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.
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