The Olive Leaf

Read verse 13 slowly, because it makes four claims in one sentence and they are not obviously the same claim. This light is in all things. It gives life to all things. It is the law by which all things are governed. And it is the power of God. Physics, biology, jurisprudence and theology, welded together.

The doctrine has a name — the Light of Christ — and it is broader than the gift of the Holy Ghost. It is the illumination given to every person that lets them tell good from evil (Moroni 7:16; John 1:9); it is what makes conscience possible before any missionary arrives; and here it is also the ordering principle of the cosmos.

Nine words that put the Restoration on the far side of a two-thousand-year argument. In the Platonic inheritance that shaped much of Christian thought, the soul is an immaterial thing temporarily housed in a body, and salvation is the soul's escape. Here the body is half the soul, and the resurrection is redemption rather than release.

Hebrew nephesh was already unitary in exactly this way — in Genesis 2:7 the man became a living soul rather than receiving one. D&C 88:15 restores the biblical anthropology and states it as doctrine, and D&C 131:7–8 completes it: spirit is matter, only finer.

The argument here is not that God assigns people to kingdoms as rewards. It is that a kingdom simply is a law, and a person capable of living that law can live there. Verse 34 makes the point positively: what is governed by law is also preserved, perfected and sanctified by the same law. Law in this revelation is the medium of growth, not a hurdle.

That reframes judgement considerably. D&C 76's degrees of glory and D&C 88's law/glory correspondence together suggest that the final judgement recognises what a person has become rather than imposing an unrelated sentence — which is exactly what Alma 41:3–7 says.

Verse 40's list is a description of how like attracts like, and it does the work of explaining verse 22 without any machinery of assignment. What you have become determines what you can hold on to.

Verse 118 begins with a phrase that is easy to skate past: "as all have not faith." It is not a rebuke. It is a recognition that faith is unevenly distributed, and that the remedy is study — that learning is offered as a way in for people whose faith is not yet strong enough to carry them. Study and faith are named as two methods, not as a hierarchy.

The instruction produced the School of the Prophets, which met above Newel K. Whitney's store and studied theology, grammar, geography, politics and eventually Hebrew — a Hebrew scholar, Joshua Seixas, was hired to teach a class of Latter-day Saints in Kirtland in 1836. The Church's later investment in universities, seminaries and institutes runs directly back to this verse.

And verse 119 is the description of a temple, given three years before the Kirtland Temple was dedicated. The seven epithets — prayer, fasting, faith, learning, glory, order, God — are repeated in the dedicatory prayer of D&C 109:8 and are still quoted at every temple dedication.