The Fall, part two

A fun way to understand the Fall is to set it down next to the Creation and Atonement. Elder Bruce R. McConkie called these three events the Three Pillars of Eternity. Each one is vital to the operation of the whole Plan of Salvation.

The atonement brings every person back into the presence of God thereby overcoming even spiritual death for all of us (qualified statement). See Helaman 14:17, Alma 42:23

Do we believe in original sin? Why does the Book of Moses insist that we were conceived in sin? Or in other words, what does it mean?, Moses 6:55. (It is blood.) To better understand this, take the following scripture chain:

· What is it about the Fall and blood that makes us evil?

· Evil (blood) is in the flesh, and it is that evil within that gives Satan power over us, as we allow. (2 Nephi 2:28-29)

· Satan cannot tempt translated beings because they no longer have a “sinful” body (3 Nephi 28:39). In other words, their bodies have been changed in some way.

· Satan has no power over the righteous disembodied (Abraham 3:26)

· The test of mortality is mortality: to overcome our carnal desires (Mosiah 16:4-5)

· Mosiah 3:19 is saying we are all naturally evil (because of the fall and the blood) and we must do something that is unnatural to Telestial bodies—act terrestrial or even celestial through the Atonement of Christ.

· Mahonri Moriancumer says the same thing (Ether 3:2: “Because of the Fall our natures have become evil continually)

· 1 Corinthians 15:22 is more than physical death. It is because of the Atonement that we can live. “Christ takes dead men and makes them alive.”

· In the act of the Atonement, what was it that Christ purged from his body?

o Mortality or blood.

Why must we understand the doctrine of the creation in order to understand the doctrine of the fall? Without the knowledge that Adam and Eve were literally the children of divine parents we are without the hope that we too are of the same family and that we through Christ can be reconciled to God.

The purpose of the atonement is to take us back to God not to make of us something that we never were. The purpose of the atonement to correct all the evils of the fall. It is to create again a deathless state, a sinless state, a place without wickedness and sin, etc.

Did Adam and Eve fall up, down, or forward? The Fall “had a twofold direction—downward, yet forward. It brought man into the world and set his feet upon progression’s highway” (Orson F. Whitney, in Cowley and Whitney on Doctrine, 287).

The 2^nd Article of Faith says we are not accountable for Adam’s transgression, what about Adam? Moses 6:53-54 helps us understand that original guilt is real, however Christ atoned for Adam’s original guilt.

To what extent did the Fall of Adam and Eve affect the whole world?

· To the extent of which the earth will be restored (AF 10)

· D&C 101:24-25 – terrestrial earth all becomes new

· D&C 29:24 – celestial earth all become new

· 2 Nephi 2:22 – “all things” (which is quite all encompassing)