Alma 41

Let me say a bit more about this reconstitution of flesh and bone and spirit. Some have twisted the concept, gotten bent out of doctrinal shape about it. You may be bending a little yourself. So let me give it a try.

Entropy stinks. Jesus’ resurrection is to defy entropy. Justice demands it. Love demands it. The spirit has to go back into its body and the body undissolve itself.

But justice and love require judgment of some kind. This has to be according not only to actions but intentions. If both are good, the soul’s prognosis is eternally healthy.

If either or both are bad it get’s complicated, though generally the prognosis is death. Live for evil and you get stuck in a vortex, backing and forthing like the words themselves do: evil live evil live evil live evil live evil live evil … You don’t want to get sucked into it.

We say life isn’t fair. Maybe. But it will be when the eternal tradeoffs kick in: dying to undying, decomposition to recomposition, some migrating into a sensible kingdom of soul-satisfaction, others sliding into unstoppable depression, with no suicidal outlet possible. (You’re already dead.) If you’ve hunted for happiness in sincere, productive ways, you’ll find it. If you’ve hunted for darkness it will snap on you like a bear trap. There are cold places in the world where for months the sun hardly rises. Think of that a thousand times worse and you’re envisioning the end of gothicmindedness.

Every twisted mindset can be reversed by careful effort and lots of help. Those who accomplish that reversal, trump the disaster one would have anticipated.

We’re talking about redemption, which God can do. But you have to start the process on yourself. He is the judge. But only appellate. You judge yourself first. He can change the verdict but he can’t change the process. The rules are carved into matter itself. The road to happiness is paved with eternal heft.

So don’t attempt casual risk management. You know the things that try to steer you off the road. Root them out.

Likewise, although reversals and paradoxes are shot through every dimension of the universe, sin excludes and repels happiness. It’s like chemicals that won’t mix, no matter how hard you stir them. So people steeped in mere animalistic viewpoints and pursuits can never acquire what they profess to have. Sin has tied them up and poisoned them, metabolically altering their nature. Rewiring their brains. Happiness has gone over the cliff as far as they’re concerned.

So, this “restoration” concept associated with justice and resurrection does not include unwarping warped natures. Restoration means answering everything with its logical consequence: healthy for healthy, diseased for diseased, divine for divine, satanic for satanic, etc. A heavenly mirror held up to action and intentions. But a mirror in which the image is not reversed.

So create patterns, divine ruts into which you drive yourself, ruts of fairness and tolerance. You will find that the course you’re driving takes you inevitably to a kingdom built from the good things you’ve practiced. If you want a reward for acting well, the reward will be that you are acted well toward. I keep this in the passive voice, because I don’t want to personify the agents of the reward. That is, it’s a principle independent of the participants. It’s like karma, but we don’t call it that. (It’s trademarked by that other religion.)

We do have the rights to “you reap what you sow,” though. So let’s leave it at that.