Categories: All Articles, Atonement, I Have No Greater Joy, Repentance, Resurrection
Supernal Gifts
As I was teaching my Primary class of 11-year-olds a boy raised his hand. “I have a question,” he said. “Is Jesus a person or a thing?”
My breath was taken away. I was astounded. Was this question real, or was he joking? This boy’s father had been in a bishopric. Have we somehow missed getting this most basic of teachings across?
I turned to the other four young people in the class and said, “How about that, is Jesus a person or a thing?”
I expected to hear a chorus affirming that Jesus is a person. Instead there was a hesitancy before another boy ventured the opinion that Jesus might be a spirit. Another boy agreed that might be so.
I repeated my question, but with an addition: “Is Jesus a person, a thing, or a spirit?” A less-active girl was in the class, and I didn’t expect her to know the answer. Three of the other young people were the children of men who had served in bishoprics, and the fourth was the son of a returned missionary who was a ward leader. I know for a fact that the gospel is lived, discussed, and practiced in their homes, but not one of those children could tell me if Jesus was a person, a thing, or a spirit.
What followed was a golden teaching opportunity, perhaps the most golden teaching opportunity that I’ve ever had, because I had five attentive listeners who truly wanted to know the answer to their own question. Hopefully each of them now knows that Jesus is a real, live, resurrected person, and that because of Him, each of us will be resurrected, too. As I rehearsed these things, memories of other teachings came to the children’s minds, and things started to come together and to make sense to them.
“How will we be resurrected,” one asked, meaning what will we look like? “Will we be little kids?”
Clasping my hands together I said, “Here’s a baby. If it dies, its spirit and body separate.” (Here I unclasped my hands and let the left one sink down onto the table). “What happens to its body?”
“It’s buried.”
“What happens to its spirit.”
“It goes to heaven.”
“Can the body do any growing in the grave?”
“No.”
“So in the resurrection when that spirit goes back into that body, what will that resurrected baby look like?”
“A baby.”
I then turned to the member of the stake Primary presidency who had entered the room in the midst of this discussion and had quietly sat down in a chair. I introduced her and asked, “Have you, by chance, ever lost a baby?”
“Actually I have.”
“Then,” I told my class, “after this mother dies and she and her baby are both resurrected, she will have the joy of raising that baby to maturity.”
Tears sprang to her eyes as the sister blurted out, “Isn’t the gospel beautiful?”
“Indeed it is,” I agreed. “In a few years I’m going to die as an old man, and they’re going to lay my old body in the grave. What will I look like when my spirit goes back into my old body when I’m resurrected?”
“An old man.”
“Yep, but then as that baby is growing up, I’ll be going the other way. What will we all end up looking like?”
“Our best!” one young man shouted out.
“I like that,” I said. “I was going to say we’ll look like we would in the prime of life, but your answer is better. We’ll look our best!”
The sister was right. The gospel plan is beautiful. Virtually no one outside the membership of the Church has any comprehension of how beautiful the plan is. My mother-in-law once asked her good friend how she viewed God. In reply the friend waved her hands in the air like a blowing breeze and said, “I see Him as a force.”
I’m afraid that the comprehension we have, who are members of the Church, is also more limited than it should be.
For instance, do you know that you’re dead? You think that you’re alive and well, but you’re dead! Samuel the Lamanite said so. Listen to this:
“For behold, he surely must die that salvation may come; yea, it behooveth him and becometh expedient that he dieth, to bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, that thereby men may be brought into the presence of the Lord.
“Yea, behold, this death bringeth to pass the resurrection, and redeemeth all mankind from the first death—that spiritual death; for all mankind, by the fall of Adam being cut off from the presence of the Lord are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual.
“But behold, the resurrection of Christ redeemeth mankind, yea, even all mankind, and bringeth them back into the presence of the Lord.
“Yea, and it bringeth to pass the condition of repentance...” (Helaman 14:15-18).
When we’re out of the presence of God, we’re dead!
Picture this: You once lived in a beautiful and blissful place with your Father in Heaven, your current loved ones, your beloved ancestors, and your cherished future posterity. One by one you saw your best friends leave on that hazardous earth journey. Did you cry at this parting—this death—or did you rejoice that they were making the trip so that you could have your turn to get a body? I’m fairly certain that the emotions that accompanied that parting were similar to what we feel when a righteous loved one leaves us here.
And then it was your turn to step through the veil. You did it willingly. It was your choice. You did it with anticipation and perhaps with some dread. The trip ahead was fraught with pain and peril, but you wanted that body! You were willing to go through anything to get it. If the Lord in His wisdom decreed that your time in mortality would be most profitably spent in a deformed body, you were even willing to endure that. You trusted His wisdom and His promise that in the resurrection your eternal body would be made whole and glorious.
On the eternal side of the veil, our leaving that life looked like a death. On the mortal side of the veil it was a birth. When the time of our physical deaths arrives the perspectives will be reversed. Our entry into the world of spirits will ideally be a long-anticipated, happy birth into a new world.
Death has already happened to us once when we left the Father’s presence to come to earth. It was our choice. It was the only way that we could obtain a body like His, and have the opportunity to become like Him. We want to eventually return to His eternal presence. That’s where we all want to ultimately end up.
We all willingly died once already. We died when we left the Father’s presence. That birth/death experience necessitates another death when we leave mortality. Physical death is something to look forward to with anticipation if we’re ready to go. I don’t look forward to the pain and suffering that might precede it, but we have the promise that our moment of passing can be sweet.
“And it shall come to pass that those that die in me shall not taste of death, for it shall be sweet unto them.
“And they that die not in me, wo unto them, for their death is bitter.” (D&C 42:46-47).
Leaving this world in an unrepentant state is a highly risky and extremely stupid thing to do. The risk is that you might suffer another death by being cast out of the Father’s presence forever.
The stupidity of risking that lies in the fact that we have been given a monumental gift that gives us the power to avoid the death which might inevitably follow an unprepared-for physical death.
People go to great extremes to try to avoid, or to put off, physical death. People view death as the very worst thing that can happen to them. Somewhere there are repositories where people have actually paid to have their bodies stored in a frozen condition until science comes up with a way to restore life to the body and to enable them to live forever.
Such faith is misplaced. If you’re going to worship science or a force, you might as well be worshiping cows or crocodiles. Neither science nor idols has the power to enable eternal life.
But the monumental, transcendent, incomprehensible, amazing gift of repentance does. Did you catch what I just quoted from the 14th chapter of Helaman? “The resurrection of Christ redeemeth mankind...and bringeth to pass the condition of repentance.” (Helaman 14:17-18).
Repentance is the key. Repentance is a gift. Repentance is an opportunity. Repentance is the way to eternal life. The Atonement and resurrection of Jesus is the key that opened the way. The way is wide open for all mankind to be redeemed from these deaths and to come back into the Father’s presence. All we have to do is to accept this gift of repentance that the Redeemer holds out to us. Each and every sin has to be paid for. He has already done it in our behalf, but we have to redeem the coupon. It’s free if we’ll repent and covenant to follow Him and to always remember Him.
If we’re not willing to do that then D&C 19:15-20 says that we’ll have to do our own suffering, which will be sore—“how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not.”
Now the following might seem like an uncharitable statement, but as I understand the scriptures, the fulness of the effects of the Atonement only applies to baptized members of the Church (and babies who die before the age of accountability). Listen to this:
“And he shall come into the world to redeem his people; and he shall take upon him the transgressions of those who believe on his name; and these are they that shall have eternal life, and salvation cometh to none else.
“Therefore the wicked remain as though there had been no redemption made, except it be the loosing of the bands of death...” (Alma 11:40-41).
“Then, I say unto you, they shall be as though there had been no redemption made; for they cannot be redeemed according to God’s justice; and they cannot die, seeing there is no more corruption.” (Alma 12:18).
“Behold, he offereth himself a sacrifice for sin, to answer the ends of the law, unto all those who have a broken heart and a contrite spirit; and unto none else can the ends of the law be answered.” (2 Nephi 2:7).
“For no man can be saved, according to the words of Christ, save they shall have faith in his name; wherefore, if these things have ceased, then has faith ceased also; and awful is the state of man, for they are as though there had been no redemption made.” (Moroni 7:38).
The bottom line is this: Jesus Christ, our Redeemer and our Savior, through unspeakable suffering, paid a debt that He did not owe, for sins that He did not commit. He did it—out of love—for you and for me and for every soul who will repent of His sins and who will covenant through the sacred ordinance of baptism to follow Him the rest of their lives.
The Savior’s Atonement activated two supernal gifts to all mankind. One of the gifts is automatic to both saint and sinner. That is the promise of resurrection. We will all ultimately get out of this life with what we came here to get. We were promised a body if we’d come, and the Lord will keep His promise.
The other gift is conditional. It’s the gift of eternal life back in the presence of God and of our loved ones. It’s conditional upon the gift of repentance.
We don’t have to do a thing to accept the gift of resurrection. But accepting the gift of repentance is a lifelong effort involving abandonment of our sins and the making and keeping of sacred, essential covenants.
I am grateful for my Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ. He lives. He’s a real person. He made my repentance, resurrection, and eternal life with Him and my family possible.