Pillars of Eternity

This week my lesson was on The Creation! It was a wonderful lesson and while studying and preparing for it I found an article by Bruce R. McConkie titled "Christ and the Creation." This article is really amazing and I wanted to share an excerpt that I found particularly enlightening.

God himself, the Father of us all, established a plan of salvation whereby his spirit children might progress and become like him. It is the gospel of God, the plan of Eternal Elohim, the system that saves and exalts, and it consists of three things. These three are the very pillars of eternity itself. They are the Creation, the Fall, and the Atonement.

Before we can even begin to understand the temporal creation of all things, we must know how these three eternal truths—the Creation, the Fall, and the Atonement—are inseparably woven together. No one of them stands alone; each of them ties into the other two; and without a knowledge of all of them, it is not possible to know the truth about any one of them.

Salvation is in Christ and comes because of his atoning sacrifice. The Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ is the heart of revealed religion. It ransoms men from the temporal and spiritual death brought into the world by the Fall of Adam. All men will be resurrected because our blessed Lord himself died and rose again, becoming thus the first fruits of them that slept.

And further: Christ died to save sinners. He took upon himself the sins of all men on conditions of repentance. Eternal life, the greatest of all the gifts of God, is available because of what Christ did in Gethsemane and at Golgotha. He is both the resurrection and the life. Immortality and eternal life are the children of the Atonement. There is no language or power of expression given to man which can set forth the glory and wonder and infinite import of the ransoming power of the great Redeemer.

But, remember, the Atonement came because of the Fall. Christ paid the ransom for Adam’s transgression. If there had been no Fall, there would be no Atonement with its consequent immortality and eternal life. Thus, just as surely as salvation comes because of the Atonement, so also salvation comes because of the Fall.

Mortality and procreation and death all had their beginnings with the Fall. The tests and trials of a mortal probation began when our first parents were cast out of their Edenic home. “Because that Adam fell, we are,” Enoch said, “and by his fall came death; and we are made partakers of misery and woe.” (Moses 6:48.) One of the most profound doctrinal declarations ever made fell from the lips of mother Eve. She said: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.” (Moses 5:11.)

Remember also that the Fall was made possible because an infinite Creator made the earth and man and all forms of life in such a state that they could fall. This fall involved a change of status. All things were so created that they could fall or change, and thus was introduced the kind of existence needed to put into operation all of the terms of the Father’s eternal plan of salvation.

I encourage you all to read this talk. I never realized how important it is for us to study and understand the accounts of the creation. In studying about the creation I have gained a further witness that Jesus Christ is our Savior and that our Heavenly Father loves us immensely.