Justin Collings Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Transcript

Justin Collings: Thank you, Rosalynde, for that kind introduction. What she didn't say about that cello competition is that she was the accompanist for both of our young cellists, and she got up even at that unseemly hour to drive to Salt Lake for a competition at the University of Utah, and was bouncing around from one accompanying gig to another, so we still owe her a kind of Kneaders basket. Thank you for that. We're just a little slow on the uptake.

I'm honored and humbled to be here. I love the title of this series, the Wonder of Scripture. I think today it's a double wonder. You will be wondering why they chose this guy, and I will be wondering, how did I get into, into this lineup? I love the Maxwell Institute. Grateful to for JB Hawes and his leadership with Rosalynde and Kim and others, and grateful to have Spencer Fluhman, who gave seven, seven and a half years of his the best years of his life and his life's blood to this institution. So thank you for for being here, and I love that we have an institute that honors the name and the memory and the legacy of Elder Neal A. Maxwell. 20 years ago, two months ago, Elder Maxwell passed away at the age of 78 and at the time we were cradling our first born child, we were young and inexperienced, and the mission companion once said to me is “I can't believe the government let you take this child home,” but I remember holding her and feeling deep sadness that she would grow up Not knowing the voice and the witness of Elder Maxwell, and we haven't progressed much. 20 years on, we're still cradling an infant that earlier infant is now a missionary. So Fauci, I guess. I'm so excited to be here and hope that I can play a just a very modest contribution to the Maxwell's ongoing effort to advance the cause of the restored gospel and preserve the memory of one of the most remarkable apostles of this and probably any dispensation.

So he began before the beginning, before the flood and before the fall, before the creation and before even the council in heaven. After posing a deceptively simple question, “what kind of a being is God?” He offered a staggering answer, providing, in the process, a stunning glimpse into the everlasting biography of God our Eternal Father. It was April 7, 1844 the Nauvoo saints were gathered in general conference, both to hear their leaders preach and to mourn the death four weeks earlier, of Elder King Follet, a fellow saint and friend of the Prophet Joseph Smith, in his conference address, the prophet hopes to help the saints come to know God, the Father, as Joseph himself had come to know him. He wanted them to fulfill the aspiration outlined in the lectures on faith, to be familiar with him, to have a correct idea of his perfections and attributes and to understand the excellency of his character. To that end, Joseph highlighted a singular moment in cosmic history, a primeval burst of heavenly grace, when the Father resolved to lift His children as high as they might be willing to rise. “God Himself,” Joseph said, “finding He was in the midst of spirits and glory because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like Himself.” Joseph loved these towering truths as they trickled from his tongue he sensed that he had gotten their telling right. “This is good doctrine,” He mused, “it tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life. And so can you, you say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the spirit of eternal life. I know that it is good. And when I tell you of these things which were given me by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, you are bound to receive them as sweet and rejoice more and more.” Indeed we are and indeed we do.

And yet many of us miss or misunderstand what Joseph identified as the instrument of such staggering cosmic grace. In his resolve to lift His children, our Father saw proper to institute laws. Those laws would fuel our eternal ascent in a thrilling blaze of gracious condescension, God beckons his children to rise toward His own throne. All who answer that sweet summons may climb by the ladder of law, but law, for many of us, is a scary word. It conjures imposing images, robed judges with imperious gavels, or Lady Justice, blindfolded, wielding her implacable sword and scales. In a religious context, many of us associate law instinctively with divine judgment and justice, retribution and eternal punishment. Many of us think of law as an unrelenting standard against which we fall forever short. Law, on this view, is the enemy against which we need grace to defend us. In stark contrast to this bleak vision, the revelations of the restoration depict law as a glorious blessing, a ladder of grace by which we may climb closer and closer toward our heavenly parents and our heavenly home, the revelations promised that the faithful will be crowned with blessings from above and with commandments not a few. My invitation today is for all of us to relish and claim that crown. When President Russell M. Nelson was called to the Quorum of the 12 Apostles in 1984 he spoke in his first General Conference message not about medicine, but about law, “while nominally, I come to you from the science of surgery,” he said, “and its mother of medicine, in a truer sense, I have been forged from the stern discipline of law.” Stern discipline isn't helping us here, but “not the laws of men as mastered by our brethren of the legal profession, but the eternal and unchanging laws of our divine creator.” He explained that his pre apostolic career had been spent learning the Divine laws that govern heart surgery. “Only as the laws are known and then obeyed,” He said, “can the blessings we desire be earned to this extent.” He continued, “there will be little difference for me in the activities of the past and those of the future.”

The endless laws of the Lord are the doctrines taught by his apostles. Chief among those apostles in our dispensation stands the Prophet Joseph Smith. Through no other prophet before or since did the Lord reveal more law or more about law, revelations that culminated in the soaring disclosures of the King Follet discourse. Joseph, like Moses, was a lawgiver in the revelations he dictated and the doctrine he declared, The Prophet expounded what Divine Law is and why the Lord deploys it. The Doctrine and Covenants, the great compendium of Joseph's canonized Revelations is emphatically, even exuberantly, a book of Divine Law, the Doctrine and Covenants both expounds laws and enacts them. In exploring some of these revelations today, I hope to rehabilitate how some of us, myself included, have sometimes thought about law. I hope to help us all see law, God's law is a manifestation of His love. My thesis is simple, with Christ as our great lawgiver, Divine Law is inseparable from Divine Love. In Christ's economy, law is not the antithesis of grace, but a medium through which grace abounds. “The commandments and covenants God offers you,” said President Henry B. Eyring, “are not tests to control you. They are a gift to lift you toward receiving all the gifts of God and returning home to your Heavenly Father and the Lord who love you.” In her devotional message on this campus just 10 days ago, Sister Jen Kearon underscored God's infinite capacity to give good gifts to his children. God has been showering good gifts upon his children since before the councils that preceded creation. Those gifts and graces invariably come in accordance with divine law. In a sense, I submit, they come as law.

I noted earlier the Lord's promise that those that “are faithful and diligent before me would be crowned with blessings from above, yea, and with commandments. Not a few.” In this arresting statement, the Lord's laws are not a limitation. Rather, they come as a crown. Each law descends as a gift of grace. The more it would seem, the merrier. The description of law as a blessing, as repeated elsewhere in the revelations. The Lord describes his laws as directions how you may act before me that it may turn to you for your salvation. “For your good,” the Lord says, in another typical case, “I gave unto you a commandment.” The English legal theorist John Austin, famously, if controversially, defined law as “a command backed by a threat.” In the revelations by contrast, Divine Law emerges as a command underwritten by love, a directive attended by consequences, or what the word of wisdom in a different context calls, a principle with promise. Sometimes, the revelations reaffirm ancient or universal laws, such as, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” Sometimes, however, the commands are quite situation specific, “and let my servant, Oliver Cowdery, have the lot which is set off joining the house, which is to be for the printing office, which is lot number one.”

Always, the law's purpose is to bless God's children and advance their eternal progression. “All things unto me are spiritual,” the Lord explains, “and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.” Always His laws operate without compulsory means. Those who accept the law giver and His laws are sanctified by both their capacities increase and expand. Their characters are transformed and refined. By contrast, the revelations warn that he who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. The present tense here is telling. The emphasis is more forward than backward looking. Our eternal inheritance depends less on our curriculum vitae than on the condition of our souls. “In contrast to the institutions of the world which teach us to know something,” President Dallin H. oaks once said, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ challenges us to become something.” On this account, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the plan by which we can become what children of God are supposed to become. What we are supposed to become, is like him “and that” brother Joseph explained, “is why he institutes laws.”

In this respect, the revelations teach that when we abide the law of the celestial kingdom, we become quickened by a portion of the celestial glory. Both the law itself and its quickening effect come as gifts of grace. When we obey the law, we exercise our agency to receive God's proffered gifts, until in his good time, we receive a fullness of that quickening glory. There is no coercion in any of this rightly understood, God's laws are never backed by threats. God might weep when his gifts are spurned, but he will never compel what his children refuse. Even the perversely unwilling will ultimately enjoy that which they are willing to receive because they were not willing to enjoy that which they might have received. “For What doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him and he received not the gift. Behold, he rejoices not in that which is given unto him, neither rejoices in Him who is the giver of the gift.” By contrast, when we receive God's gifts by obeying His laws, we place ourselves within the operation of His grace. For that which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. This process is attended by an ever deepening covenantal relationship with God.

For ancient Israel, the law of Moses was the grand symbol of God's merciful love for his covenant people, his “hesed.” I don't know if I get deep enough on the throat on that one, but you get the idea. Moses needed to gather Israel out of Egypt so they could receive God's law. Instructively, each signal moment in the gathering of modern Israel was marked by a distinctly legislative revelation. Section 42 in Kirtland, Section 59 in Missouri, section 124 in Nauvoo, and section 136 for the trek across the plains. In each case, God was not only directing the life and labors of the gathered saints, He was also signaling his own entrance into human history. He was inviting his disciples into a covenant relationship with Him. His decreed law declared His covenant love. The link between law and covenant is central to the entire canon of modern revelation. That link underscores the irrevocable connection between obedience to divine laws and the receipt of covenant blessings. But it is important to stress that the greatest of all covenant blessings is a relationship. When God decrees law, He is inviting us to exercise our agency to enter a deeper relationship with Him. Such a connection with God is the ultimate purpose of His covenant, and a central theme of the Doctrine and Covenants. Indeed, the promise of God's presence runs through the revelations like a bright red thread. One senses that the Lord wants this aspect of His covenant to thunder through the revelations like a stirring, indelible refrain, “I am in your midst, and am your advocate with the Father. I will go before you and be your rearward. I will be in your midst, and you shall not be confounded. I am in your midst, and I am the good and faithful Shepherd and the stone of Israel, He that buildeth upon this rock shall never fall. Be of good cheer, little children, for I am in your midst, and I have not forsaken you. And whoso receiveth you, there will I be also, for I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left and my spirit shall be in your hearts and mine angels round about you to bear you up.” This intimate relationship infuses our daily walk of discipleship. The ancient law of Moses comprised a system of outward performances, a type of Christ's coming designed to strengthen faith in Him.That law, of course, is no longer in force, but restoration revelations underscore outward performances that similarly direct our souls to Christ. These daily laws centered on what we eat and drink when we arise and retire–that's a tough one for college students–how we interact with nature and with each other, as well as our patterns of labor, study and prayer, events God's loving engagement in the details of our lives, His solicitous attention to the shaping of our souls. Revealed laws, address, home life, diet, finances, the Sabbath and more, always attended by a persistent call to be of good cheer.

Commandments regarding disciples, daily walk invite us toward an abundant life. The revelations make clear that God takes pleasure in our pleasure, that He has ordered creation for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart, yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul. The revelations hold forth the doctrine of divine and doctrine of embodiment that cautions that all things must be used with judgment, not to access neither by extortion, but that also makes clear that we are meant to enjoy our physical existence, indeed, that a fullness of joy comes only when spirit and body are harmonized and united. The Lord's laws govern our physical interactions in ways designed to maximize our enjoyment and our joy. Maximizing enjoyment entails commitment to the arts and the life of the mind, the revelations issued detailed and exuberant directives with respect to music, dance and architecture, as well as to education more broadly, above all, they commend and command a sacred community comprising the full gamut of human experience. “Thou shalt live together in love,” one revelation directs insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die.” At the same time, the revelations promise that the same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory. The revelations supply a marvelous manual for daily discipleship, the kind of Latter-day Torah, if you will. Much as the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, the books of the law guides the daily devotions and religious rites of believing Jews. The revelations direct the daily discipleship of Latter-day Saints. Revealed laws lead us upward to daily experience of God's mercy and grace.

Many of us struggle, however, when we think about Divine Law. We think most readily about our own shortcomings with respect to it. We are all keenly aware of our failure to live God's laws completely. We all sense painfully how far short we fall, at least I do. the revelations respond to our predicament in two mutually reinforcing ways, first by reiterating the most basic of God's daily laws, the law of repentance, and second, by reminding us, as President Nelson has put it, that the Lord loves effort, that those who strive have special access to His grace. “I command all men everywhere to repent,” the Lord proclaims, He directs his servants to say nothing but repentance unto this generation, the revelations reaffirm repentance relentlessly from the prefatory promise that he that repents and does the commandments shall be forgiven, to the towering assurance that the dead who repent will be redeemed, washed clean as heirs of salvation. Between these bookends, the revelations reinforce that God is eminently eager to forgive. Remember God is merciful. “Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God. I the Lord, forgive sins and am merciful unto those who confess their sins with humble hearts.” God is not only eager to forgive, He is gracious to forget. In ways that I don't quite understand. His mercy cancels the memory of what His omniscience must certainly recall. “Behold,” he assures “He who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I the Lord, remember them no more.”

God and His angels rejoice when we repent, “for how great is His joy in the soul that repenteth. Your brethren in Zion begin to repent, and the angels rejoice over them.” “The Savior loves us always,” President Russell M. Nelson has said, “but especially when we repent.” The revelations affirm that he that repents and does the commandments of the Lord, shall be forgiven every time we keep any commandment with a contrite heart, and thereby turn our heart to God, we are repenting. Each Divine Law thus furnishes a rung on the ladder of mercy's sweet ascent. This is not to suggest that the steps of repentance we learned in Sunday school, recognition, remorse, reformation and restitution, are unnecessary, quite the contrary, but I submit that we should view those steps as part of a broader quest to come unto Christ, and that we should cease viewing God's laws as the scales on which we are forever weighed and found wanting, and see them instead as a lifeline lifting us upward towards safety and light. President Nelson has taught very hopefully that repentance is an overarching quest to put off the natural man and overcome the world. “Each time you seek for and follow the promptings of the Spirit,” he has said, “and each time you do anything good, things that the natural man would not do, you are overcoming the world.” The Book of Mormon proclaims that Christ hath power given unto him from the Father to redeem us from our sins because of repentance, “therefore he hath sent His angels to declare the tidings of the conditions of repentance, which bringeth unto the power of the Redeemer unto the salvation of our souls.”

Like all God's laws, the law of repentance leads to our redeemer's power. The steps of repentance are also steps that enable us to become more like God. When we accept the conditions of repentance, we embrace God's gifts of grace. Those gifts come to us as we strive, even in our flawed and perfect way, to live God's laws. Of one such striver, Oliver, Granger, the Lord said this, “his name shall be had in sacred remembrance from generation to generation, forever and ever, and when he falls–when, not if–when he falls, he shall rise again, for his sacrifice shall be more sacred unto me than his increase.” To me, this suggests that the Lord cares more about about our sacrifice than our increase, more about our offering than our achievement. John Tanner has called this the doctrine of the acceptable offering. The Lord loves diligent effort and accepts each consecrated offering. He doesn't ask for ask for flawless performance, but He does require our wills, our desires. He asks us to repent when we slip, to rise when we fall. He asks that we keep going. He invites us to endure. He wants us to seek and to strive. G. K. Chesterton, the inimitable Catholic essayist and poet, while envisioning the night before the Savior's death, wrote this impressive fragment, “a night when stormy midnight heard the jar of staves and stores, a night that passed all mortal Ken was darkness in the Lord's when coward priest and hierarch bore down a lonely man. And shall I fail him in his need that slave and sophist can? I cannot meter the ages trend the kingdom's gain or loss, I only hear the pale priests shout. I see the dim crowds toss. By rich men sold, by kings denied. O Carpenter, O crucified count on one striver at thy side, one watcher at thy cross.” These final lines describe my fondest hope to be a striver at my Savior's side, a watcher by my Healer's Cross. As much as the revelations teach us about divine law, they teach even more about our Divine Law Giver.

I want to close today by examining the Savior in just one of his legal roles, his role as our Advocate with the Father. That role contrasts sharply with the adversary's role as our accuser. The book of Revelation refers to Satan, a name that comes from the Hebrew hasatan, the accuser, as the accuser of our brethren, which accused them before our God, day and night. Satan's warfare now, like his warfare, premortally, often takes the form of accusation. He aims at every human heart a persistent finger of scorn. I have learned from sad experience that the adversary invariably downplays the serious of sin right up to the point of commission, after which he magnifies it without mercy and asserts it beyond reason. He depicts repentance as unattainable, God's laws is implacable, God's grace is beyond reach. And this, as in all else, he lies, he lies about law and he lies about grace, about law's exalting purpose and grace's boundless scope. He accuses us before our God, night and day. Sometimes his accusations ring relentlessly in our minds in our hearts, we need to know that he lies. The Savior, by contrast, is the Spirit of Truth, our Advocate, Champion and Friend. When he appeared to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland Temple on April 3, 1836 He appeared in majesty with eyes of flame and hair like snow, with a countenance that outshone the sun and the voice like rushing streams. He introduced himself by highlighting one of his sweetest and most sacred roles, “I am the First and the Last,” He said, “I am He who liveth. I am He who is slain. I am your advocate with the Father.”

In the revelations, He offers stunning, autobiographical disclosures of the price He paid to become our Redeemer, his description of that suffering elicits a cosmic shutter. “I God, have suffered these things for all,” He says, “which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain and to bleed at every pore and to suffer both body and spirit and would that I might not drink the bitter cup and shrink.” The verse ends with a dash, leaving us longing to hear what's next, leaving eternity hanging in the balance. For me, what follows is perhaps the most remarkable sentence in the revelations. “Nevertheless,” the Savior continues, “Glory be to the Father and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.” In spite of the incalculable cost, notwithstanding the indescribable agony, undeterred by the price and sorrow and pain, undaunted by the immensity that lay before Him, He partook and He endured. He seized the bitter cup and He drained it to the dregs, then with victory blazing on His blood stained brow, with triumph flashing from His hands and feet and side, He took his place at God's right hand and gently deflected the honor, praise and glory to the Father He loved so peerlessly well. “Nevertheless,” He says, “glory be to the Father.”

Evocatively, He calls his sufferings, “my preparations.” Preparations, we might ask, for what? At least part of the answer seems to be that His suffering prepared him to discharge His role as our Advocate, a role He describes in another of the revelation’s most moving passages, “listen,” He beckons, “listen to Him who is the advocate with the Father who is pleading your cause before him,” saying, “Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin, in whom thou wast well pleased. Behold the blood of thy son which was shed, the blood of Him whom thou gavest that thyself might be glorified. Wherefore Father spare these my brethren that believe on my name, that they may come unto me and have everlasting life.”

There is much in these words for us to unpack, but all the theology we might extract or expound ultimately pales before the indelible image these verses evoke. It is the image of our incompable Advocate, peerless and unbroken, holy, harmless, undefiled, pleading our cause before the very throne of God. He does so not in defiance of eternal law or as an exception to define decrees, but in glorious consummation of them. “For He hath answered the ends of the law,” Mormon proclaims,” and He claimeth, “All those who have faith in Him, wherefore He advocateth The cause of the children of men, and He dwelleth eternally in the heavens.” He has earned the power to plead that cause and won the right to assert that claim. “Christ hath ascended into heaven,” Mormon attests “and hath sat down on the right hand of God to claim of the Father His rights of mercy, which He hath upon the children of men.” Rights of mercy... I am, by trade and training, a constitutional lawyer. I give it as my professional opinion that a right is not an exception to law. It is law at its most fundamental. Rights represent higher law, peremptory and superordinate, that lawmakers themselves must honor and obey. Having secured His rights of mercy at an infinite cost, the Son of God will not leave them unasserted, and when He asserts them, they prevail over every other consideration. Thus mercy overpowereth justice and encircles them in the arms of safety, not to repeat as a counterweight or exception, but as a final fulfillment.

“This Messiah came into the world,” He said, “not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.” His coming was planned before Earth was framed. He came to fulfill the laws his Father instituted in that primeval dawn of grace, laws by which the rest of God's children might have the privilege of advancing like Himself. Thus, when our Advocate pleads our cause before our Father's throne, He is not persuading the Father to change His mind. When the Son asserts His rights of mercy. He is not thwarting His Father's rights of justice. He is instead doing what He has always done. He is executing His Father's will. He is obeying His Father's law. He is going about His Father's business. He is not. He is our advocate with the Father, not our advocate against the Father. “He advocateth the cause of the children of men,” Mormon says, and what is that cause? It is the cause of saving and exalting each and every child of God, so long as time shall last, or the earth shall stand or there is one soul upon the face thereof to be saved. It is the cause of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of God's children. It is His Father's work and glory.

When the Savior asserts His rights of mercy, He is vindicating the covenantal promises that He and His Father pledged before the foundations of the world. They themselves laid those foundations, including foundations in law, precisely so that they could work together, with the incomparable assistance of the Holy Ghost, to redeem and empower, sanctify and exalt. At the bottom of those foundations lay their sovereign rights of mercy, rights that can be limited only by our equally sovereign rights of choice. When the Savior asserts His rights of mercy, He is declaring the consummation of His Father's plan. He is answering the ends of the law. He is saying in heaven what He proclaimed from the cross, “Father, it is finished.” The Doctrine and Covenants is, in crucial ways, a book of law, but it is not, in the end, a book about law. It is a book about a lawgiver, repeatedly and exuberantly, the revelations gesture toward a day when our heavenly Lawgiver will rule on earth as rightful king, a time when ye shall have no king nor ruler, for I will be your king and watch over you. A time when ye shall have no laws but my laws, when I come, for I am your lawgiver, a time when the Lord shall be in their midst and His glory shall be upon them. And he will be their King and their lawgiver. He will reign over a non coercive kingdom as every knee bends willingly before Him, and every tongue voluntarily adores Him in mortal terms. What differentiates law from an endless range of other norms is that law is binding. In eternal terms, the ultimate purposes, purpose of divine law is to bind us to God in a covenantal relationship that is richer, deeper, sweeter and more enduring than we can presently imagine. It is a bond reinforced, reinforced by sealing bonds to one another that neither death nor the legions of hell can break. If we allow ourselves to be governed by divine law, preserved by divine law, and perfected and sanctified by the same, we will find ourselves in a royal rendezvous filled with His love to our astonishment. We will then realize that we will have become like Him, for we shall see Him as He is in the wondrous revelations of the restoration. We hear the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ, our great lawgiver, inviting us to heed the laws that His Father has instituted so that we all might have the privilege of advancing toward Them and becoming like Them in the name of Jesus, Christ. Amen.

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