I ask you to think with me about the Fall of Adam and Eve. When you think about that Fall, do you lament that event, or do you rejoice in the fact that it happened? If you do not already rejoice when you think about the Fall of Adam, I would like now to try to persuade you to do so. To begin that attempt, let us look at the big picture of our existence.
Our Heavenly Father and Mother were once as we are, mortals on an earth somewhere. They were also fallen. But they proved themselves worthy by faithfully abiding the requirements to be able to stand the blessings of exaltation. They showed that no matter what the circumstances of their mortal lives, they would do the things that were right for them to do, to honor and to bless all of their fellow beings, no matter what their fellow beings did to them. Having demonstrated their firmness in their faithfulness, being unshakable, they were rewarded with the blessings of exaltation. Exaltation is a fulness of power, being able to do everything that can be done, a fulness of knowledge, to know all of the past, present and future of the whole universe, and a fulness of opportunity to bless other beings.
Using all of those blessings and powers, our Heavenly Parents sought us out. They found us as intelligences already existing somewhere in the universe. They invited us to become their children, which would mean that they would prepare bodies for us of spirit material, begetting us into their family by the process of birth on the same model as we know birth as babies into this mortality. They begat millions and billions of us as spirit children. As their children, they taught us about the universe we live in and how to grow in ability to use this universe to achieve happiness through blessing others.
Blessing others is the way our Heavenly Parents find happiness, and that is why they begat us as their spirit children, so that we could also receive the happiness they enjoy. Blessing others with what they need, to achieve as much happiness as they can stand, is called righteousness.
Righteousness is not an arbitrary thing. It does not depend on the likes or dislikes of any person, but is built right in the nature of existence. It is the rules that intelligent beings of great knowledge and power must live by to as not to hurt or curse any other being, rather to bless and help every other being affected by them to become as happy and satisfied as possible. So the rules of righteousness include being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, thus doing good and blessing all other beings affected by them. Those who achieve righteous character can be trusted with exaltation. Exaltation is to be lifted up above every limitation, to enjoy all the power there is in the universe to bless others. Blessing others is what brings happiness. Exaltation is thus the opportunity for the greatest happiness.
Being righteous persons, our Heavenly Parents found their happiness in sharing with their children, so that their children could receive the full happiness they have. So they prepared a plan by which each of their spirit children could choose and receive that full happiness. The plan was announced in a great council in heaven. The plan was that our Heavenly Parents would send their children into a new place with physical bodies like their own added to the spiritual bodies which we had already been given. In this new mortal life, we would not remember life with Heavenly Father and Mother, nor would we any longer be able to see and know the spiritual experiences which we had learned to enjoy as spirit children of Heavenly Father and Mother. The plan was to give each spiritual child the opportunity to see how much of righteousness each desired and could stand. Those who showed that they wanted righteousness more than anything else, including more than wanting mortal life itself, would thus show that they could be trusted with all of the power and knowledge of Heavenly Father and Mother. But we would each have to find how much righteousness we wanted to achieve using our hearts, not our minds. That is because our hearts are the real us. Our minds are a tool by which we attain the desires of our hearts. We were all taught that it is the heart that is the real us. So mortal life would be a situation where the real desires of each of us spirit children of Heavenly Father and Mother could be proved without error.
But the prospect of not being able to beat the system, to have the desires of our hearts become plain for all to see made many of the children of Heavenly Father and Mother become afraid. They were afraid because they knew themselves, that their hearts were not pure in desiring righteousness. They knew they could not prove themselves worthy of an eternal opportunity to bless others, because what they really wanted was selfishness, to have more for themselves than their neighbors had. These spirit children of Heavenly Father and Mother rebelled and would not accept the plan, knowing they could not prove themselves worthy of the powers of righteousness. In their rebellion they were sent away out of heaven and from the presence of Heavenly Father and Mother and the spirit children who did want to prove themselves. They were led by one of our spirit brothers who had been a notable leader, whose name was Lucifer, meaning “light bearer.”
So began the execution of Father’s plan to further bless His spirit children. The firstborn of Father’s children, He who was selected to be firstborn because of His love of righteousness, was given the opportunity to gather many of the rest of us to participate in the preparation of this earth to be the place where we could demonstrate our love of other persons in righteousness. The firstborn would be known as Jehovah, and also by the name Jesus Christ.
Some of us joined Jehovah in taking the fragments of other planets and forming them into a place where the mortal spirit children of Heavenly Father and Mother could live and prove their love of righteousness. That proof would come only if that love for righteousness were freely chosen for itself and not for some promised reward. So some condition had to be achieved whereon each of the children of our Heavenly Parents could choose whatever degree of righteousness each desired. The plan of Heavenly Father provided that the children would come to this earth having no remembrance of the heaven where they had been residing and as they became mature as human beings they would be given the way of selfishness. The way of righteousness would be offered to each child of God through promptings of their hearts and would be called the light of Christ. The way of selfishness would be offered to each child of God as desires that would come through their fleshly bodies as evil desires were put into their hearts by Lucifer.
But there was a problem. How could our Heavenly Father and Mother, being completely righteous, put their own children in jeopardy by giving them the temptation to be selfish and do evil? If Father thrust us out of His presence, then by the law of justice He would need to bring us back. This was solved in Father’s plan for the happiness of His children by allowing the first parents of human beings to choose for themselves to become fallen and subject to Lucifer. Then they would also need to choose for themselves to be redeemed back to the presence of our Heavenly Parents.
And so it was that when our first parents were put into the Garden of Eden on this earth they were put into a paradise that was very much like the heaven where they were born and raised as spirit children of Heavenly Father and Mother. But they were different, because they were like little children, having very little knowledge and ability. They did know enough to tend the garden in which they found themselves. But they were not yet prepared to demonstrate the true desires of their hearts.
To give them the opportunity to demonstrate those true desires of their hearts, Father gave Adam and Eve a commandment not to partake of the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, lest they die. Then Father allowed Lucifer, who had been sent to this same earth with his followers, to tempt Adam and Eve to disobey Father by eating of the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam would not partake, but Eve was deceived into thinking that they would not die, but would be as the gods by partaking. So she partook of the fruit and then persuaded Adam to partake. This was the Fall of Adam.
Now to recount the changes that took place in the Fall of Adam and Eve.
- Whereas they had been spiritually alive, their spiritual senses being able to perceive the spiritual existences around them, they did die spiritually that very day in which they partook. They could no longer perceive the spirits of all things in their surroundings, but only the physical part of each being. They could no longer see either Heavenly Father or Lucifer.
- Whereas they had had spirit matter flowing in their veins before their disobedience, they now had red blood flowing through their veins. This blood also sustained life in their physical bodies, but only temporarily. Thus Adam and Eve not only died spiritually, but became destined to die physically as their physical bodies would eventually degenerate and no longer be able to function. Spiritual death would thus be followed by temporal death.
- Adam and Eve had been as children, knowing and understanding very little. But after the Fall, they were taught by angels how to be righteous through Jesus Christ, and were given consciences by which they would be prompted to do good, the work of righteousness. But also after the Fall, they gained the constant companionship of an evil spirit, either Lucifer or one of his followers who rebelled in heaven. Lucifer, or Satan as he is now called, would always entreat Adam and Eve to be selfish, to seek more for themselves at the expense of others, and to delight in the pleasures of the flesh over the joy of righteousness. Thus Adam and Eve became free to choose for themselves in every dimension of their lives, to choose between the righteousness of the gods and the selfishness of the devil and his angels.
- In their new freedom to choose between good and evil, Adam and Eve and their posterity now had a default setting in their spiritual lives. That default position was to favor their mortal flesh over their spirit being. This meant that the natural, easy thing to do was always to give in to the desires of the flesh. Most humans resort to the default position most of the time and thus serve evil and Satan. In that condition they are known as “natural man,” being carnal, sensual and devilish. To be carnal is to value the pleasures of the flesh over the pleasures of the spirit, thus to desire selfishness over righteousness. To be sensual is to pay more attention to and to delight in the senses of the physical body rather than to the feelings of one’s heart which enjoin righteousness. To be devilish is to choose the promptings of Satan over the whisperings of one’s conscience, which conscience is the light of Christ in their lives.
Adam and Eve, now being fallen, were thus in a special, God-given situation of agency, freedom to choose for themselves a character. The true desires of their hearts would be made evident by their choices. Each day they would make many choices, most of which would involve choosing between the flesh over the spirit, thus choosing to follow Satan or Christ, those choices would begin to fix habits in them. Those habits would become their character. Unless they made a special effort to follow Christ and righteousness, they would default into being carnal, sensual, devilish, natural men. This mortal character would become the basis upon which Father would reward them with an eternal trajectory of action for eternity, each child of god having chosen his or her own character and thus his or her own future. Those who gained character which produced righteousness could be trusted with great power. Those who fostered the character of the natural man, being selfish, could not thus be trusted because they would use power to wound others to feather their own nest. Hurting others to feather one’s own nest is abhorrent to every righteous being and especially to God, who is a being of pure righteousness. God will not, nay, cannot, reward selfishness with power, for then he would cease to be a god. So when each human receives his or her final judgment, God rewards each with that power they learned to use in righteousness, and are stopped from exercising every power they used in their probation for selfishness. That limitation of power is called “damnation.”
So what can we human beings do to avoid damnation? The answer is no secret. It is called the strait and narrow path of righteousness. It is the covenant path to acquire the same habits, character and power enjoyed by our leader in righteousness, Jesus Christ. The goal is to learn to love our Heavenly Father and Mother for their righteousness with all of our heart, might, mind and strength, even as Christ does. All of our heart, might, mind and strength is all that we have.
The covenant path begins by learning of Christ and desiring to become like Him. We are invited to be baptized, reborn as His children, by making three promises: One: To be willing to take the name of Jesus Christ upon us, thus to be known among mankind as His servants. Two: To keep the commandments He has given us, which enable us to choose righteousness over selfishness in every circumstance. Three: Always to remember Him, thus to remember in every decision we make to choose as He would choose. If and when we make those promises in authorized baptism by water, Christ then gives the greatest gift we could receive as mortals, the gift of the Holy Ghost. That gift of companionship means that Christ will always be with us so that we will always be able to choose righteousness over selfishness and never need to serve Satan and our flesh ever again.
Unfortunately, we humans are not very strong of ourselves, and we all break the covenant of baptism. When we break that covenant, the forgiveness of sins we gained in baptism is taken away and the weight of all of our previous sins comes back upon us and the companionship of the Holy Ghost is taken away. But Christ has provided a remedy for that regression. He allows us to again make the promises of baptism by partaking of the sacrament. As we eat of the flesh of Christ and drink of His blood, we renew the promises we have made to Him. If we really are humble and sorrowful for having broken our promises, our Savior again forgives us and allows the Holy Spirit again to be our companion unto helping us become stronger and stronger in faith in Christ unto the gaining of the habits and character of righteousness.
As we become more firm and steadfast in the path of righteousness, serving others, we are ready to receive the Holy Priesthood after the Order of the Son of God. Men who serve Christ are first given the priesthood of Aaron, which priesthood pertains to temporal order and the teaching and preaching of the way of Christ. If men are faithful in the opportunities of the Aaronic Priesthood, they are then given the Melchizedek Priesthood, which priesthood administers the spiritual gifts of God and is the power to preside in the Church of Jesus Christ. Men who are faithful in that priesthood are then invited to the Holy Temple to receive the full blessings of the Patriarchal Priesthood, which blessings they can only receive with their wife, which blessing is to be sealed in the temple to their chosen companions in eternal marriage, that they might have posterity in God’s way and build an eternal family kingdom of righteousness.
Necessary to the ability to form an eternal family unto righteousness is the receiving of the temple endowment. That endowment is a gift from God, for the meaning of the word “endowment” is “gift.” The endowment consists in receiving all the gifts of God necessary to form an eternal family in righteousness. In that endowment the receiver of it makes five covenants with God which show the person how they can love God with all of their heart, might, mind and strength. The temple order of those covenants is mind, heart, strength and might, the order in which they must be built, as opposed to the order of importance given in the great commandment.
The most fundamental requirement to be able to tread the narrow covenant path which enables a human being to attain the character of Christ is to be humble. Pride is the enemy of righteousness. But as a person comes to Christ as a little child, willing to obey and to suffer all things Christ would put upon him or her, the blessings of Christ come upon that person. They become meek before God, hungering and thirsting after righteousness until they attain the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost and then the firmness of the character of Christ Himself. In that humility and obedience, all that God is and has can be put upon them. They will never use any of it for selfishness but will use it only to bless others and to attempt to bring those others also to come unto Christ. To come unto Christ is to come unto righteousness and to a fulness of the blessings which Christ has to give: All that Father has.
Thus, the blessing which Christ has to give to all mankind is Himself. He gives all mankind the opportunity to fully partake of His suffering of the Atonement unto the forgiveness of their sins and of His righteousness by coming into the stature of the fulness of His character. To receive this is truly living, the fulness of life and salvation, the greatest accomplishment any human can ever attain.
As we contemplate the Fall, let us remember what would have happened had there been no Fall. Had Adam not fallen, he and Eve would still be in the Garden of Eden as little children and with no posterity. All things would have continued as they were, because there would have been no death as well as no progress. Had Adam not fallen, Father could not bless His children with exaltation through Jesus Christ.
Now: Are we not all greatly blessed by the Fall of Adam? Rejoice!