Of Easter and the Triumph of Life

Spring came early this year, and Easter comes late, and that is fine with me.  Sometimes Easter arrives while winter still lingers, but this year Easter’s message of life and renewal will be fully broadcast in the flowers and trees.  I think I love the bright azaleas and tulips best.

Let their message of perennial life be matched in our hearts, as renewal and rebirth come to our souls through the power of Jesus Christ to make all things new and to make death a temporary pause.  Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ, nothing would matter, for death would prevail as the final statement to each and all.  Since Christ overcame death and rose from the dead to eternal life mortality is converted into the exception to the normal existence of life.  Mortality is to be endured, and more than endured, used to prepare for our eternal existence after we have all died and then risen from the grave to immortality.

To be sure, our mortality is intense and at times all that we can bear, for which reason it is mercifully short, the very oldest of us living not long past a mere century.  If life is so important, does it make any sense for it to be so brief?  If each of us is so filled with love, does it seem right that our love ends so quickly?  With each human so richly endowed with creativity, can it be that all of our creations corrode and fade away to nothing?  Why did my mother’s memory leave before she did, and is our memory of her doomed to the same fate to be lost eventually forever?

The answer of death is yes, all is vain, all will be lost.  Christ’s victory over death means that the answer is no, and that all good things are redeemed and preserved forever, and not just preserved, rejuvenated to live and grow without end.

Which is to say that the continuation of life is reasonable, as it is true.  The joy of Easter is that its story is real, that through the resurrection of Christ life and all of its riches are to be everlasting, as they should be. 

No fact of antiquity is more certain than Christ’s resurrection, no event of the ancient years has left us with more evidence.  To the testimonies of those who walked and talked and ate with the resurrected Christ, as preserved in at least five separate records gathered centuries later into the Bible, the Savior has brought to light the witnesses of His visit to His followers in ancient America shortly after His resurrection in Jerusalem.  Over the course of three days Jesus Christ taught, healed, and prayed with those who had long been waiting for His appearance, as prophesied by their prophets for six hundred years.  More than two thousand of them, one by one, touched the wounds in His hands, feet, and side,

and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety (3 Nephi 11:15)

that this was “Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world” (3 Nephi 11:10).

Those are the ancient witnesses and evidences.  They are to be treasured.  These were not ancient experiences to the people who lived them and testified of them.  They were just as current and real as anything we experience today.  As Christ explained to the Sadducees, God is the God of the living, of life (see Matthew 22:32).  We need not rely on the ancient witnesses alone.  Christ has called contemporary prophets and Apostles living with us and among us in our day, just as He did during His mortal ministry.  Their witness is the same as Peter, James, John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Paul, Nephi, Mormon, and others who knew with a certainty that Christ rose from the dead as the God of life.  In this mortal life death so often seems to prevail that we all need reminders from those who know of the triumph of life.

You can hear their modern words.  They report the same message that the Savior has shared with mankind throughout history, but God knows that we each have a need to hear it in our own day.

With confidence, as you enjoy the buds and blossoms of spring, take in their proclamation of life made possible by Christ’s victory over death, by which all that is good is saved.

Of Agnostics and Manmade Religions

Atheism is intellectually weak minded, if it is what its professors claim it to be, that is the assertion or affirmation that there is no God.  The adherents of that religious doctrine (atheism must be acknowledged a religious doctrine, an organized system of belief with regard to God and man’s relation to God) do not merely believe for themselves that there is no God but make an unjustifiable claim to knowledge and then affirm and advocate what they cannot possibly know.  Surely they can choose not to believe that there is a God, but how can they know that God does not exist anywhere and that no one has met God?  Adherents to the atheist doctrine demonstrate a good amount of blind belief in unproven theories. 
 

The most that they can possibly prove or know is that they personally have not found God yet and that this lack of discovery has caused them seriously to doubt.  Unless they can be everywhere at all times and understand all things (which would be nigh unto godhood itself) they cannot say with intellectual honesty that God does not exist.  They cannot get further down the road of atheism beyond the signpost of agnosticism.  I understand the challenge of proving a negative, and affirming a negative is even bolder, but atheists themselves claim to have met this challenge, a claim that they have never substantiated.

Agnosticism is another thing, if engaged in honestly.  Honestly, it is an admission—or even affirmation—that one does not know.  The agnostic can explain why he does not know, what avenues he has unsuccessfully explored to know.  What he cannot honestly do is claim to know all that can be known or what others know.  The agnostic strays into the same errors of the atheist if he claims that because he does not know God then no one else can.  How could he possibly know that?  How can his experience circumscribe the experience of others, including the experience of those he has never met?  He can espouse theories as to why he disbelieves the claims of knowledge of others and even why he believes that others could not know, or even why he has lost hope that others know, but he cannot prove his theory, again unless he can be everywhere and know all things.  The agnostic cannot honestly pretend to knowledge that he does not have about the knowledge or experience of others.  Not all agnostics do.

Agnostics do have a point viewing the global and historical variety of manmade religions, which present a deep well of disappointment to those seeking evidence of the Divine.  When Jesus Christ spoke directly in person to the young boy Joseph Smith in 1820 the Savior ratified to Joseph much of the factual assertions of the honest agnostic.  The Savior declared to Joseph that all the religions then on the earth were creations of men, not of God, that “they teach for doctrines the commandments of men” having little more than “a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof” (Joseph Smith-History, verse 19).  Many of the religions of 1820 exist today, while inventive men have been working diligently since to create many more.

There was much justification for the agnostic in 1820.  There is increasingly less today.  The fact that all of the religions 190 years ago were manmade does not mean that God Himself could not establish—or reestablish—His own church and religion on the earth.  In fact, 2,500 years ago God promised that He would do just that.  When the prophet Daniel interpreted the dream of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, he prophesied that in the last days God Himself would establish on earth His religion, symbolized in the dream as a stone “cut out of the mountain without hands” that would roll forward until it filled the whole earth (Daniel 2:28-45).   Daniel then prophetically declared to the king, “the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.” (Daniel 2:45)

Which means that to honest atheist and agnostic alike, the message is beware lest you stop looking too soon, for the good news is that aside from the religions of men God has done His own work and revealed Himself to His children, as He promised long ago.  These things can be known today, certain and sure.

Of Baptisms for the Dead and the Feast of the Lord

I am not troubled by increased attention of the public to the doctrines of Jesus Christ.  I welcome it as an opportunity to invite them to partake of the riches of eternity that the Savior has placed upon the table of mankind for His brothers and sisters to delight in.  I am eager that all should pull up a chair:  the supply is unlimited and the table will never be too small nor the number of chairs inadequate.

I am reluctant, however, to allow the enemies of Christ to pollute the table or to corrupt what the Lord has given to us.  To humanity at large, many of the gifts of the Savior will seem new and powerfully at odds with the fare offered on the impoverished tables of the world.  It has always been so.  If they are to be of value to the disciples of Jesus Christ and those who would join them, they must be preserved in their purity. 

One of the great offerings from the Savior to the world through the church of Jesus Christ is the privilege of being baptized for release from our sins.  Through that marvelous ordinance we are able to make a promise to God to turn away from a life of sinning to a life of goodness and good will to all and eternal perfection of ourselves, leaving the former ways of dissipation in degrees small and great behind us.  In return, we are washed of our sins, and our days and ways of death are left buried underneath the wave as we arise from the water in newness of life.  We escape the consequences of our past sins by completely accepting the Savior Jesus Christ and receiving His suffering in place of our deserved punishment.  As Christ explained through modern prophets,

For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent. . . (Doctrine and Covenants 19:16)

That is a wonderful doctrine of change and peace of mind, by which the evils of the world can be overcome and peace prevail—today for any individual who chooses to embrace it, and for any society made up of such individuals.  It is all the more powerful because it is real, having been tested and demonstrated in millions of lives over the course of human history.

As a young teenager I could see the value of these doctrines, and I welcomed them.  I was particularly moved by the doctrine of extending these blessings of repentance and baptism to all, even to people who had little or no opportunity to hear or receive them during their mortal lives. 

While those who once walked where we walk now live in the world of spirits, awaiting the great resurrection of all, they continue to learn and associate with one another.  There they have the opportunity of learning of Jesus Christ and accepting His sacrifice for them, or rejecting it, as many have and do in mortality.  Those who accept the Savior’s vicarious sacrifice can make the same promise and commitment to newness of life by accepting vicarious baptisms performed by the living on their behalf in Christ’s Temples.  Thereby they obtain all of baptism’s changing and redemptive power.  Similarly, just as Christ and His vicarious suffering can be rejected in the world of spirits so can those vicarious baptisms by which the Savior is otherwise received.  As in mortality, free will is preserved and indeed enhanced by having the opportunity to accept or reject what otherwise would be beyond reach.  Even to a thirteen year old the fairness and justness of this doctrine was apparent.

What is not apparent to me several decades later is the logic of those who would object to this doctrine.  If you do not believe that it is a true doctrine of God, then at worst Christ’s disciples are wasting their time being baptized here on behalf of those who have died.  If the doctrine is false and the church of Jesus Christ is mistaken, then nothing that it does can reach beyond the grave and the dead remain out of touch from any in this life.  If, however, Jesus Christ is the Savior and indeed did suffer vicariously for the sins of any who would receive Him so that they might not suffer for themselves, and if the work offered in Christ’s Temples does reach beyond the grave, then this doctrine is a cause for rejoicing and partaking, among the many other rich things prepared for us and available on the Lord’s table of fat things.

And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.  (Isaiah 25:6)

Y’all come and pull up a chair.