of laws who is not capricious or given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior. The universe truly has system and order.
An examination of Joseph Smith’s teachings about the Creation shows that he gradually learned a great deal between 1820 and 1844. In 1820, in the Sacred Grove, he received a new understanding of the fact that “God created man in his own image.” (Gen. 1:27; see JS—H 1:16–17.) Man literally was created in the image of God.
In 1830, the infinite number of God’s creations became apparent as the Lord told Joseph, “Worlds without number have I created.” (Moses 1:33.) That year, in another revelation, Joseph was also informed that all things were created twice by the Lord: the first time spiritually, the second time physically. (See D&C 29:31–32; Moses 3:5.)
In 1830, Joseph Smith had learned clearly that God the Father created “this heaven, and this earth” through his Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ. (See Moses 2:1; John 1:10–14.)
But in 1835, the Prophet translated a record that revealed more concerning who created the earth and how it was done.
He learned from the Book of Abraham that Jesus Christ acted in concert with other Gods to create our world: “Then the Lord said: Let us go down. And they went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth.” (Abr. 4:1.)
Unfortunately, Christian literature through the third century A.D. does not refer much to the Creation.
The tradition of divine beings participating in the work of creation, however, was well established among the Gnostic Christians, that is, those Christians who believed in mystical knowledge available to relatively few.
Whether this was a perversion of the more orthodox Christian belief concerning the Creation is impossible to discern. Clearly, though, Joseph Smith was conveying something known to Abraham but lost since then.
Joseph Smith also discovered that the Creation was the result of organization. During the Nauvoo period, he continued to speak about the Creation in terms of organization. William Clayton, the Prophet’s private secretary, reported Joseph Smith as saying in 1841, “This earth was organized or formed out of other planets which were broke up and remodeled and made into the one on which we live.”
In the famed King Follett discourse, delivered at general conference in April 1844, Joseph Smith presented an extensive treatise on creation as organization.
He told the Saints that the word create comes from the Hebrew word baurau [bara], which means to organize, and that “God had materials to organize the world out of chaos … [which] may be organized and reorganized but not destroyed.”
Although these teachings were new for his time, Joseph Smith’s ideas received little attention from his non-LDS contemporaries. Members of other sects in the nineteenth century accepted the idea of ex nihilo creation without reservation. Consequently, Christians dismissed any alternative as irrelevant. Most accepted the Westminster Confession of Faith, which stated that God made the world “of nothing.”
To the people of his day, steeped in such traditions, Joseph Smith’s ideas on creation must have seemed implausible.
In contrast to nineteenth-century Christians, the early Christians believed in a concept of creation through organization similar to that Joseph Smith taught. The Christians in the first two centuries after Christ indeed believed that God created the earth by organizing it from material that had existed eternally. Justin Martyr, for example, wrote about A.D. 165 that “[God] in the beginning did create all things out of unformed matter.”
Two currents of thought may be largely responsible for the change in traditional Christian doctrine: Gnostic ideas and Greek philosophy. Both Gnostics and Greek philosophers taught that only the spirit is pure, and that body and matter are corrupt.
It was therefore inconceivable for them to believe that material things could proceed from spiritual things. Because of such ideas, ex nihilo creation became a pillar of faith in traditional Christianity. This commonly accepted view of creation was what Joseph Smith challenged as he initiated a return to the view of earlier Christians.
Since the time of Peter, the Saints have looked forward to “the times of restitution of all things.” (Acts 3:21.)
For centuries, mankind was tossed to and fro among the multitude of differing doctrines on the nature and being of God and man. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Lord Jesus Christ and His latter-day prophet, Joseph Smith, for revealing to us in the present-day world the true nature of God, man, and the Creation, that we may know who and what we worship and what our relationship to God is.
Pres Monson Talk Given 1 Nov 2011 at BYU (only a small part of the talk is presented here. It is part of a paraphrased version from Deseret News).
President Monson told of a letter he received from a Catholic woman who commended the compassionate service two Latter-day Saint men gave her brother-in-law, Tom Brown, who was not a Latter-day Saint and had terminal cancer. The woman wrote that she used to indulge in "Mormon bashing," but after having seen how Church members treated her family, she not only would never again criticize the LDS faith but would not allow it to be criticized in front of her."
President Monson said, "Our opportunities to shine are limitless. They surround us each day, in whatever circumstance we find ourselves. As we follow the example of the Savior, ours will be the opportunity to be a light, as it were, in the lives of those around us — whether they be our own family members, our coworkers, mere acquaintances or total strangers."
He said when he presided over the Canadian Mission one of the missionaries became seriously ill and was hospitalized. The evening before the missionary was to be operated on, President Monson and the missionary's father gave him a blessing.
The five other men in the hospital ward, impressed with what the missionary had taught them during his hospitalization, fasted on the morning of the surgery. Despite serious chances that the missionary would not be able to endure the surgery, everything went well.
The surgeon, who performed the operation, refused payment, saying, "'It would be dishonest for me to accept a fee. I have never before performed surgery when my hands seemed to be guided by a power which was other than my own.
No, I wouldn't take a fee for the surgery which Someone on high helped me perform.'"
President Monson quoted from the "Lion King," in which Mufasa, the spirit of Simba's departed father, tells him, "Look inside yourself, Simba. You are more than what you have become….Remember who you are….Remember."
Man’s Eternal Nature and Premortal Existence (Part 2)
Another major doctrine that Joseph Smith restored tells us about our eternal roots. All people are different from one another, with varying talents, interests, and inclinations. Why do such differences exist? Can they be adequately explained in terms of biological and environmental factors? The doctrine of man’s premortal existence answers these questions.
Some spirits who sanctioned our Heavenly Father’s plan were foreordained to special callings on earth. Such spirits come to earth not predetermined but predisposed to recognize and obey the voice of truth.
Not only were Abraham and Jeremiah called in this way (see Abr. 3:23; Jer. 1:5), but also, as Joseph Smith taught, “every man who has a calling to minister to the inhabitants of the world was ordained to that very purpose in the grand Council of Heaven before this world was—I suppose that I was ordained to this very office in that grand council.”
Joseph Smith taught that “all the spirits that God ever sent into this world are susceptible of enlargement.” In the Doctrine and Covenants, he said that the Spirit gives light to everyone who is born and that it enlightens everyone who hearkens to its voice. (See D&C 84:46; John 1:9.) Those who continue in obedience to God receive more light, and that light can grow “brighter and brighter until the perfect day.” (D&C 50:24; see also Alma 12:9–11; John 8:12.) With such assistance, men and women are able to rise above the negative aspects of their earthly training and environment. Thus, it is possible for everyone to receive the blessings of heaven.
Eternal life is also possible, in part, because an element of every human being is divine and eternal. Joseph Smith used several different terms to refer to that eternal essence—spirit, soul, mind, and intelligence. He received the knowledge that “man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” (D&C 93:29.) He taught that “the mind of man is as immortal as God himself” and that “the Spirit of Man [meaning intelligence] is not a created being.”
He did not define, however, this element’s form and substance, nor did he identify its attributes, other than its eternal nature.
This eternal element of intelligence or light of truth is something other than the spirit bodies God created later; these later entities were “the intelligences that were organized” and were the spirits that Abraham saw.
From revelations given to Joseph Smith (see D&C 131–32) and from his own comments about them, plus subsequent statements from later prophets, we know that spirit bodies are procreated by resurrected, exalted couples who have “a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever.” (D&C 132:19.) Spirits are “begotten and born of heavenly parents, and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father.”
In our own primeval births, the eternal intelligence part of us was “organized” and provided opportunity to become part of God’s plan of salvation—with the potential to become like him. This doctrine is ennobling and intriguing—a subject that we hope will be among the many great and important things about which God will yet reveal more. (See A of F 1:9.)
That the ancient prophets knew of the doctrine of man’s premortal existence is clear. (See Abr. 3; Moses 3–4; Gen. 2:4–5; Jer. 1:5.) The doctrine also circulated among early Christians but was declared anathema, that is, (Something or someone that one vehemently dislikes or a formal curse by a pope or a council of the Church, excommunicating a person or denouncing a doctrine).
In the fifth century A.D. 32 An early Christian poem known as “The Pearl,” for example, begins: “In my first primeval childhood … I was nurtured in the royal house of my Father. … Then my parents sent me forth from our home in the East (the source of light), supplied with all necessities...
They removed from me the garment of light … and they made a Covenant with me, and wrote in my heart, lest I go astray.”
Nevertheless, at the time of Joseph Smith, little trace of the doctrine had survived. No part of man was thought to have existed eternally, for God was said to have created all things out of nothing. Most Christian churches today do not teach that mortals existed as spirits prior to their mortal births.(That makes the LDS children's song, I Am a Child of God, all the more important). They generally acknowledge that Christ existed before his birth and that God created other beings who exist in the universe but who do not become mortal.
The most common view is that God creates a person’s spirit at the time of his or her mortal birth. This view interprets biblical passages that suggest premortal existence as referring to Christ or saying that all things existed only in the mind and plans of God before their actual creation.
Joseph Smith, however, restored the doctrine of man’s premortal existence. The doctrine can be both comforting and unsettling—comforting in that it tells us we are literally of the family of God with unlimited potential; unsettling because it tells us that we are responsible for what we are now and for what we will become. (to be continued)
