2 Nephi 2

Then to Jacob:

You’re my firstborn on this vexing adventure. And your rude brothers made you pay for it. But you know God’s greatness and he’ll turn your bruising into blushes. Nephi will take care of you. You and he will serve God, not to mention his Son, whose gift to the world you recognize. You’ve seen his glory, just like me.

So you’re as blessed as the men who will see the Lamb in the flesh. Because of what you already know, let me share some theology with you—big word, I know, but it comes in handy sometimes.

God’s spirit is always the same. And since Adam, salvation has been free. Everyone knows enough to be judged: to know good from evil is all you need for that. God gives laws, but they don’t save anyone, just condemn them. Only the Redeemer—God’s Son, the Anointed One, the Lamb—can save people. He’s got grace and no one can be saved without that. To bring grace into the picture he offers himself as a sacrifice. That’s why we call him the Lamb. (One reason, at least.) He satisfies God’s law for everyone whose heart has been broken and yearns to make peace with God. This grace doesn’t work for anyone else.

That’s why we’ve got to keep telling people about what we know, telling them that no one, not anyone, can dwell with God now or later except for the merits, mercy, and grace of the Anointed One, which to some degree he shares with every person who’s ever lived. He’ll let himself die, only to rise again, the first person on earth to do so. So it’s as if he’s God’s first harvest, the pioneer of living again. He’ll also speak up for us all, pleading believers’ cases to his apparently much sterner Father.

We all have to come before God to be judged, but only according to the Anointed One’s truth and holiness. Strange, but strangely true.

Punishment for bad deeds stands opposed to reward for good ones. This is part of the General Law of Opposition. Everything must have an opposite. If not, we couldn’t even be talking about righteousness or wickedness, goodness or badness, life or death, ripeness or spoilage, any such dichotomies. But we have to. It’s a principle deeply woven into our brains. If it weren’t, every idea, hope, regret, etc. would be all rolled into a single lump in our minds. And a lump like that is dead. That’s what defines death.

Without dichotomies, the whole universe would be stillborn. Dead before it left the womb of God’s imagination. And that would wreck the very idea of God.

No wisdom, no power, no mercy-justice axis. Nothing worth having a God for.

Here’s my chain of thought. Rough, but hear me out:

—if there’s no law, there’s no sin

—if there’s no sin, there’s no righteousness

—if there’s no righteousness, there’s no happiness

—if there’s no happiness, there’s no misery

—and if there’s neither happiness nor misery, neither God nor we exist in any form we could recognize as valid.

Take these things away and you might as well kick the scaffold out from under the universe. It’s all a meaningless joke.

So I’m just saying: there is a God, he created all things and beings, both active and passive. That includes everything you read in Genesis about the animals and birds and even the two humans that revved this story into high gear. He also gave them an opposition too: the fruit of forbidden knowledge vs. the fruit of life. One’s sweet and one’s bitter. [Notice the word order there: which is sweet and which bitter? Dad being ironic again? – Nephi.] So God set up this duality and let humans choose.

Everything I’ve heard tells me that one of God’s angels lost his status and turned into God’s enemy, a devil, whose tendency is always to sin as a form of payback.

He’s one neurotic son of a gun. He wants company. Eve seemed especially promising, not to mention attractive. So he came as a snake and told her to eat the fruit God had put on his divine blacklist, because, the snake said, God had intense professional jealousy. He didn’t want any competition in the God department.

Adam and Eve both ate more of the fruit and God shoved them out of the garden. “Here,” he said, “go plant your own trees.”

Well, with that forbidden fruit under their belts they were ready to have kids, which they did. God decided he’d let them live a long time—have you read those ages in the books of Moses?—because they needed that much time to stop sinning. The kids’ genes came from the original sinners, so what would you expect?

The good news is that if Adam hadn’t eaten that fruit, he and Eve would have gone into a weird stasis—no progress and no decline. Forever. No children. And yes, that would have kept them innocent. And yes, that would have stopped all sense of opposition in their lives. Because that’s where parents normally get it, from their kids. But if no sadness, no gladness.

God knew what he was doing. You can trust him. Adam “fell,” as we say, for all of us to exist. And we exist for joy. That’s the one thing that keeps the world moving forward, the thought that we might have more joy one day. Adam fell for it.

The Anointed One will come some day and save Adam and Eve’s kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and on and on. That saving includes cutting the kids out of Adam and Eve’s book of debts, so they can act freely and make decisions based on their own knowledge. Men are free (and someday women will be too). They have all they need to choose spiritual wholeness and longevity, as opposed to breakage and self-disposability.

So, to all my sons, I say: study God’s laws, the big ones especially, toe the line, choose well, avoid death and the overly bodily things in life. Those are leakage points where the devil seeps in. He’s all about tricking you into being his slave and moving in with him in you-know-where.

Okay, I’m done. I’m not long for this planet. I don’t have one of those zillion-year long lifespans that early people did. But I’ve made my best of the years I did have. You ought to do the same. Amen.