I have been struck in recent days how the Lord is mindful of each of us, no matter how many of us there are to worry about. Some years ago I was reading in Good Housekeeping a small article that talked about the wife in a family that had been chosen Arizona's Family of the Year. In it she talked about having all the things she could dream of and in less than a year of having it swept away by divorce. And she said that one day she went to the LDS temple in Mesa, Arizona, to find some solace. In the temple we are asked to whisper in our regular communications which affords a certain level of reverence. But it can also give one a feeling of isolation, an isolation that only God can penetrate. She said that in the middle of the service she looked around at all the other people, dressed in white, who were in attendance. In her moment of loneliness she thought, “I wonder if there is anyone here I know. I doubt that anyone here even knows my name.” In that moment of aloneness came the still, small voice of the Spirit, whispering, “I know your name.” It is this constant watching that God does over us that I would like to discuss.
Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints include the idea that we are the spirit children of God the Father. And we were participants in a grand council, before the foundation of the world. In that council, the Father presented a plan whereby all of His children would come to Earth to receive a physical body, like unto His own. And that we would be placed in an environment where we would be tested to see if we would choose to do all that He asked us to do. (see Abraham 3:22-28)
Significant to this council was the choosing of Someone to redeem the children of God from the necessary Fall which places us in the proving ground. From the beginning it was known that all men would be born into this fallen world and that a Savior must be provided to redeem them from the effects of that Fall.i
While Adam was in the garden he was warned that to partake of the forbidden fruit was to take death upon him. The phrase, “in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,”ii was indeed fulfilled because Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden and the presence of God, an immediate spiritual death. Their physical deaths were also guaranteed, but it was important to God's plan that man be given a chance to be tested. iii So the physical deaths of Adam and Eve were not immediate but sure.
The promised redemption was known from the beginning, but the significance to this discussion is yet to be explained. Because the atonement of Christ was intended to save us from both a physical and spiritual death, the details of its nature are unfolded in the messianic scriptures of the Bible and the Book of Mormon. We get small snippets of Jesus' true sacrifice only by serious study.
First, let us take note that the atonement, or reconciliation with God, has two saving components. First is a universal resurrection of the body, given to all who have ever lived.iv The second is a cleansing from all sin. Consider that the tradition of the Lord's Supper contains the separate blessing, first of bread and then of wine. It is no accident that they have always been blessed and partaken of separately. I suggest that this is because they symbolize the reality of two kinds of salvation: a resurrection of the body, and the conditional reconciliation with God. Both are accomplished by grace and are gifts to His children, but only resurrection is unconditional. The kind of resurrection is related to the kind of person we choose to be.v
More important to this discussion is the idea that Jesus surrendered His will to that of the Fathervi by taking upon himself the sins of every person born into this world. And in that great sacrifice which began in Gethsemanevii He suffered all that we had and would suffer. Not for our sins only, but for the pains of this life, whether inflicted by others or not.viii And in the moment of greatest sorrow Christ was granted a vision of those for whom He suffered. And in the acceptation of His gift we become His children (or his seedix as Isaiah puts it), and Jesus becomes a father to us who accept Himx. Thus we have not only a father of our spirits, our Heavenly Father, but we also have a father of our new selves and in Jesus we are indeed born again. Because of His sacrifice Christ knows us and everything we suffer. He is with me as I type these thoughts. He is with you as you read them. Of course he knows our names!
