Of Scarcity and Life without Limits

When you have an unlimited supply of something, do you even notice it?  Do the fish in the ocean know that they are in water?  How many thousands of years did mankind enjoy gravity before someone pointed out its existence?  Presumably men have long recognized the existence of air, because we could feel the wind and there was the occasional suffocation that demonstrated what lack of air would do.  Nevertheless, we all go through each day little thinking of the air that constantly surrounds us.

The almost universal aspect of our mortal existence is scarcity, the fact that there are limits to things.  Scarcity is as basic a law of economics as motion is to physics.

When we think of God, the limits are removed.  Is that a human conception, to make God seem to us as otherworldly?  Or is the overcoming of limits a characteristic of eternal life, the limits of mortality serving to help teach humans the value of the eternal things we will soon experience?

Consider the mortal condition and how many problems are tied to scarcity.  Most wars have been fought over scarcity, whether scarcity of land, resources, or power.  How would things be different if there were no limits to food, wealth, or water?  

Such speculation is the stuff of intriguing science fiction writing.  Certainly the galaxies of the universe seem infinite.  Man’s fascination with the night sky over the millennia has in no small part been due to its ability to draw the mind of man out of the mortal world where all seems limited, attracted and uplifted to something that appears to have no end.

Stepping from speculation to revealed knowledge, God has indeed taught us that mortality is temporary, as are its limits.  Throughout man’s existence on earth God has called to His children to overcome their limits, to learn from them and then to exceed them.  God has taught us how to do so, endowed us with the divine ability to rise above obstacles, and sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to make triumph over limits possible.  That triumph was symbolized by but not limited to His victory over death, rising from the tomb to immortality.  That gift of immortality has been promised to all.  Other victories over life’s limitations are offered to all, but the offer must be received.

While triumph over the limits of physical death is guaranteed to all, transcendence over many other limits is optional.  The intentional rejection of the means offered to transcend human limitations is what makes sin what it is, intentional action that limits human potential.  Sins such as dishonesty, covetousness, cowardice, violation of the laws of chastity, and all other evils make us smaller, stop our growth, undermine our progress, close doors to the advancement of our character.

Virtue, on the other hand, is to embrace all that ennobles, that builds character, that strengthens courage, that develops the divine capacity to love.  Honesty generates trust, generosity increases our fellowship, chastity reinforces the bonds between husbands and wives and sets the foundation for eternal families, and each act of kindness leads to greater kindness, revealing the divinity that is at the center of our humanity.  In every case we become more, without end to the process.

Prophets throughout the ages have taught that damnation means to be limited where otherwise there would be progress and increase.  The modern prophet, Joseph Fielding Smith, described damnation as “being barred, or denied privileges of progression. . . or stopped” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, Vol. II, p.227).

Does not death impose an end on all of this progress?  Indeed it would, if mortality were the last word.  Without Christ and His atoning sacrifice it would be.  Damnation would be the lot of all, progress forever foreshortened, all efforts ultimately meaningless, the grave the final limit.  All good would be temporary, swallowed in the permanence of death.

Christ in life, death, and resurrection, was the constant reminder that mortality’s limits could be overcome.  He walked upon the water and calmed the sea.  He fed the thousands with a few fishes and loaves of bread.  He restored sight to the blind and healed all manner of diseases.  Christ summoned the dead back from the world of spirits.  He suffered death Himself, and yet in three days walked again among men, never more to die or to experience any other of mortality’s limitations.  Christ brought examples of eternity to us in this world to remind us what could and would be.

The ancient American prophet, Abinadi, joined with the prophets of all ages to proclaim,

And now if Christ had not come into the world . . . there could have been no redemption.  And if Christ had not risen from the dead, or have broken the bands of death that the grave should have no victory, and that death should have no sting, there could have been no resurrection.  But there is a resurrection, therefore the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.  (Mosiah 16:6-8)

To those who fully embrace the Savior’s offered redemption this promise:

Wherefore, all things are theirs, whether life or death, or things present, or things to come, all are theirs, and they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.  And they shall overcome all things.  (Doctrine and Covenants 76:59, 60)

The destiny that God, our Father, has planned for all of His children who will accept it, is life without limits, provided that we learn how to live in such a world.  For that we swim today in an ocean of limits, with instructions from the eternal worlds on how to thrive and overcome.