Old Testament # 3
“The
Creation”
Moses 1:27–3:25
Introduction
I had joined the Church and been to the temple before
Bruce R. McConkie’s Promised Messiah series was published. And I had not
yet been introduced to Nibley’s Collected Works, so imagine my surprise when I
read:
Our three accounts of the Creation are
the Mosaic, the Abrahamic, and the one presented in the temples. Each of these
stems back to the Prophet Joseph Smith. The Mosaic and Abrahamic accounts place
the creative events on the same successive days. We shall follow these
scriptural recitations in our analysis. The temple account, for reasons that
are apparent to those familiar with its teachings, has a different division of
events. It seems clear that the “six days” are one continuing period and that
there is no one place where the dividing lines between the successive events
must of necessity be placed.[1]
What? (a) the account in the temple
is different—how had I missed that?? Well I had only been going a year, and
even then it was 4 hours away, so only a couple of times. (b) “The temple account, for reasons that are
apparent to those familiar with its teachings, has a different division of
events.” Just for the record, some 35 years later, I have still not
found anyone familiar enough with the teachings of the temple that the reasons
for the difference in sequence is apparent. I have my theory, but it is just
that. Added to that, I had comfortably put the temple account into the “spiritual
creation” category but Elder McConkie blasted that one to smithereens also:
The Mosaic and the temple accounts set forth
the temporal or physical creation, the actual organization of element or matter
into tangible form. They are not accounts of the spirit creation. Abraham gives
a blueprint as it were of the Creation. He tells the plans of the holy beings
who wrought the creative work. After reciting the events of the “six days” he
says: “And thus were their decisions at the time that they counseled among
themselves to form the heavens and the earth.” (Abr.
5:3.) Then he says they
performed as they had planned, which means we can, by merely changing the verb
tenses and without doing violence to the sense and meaning, also consider the
Abrahamic account as one of the actual creation.
My neophyte Mormon brain was blown.
Did it affect my testimony? No of course not, and in fact I am grateful because
it causes me to pay greater attention each time I attend a temple session. But
it does remain a mystery (for me). One that one day I hope to be able to
unveil.
I’m not sure if we have said this
before, but Moses 1 is one of those plain and precious truths left out of the
Old Testament. And if one puts it before Genesis 1, things begin to make more
sense. But we know that Moses wrote . . . Moses . . . and he also wrote at
least the creation account in Genesis, but they belong together.
I attend an adult religion class at
BYU and this semester, Br. Ron Bartholomew is teaching Old Testament. He
pointed out something very interesting. From Moses 1–5 we have the Lord
talking: “I the Lord . . .”. In Moses 6, it switches to third person. I just
throw that out for some thinking gum!
Scientists are just now beginning
to catch up with what was revealed to Moses. There is a possibility of life on
other worlds; our universe is just one of many; our world was organized, not
created ex nihilo (out of nothing). A few years ago my niece came to
visit and we went to the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake to see their show of
how our galaxy was created. It was a profound experience, especially knowing Whose
hand was behind it.
The Prophet Joseph Smith said: “The word create
came from the [Hebrew] word baurau which does not mean to create out of
nothing; it means to organize; the same as a man would organize materials and
build a ship. Hence, we infer that God had materials to organize the world out
of chaos—chaotic matter” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel.
Joseph Fielding Smith [1976], 350–51).
We talked about the explanation of
astronomy in Abraham 3 as a metaphor for how great God’s intelligence is. And
yet, even though we are not even ants to a giant, He created us in His image.
Such a simple concept, yet even that has been corrupted in what President
Nelson referred to as a sin-sick world.[2] The quote
that I didn’t get to last Sunday was from Ezra Taft Benson—a very short and
pithy one:
“The great test of life is
obedience to God’ (Ensign, May 1988, 4).
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