Doctrine and Covenants 93

<p>You may not have heard the Lord call you by name, but He knows each one of you and He knows your name. Elder Neal A. Maxwell said: &ldquo;I testify to you that God has known you individually &hellip; for a long, long time (D&amp;C 93:23). He has loved you for a long, long time. He not only knows the names of all the stars (Ps. 147:4; Isa. 40:26), He knows your names and all your heartaches and your joys!&rdquo;</p> <p>How can you know that your name and needs are known by our Heavenly Father? Elder Robert D. Hales counseled: &ldquo;Turn to the scriptures. Kneel in prayer. Ask in faith. Listen to the Holy Ghost. &hellip; Live the gospel with patience and persistence.&rdquo;</p>

<p>In the great revelation which contains that famous &ldquo;Mormon&rdquo; axiom, &ldquo;The glory of God is intelligence&rdquo; (D&amp;C 93:36) we read this:</p> <p>The Spirit of truth is of God. I am the Spirit of truth, and John bore record of me, saying: He received a fulness of truth, yea, even of all truth; And no man receiveth a fulness unless he keepeth his commandments (D&amp;C 93:26-27).</p> <p>That, it seems to me, is the key to true education. No man can receive a fulness of truth unless he keeps the commandments of our Father in heaven. Learning is not wisdom. We have been misled into thinking that learning is the ultimate in education. True education must result in wisdom. The learning in the world is great. We stand breathless before the myriad of marvels of science. The wisdom of the world is puny. Witness the devastation of war.&nbsp;</p>

<p>&ldquo;We are eternal beings, without beginning and without end. We have always existed. We are the literal spirit children of divine, immortal, and omnipotent Heavenly Parents! We come from the heavenly courts of the Lord our God. We are of the royal house of Elohim, the Most High God. We walked with Him in our premortal life. We heard Him speak, witnessed His majesty, learned His ways. You and I participated in a Grand Council where our beloved Father presented His plan for us&mdash;that we would come to earth, receive mortal bodies, learn to choose between good and evil, and progress in ways that would not otherwise be possible. When we passed through the veil and entered this mortal life, we knew that we would no longer remember the life before. There would be opposition and adversity and temptation. But we also knew that gaining a physical body was of paramount importance for us. Oh, how we hoped that we would quickly learn to make the correct choices, withstand the temptations of Satan, and eventually return to our beloved Parents in Heaven. We knew we would sin and make mistakes&mdash;perhaps even serious ones. But we also knew that our Savior, Jesus Christ, had pledged to come to earth, live a sinless life, and voluntarily lay down His life in an eternal sacrifice. We knew that if we gave our heart to Him, trusted Him, and strived with all the energy of our soul to walk in the path of discipleship, we could be washed clean and once again enter the presence of our beloved Father in Heaven. So, with faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, you and I accepted, by our free will, Heavenly Father&rsquo;s plan. That is why we are here on this beautiful planet earth&mdash;because God offered us the opportunity, and we chose to accept it. Our mortal life, however, is only temporary and will end with the death of our physical body. But the essence of who you and I are will not be destroyed.&rdquo;</p>

<p>The plan of life and an explanation of its eternal course come to us from the Master of heaven and earth, even Jesus Christ the Lord. To understand the meaning of death, we must appreciate the purpose of life.</p> <p>In this dispensation, the Lord declared: &ldquo;And now, verify I say unto you, I was in the beginning with the Father and am the Firstborn&rdquo; (D&amp;C 93:21). &ldquo;Man was also in the beginning with God&rdquo; (D&amp;C 93:29). Jeremiah the prophet recorded, &ldquo;. . . the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee . . . I knew thee; and before thou camest forth I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations&rdquo; (Jer. 1:4-5).</p> <p>From that majestic world of spirits we enter the grand stage of life even to prove ourselves obedient to all things commanded of God. During mortality we grow from helpless infancy to inquiring childhood and then to reflective maturity. We experience joy and sorrow, fulfillment and disappointment, success and failure; taste the sweet, yet sample the bitter. This is mortality.</p>

<p>In the hours leading up to His death on the cross, Jesus was asked by Pontius Pilate, &ldquo;What is truth?&rdquo; (John 18:38). The Gospel of John does not record an answer from the Savior, but the answer is found in this revelation. The Savior declares, &ldquo;Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come&rdquo; (D&amp;C 93:24). In our time there are many who would suggest that all truth is relative, subject to the perceptions of the person who is viewing it. In contrast to this idea, verse 24 teaches that there is an objective truth of things as they are, were, and are to come. While we sometimes preoccupy ourselves with the question of what is coming, the questions of how things were in the past and how things actually are in the present are both important as well. At times the most difficult task is not to know the past or the future but to know the reality of what the truth is in the present.</p> <p>Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf once quoted the John Godrey Saxe&rsquo;s poem &ldquo;The Blind Men and the Elephant&rdquo; to illustrate the danger of approaching the truth in the wrong way. The poem begins,</p> <blockquote> <p>Six men of Indostan<br />To learning much inclined, <br />Who went to see the Elephant<br />(Though all of them were blind), <br />That each by observation<br />Might satisfy his mind.</p> </blockquote> <p>Elder Uchtdorf added:</p> <blockquote> <p>In the poem each of the six travelers takes hold of a different part of the elephant and then describes to the others what he has discovered. One of the men finds the elephant&rsquo;s leg and describes it as being round and rough like a tree. Another feels the tusk and describes the elephant as a spear. A third grabs the tail and insists that an elephant is like a rope. A fourth discovers the trunk and insists that the elephant is like a large snake. Each is describing truth. And because his truth comes from personal experience, each insists that he knows what he knows.</p> </blockquote> <p>The poem concludes:</p> <blockquote> <p>And so these men of Indostan<br />Disputed loud and long, <br />Each in his own opinion<br />Exceeding stiff and strong, <br />Though each was partly in the right, <br />And all were in the wrong!<a id="_ftnref1" class="see-footnote" title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a></p> </blockquote> <p>As with the blind men in the poem, we make a mistake when we assume to know the whole objective truth&mdash;in reality, we may only know part of it. The Father and the Son, however, see and view the whole truth, which exists objectively in Their sight. We must trust that They see the entire picture and guide us so that we can know what the truth is in relation to the past, present, and future.</p> <div class="footnotes"> <p class="footnote"><a id="_ftn1" class="footnote-label" title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Dieter F. Uchtdorf, &ldquo;What is Truth?,&rdquo; CES devotional, January 13, 2013.</p> </div>

<p>In Doctrine and Covenants 93:30-32 the Savior explains how men and women can be coeternal with God and still be His children. The eternal element of man is labeled here as &ldquo;intelligence.&rdquo; This revelation establishes two things about the nature of intelligence. First, it cannot be created or made (D&amp;C 93:29). Second, intelligence is free to act in the sphere in which God has placed it, or written more simply, all intelligence has agency (D&amp;C 93:30). Beyond these two things, there is little that we know about intelligence. Joseph Fielding Smith warned about the dangers of taking our limited knowledge on this subject too far: &ldquo;Some of our writers have endeavored to explain what an intelligence is, but to do so is futile, for we have never been given any insight into this matter beyond what the Lord has fragmentarily revealed. We know, however, that there is something called intelligence which always existed. It is the real eternal part of man, which was not created nor made. This intelligence combined with the spirit constitutes a spiritual identity or individual.&rdquo;<a id="_ftnref1" class="see-footnote" title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a></p> <p>This revelation about the eternal nature of intelligence and agency has widespread philosophical consequences. Consider, for instance, the problem of evil. Those who question the existence of God often use the existence of evil and suffering in the world as evidence that there is no overseer to the universe. When people of faith point out that men and women have agency and at times use it unwisely, leading to evil, those who question might respond, &ldquo;Why did God make men and women the kind of beings who could do evil things?&rdquo;</p> <p>Doctrine and Covenants 93 presents the answer to this question regarding the capactify of men and women to engage in acts of evil. There is a part of men and women, here called intelligence, that God did not create. Intelligence has always existed and has always had agency. Thus, men and women are responsible for their own decisions and have always been. This addresses not only the problem of evil but also the nature of free will and predeterminism. Truman G. Madsen, a professor of philosophy, phrased the issue this way: &ldquo;Q. If man is totally the creation of God, how can he be anything or do anything that he was not divinely pre-caused to do? A. Man is not totally the creation of God. &lsquo;Intelligence was not created or made, neither indeed can be . . . behold, here is the agency of man.&rsquo;&rdquo;<a id="_ftnref2" class="see-footnote" title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a></p> <p>The intelligence part of our beings that was not created by God does not lessen our relationship with Him. God took intelligence, provided it with a body of spirit, and then arranged for the eternal progression of those who follow Him. In this sense, the relationship between God, His sons, and His daughters closely mirrors the relationship between earthly parents and children. Parents do not love their children less because they know they existed before they came into their home. Knowing the eternal nature of each child makes our connection to our Father in Heaven even more profound.</p> <div class="footnotes"> <p class="footnote"><a id="_ftn1" class="footnote-label" title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Joseph Fielding Smith, <em>The Progress of Man</em>,1964, 11.</p> <p class="footnote"><a id="_ftn2" class="footnote-label" title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Truman G. Madsen, <em>Joseph Smith the Prophet</em>,1989, 140&ndash;141. See also David L. Paulsen, &ldquo;Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil,&rdquo; BYU forum, September 21, 1999.</p> </div>