To Climb the Ladder of Law
Adapted from Divine Law, by Justin Collings, in the Maxwell Institute’s Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series.
His thoughts soared far beyond the stars, but he worried about the wind. He had, in a sense, waited his whole life to preach this sermon. “He lived his life in crescendo,” a later admirer wrote, and this was to be a kind of climax.[1] He had a dazzling vision to unfold, a soaring theology to set forth. He had friends to comfort and eternity to hold before their gaze. If only the wind would cooperate. If only his lungs could hold up. If only his voice would carry. If only he could find the words to match his message.
“It is my meditation all the day,” he once sighed, “and more than my meat and drink, to know how I shall make the Saints of God comprehend the visions that roll like an overflowing surge before my mind.”[2] He strained against the limits of human comprehension and mortal communication. He repined over “the little, narrow prison” and “almost . . . total darkness of paper, pen, and ink”; he chafed at the boundaries of “a crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect language.”[3] But on this day—April 7, 1844, in Nauvoo, Illinois, at a general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Prophet Joseph Smith would defy the limits of language and lay before his beloved Saints one of his grandest visions of all.
His announced subject, fitting to honor a friend who had been killed in an accident, was “the dead.” But he also promised “a few preliminaries”—preliminaries that carried him inexorably “back to the beginning.”[4] Indeed, they took him back before the beginning—before birth, before Creation, before the Council in Heaven. He posed a deceptively simple question—“what kind of a being is God?”—then offered a staggering answer. In doing so, he gave the Saints a glimpse into the everlasting biography of our Eternal Father. “God himself was once as we are now,” the Prophet declared, “and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! . . . He was once a man like us”—a man who “dwelt on an earth.”[5]
This was dizzying, dazzling stuff—and there was more to come. The Prophet went on to explain that the Father’s own ascent to Godhood provided a pattern for his children. “When you climb a ladder,” Joseph said,
you must begin at the bottom, and ascend step by step, until you arrive at the top; and so it is with the principles of the gospel—you must begin with the first, and go on until you learn all the principles of exaltation. But it will be a great while after you have passed through the veil before you will have learned them. It is not all to be comprehended in this world; it will be a great work to learn our salvation and exaltation even beyond the grave.[6]
This stirring prospect of growth beyond the grave and ascent beyond the skies was made possible, Joseph continued, by a merciful Father who beckons His children endlessly upward.
Joseph wanted the Saints to know the Father, as Joseph himself had come to know Him. The Prophet wanted them to fulfill the aspiration outlined in the Kirtland-era 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.”[7] To that end, Joseph highlighted a singular moment in cosmic history—a primeval burst of celestial grace. He highlighted the Father’s decision and resolve to lift His children as high as they would 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. . . . He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with Himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them in the world of spirits.[8]
Joseph loved these towering truths. As they trickled from his tongue, he sensed that, at long last, he had gotten their telling right. “This is good doctrine,” he continued.
It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you. They are given to me by the revelations of Jesus Christ; and I know that when I tell you these words of eternal life as they are given to me, you taste them, and I know that you believe them. 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.[9]
Indeed we are; 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, Joseph explained, our Father “saw proper to institute laws.” Those laws would furnish means for our divine 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.
Through the Prophet Joseph Smith the Lord revealed more law or more about law than through any other prophet—revelations that culminated in the soaring disclosures of the King Follett funeral sermon. Joseph, like Moses, was a lawgiver. In the revelations he dictated and the doctrines 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.
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.”[10] The law of the gospel allows us to accept Christ’s gifts of grace. This is less a matter of earning blessings than of receiving them; less a question of merit than of agency—of freely embracing what Christ so freely gives.
The God who revealed himself to a fourteen-year-old boy is the same God proclaimed by a thirty-eight-year-old prophet in perhaps the most significant sermon of an unparalleled ministry. He is also the God proclaimed in an even greater sermon in an even greater ministry—a God who notes the sparrow’s fall; who feeds the fowls and robes the lilies; who sees our silent fasting and our secret alms; who hears our private pleadings and our closet prayers; who secretly observes and openly rewards; who knows, above all else, how to give good things unto His children.
God has been showering good gifts upon His children since before the councils that preceded creation. Finally, He offers such gifts not as the just deserts for our modicum of obedience but “through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah” (2 Nephi 2:8). Yet, those gifts and graces invariably come in accordance with law. Indeed, in a sense, they come as law.
The Doctrine and Covenants tells us how.
[1] B.H. Roberts, Introduction to The History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2nd ed. rev. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1980), 6:xiii.
[2] History Draft [1 March – 31 December 1843], The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-draft-1-march-31-december-1843/33.
[3] Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, 27 November 1832, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-william-w-phelps-27-november-1832/2. These words are crossed out in the original, suggesting perhaps that Joseph found language inadequate even to describe its inadequacy.
[4] Minutes and Discourses, 6–8 April 1844, as Reported by William Clayton, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-and-discourses-6-8-april-1844-as-reported-by-william-clayton/24.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “History, 1838-1856, vol. E-1 [1 July 1843-30 April 1844],” The Joseph Smith Papers, 1971, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-e-1-1-july-1843-30-april-1844/343.
[7] “Lecture Third,” Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints: Carefully Selected From the Revelations of God and Compiled by Joseph Smith Junior (Printed by F. G. Williams & Co., Kirtland, Ohio, 1835), 36.
[8] “History, 1838-1856, volume E-1 [1 July 1843-30 April 1844],” The Joseph Smith Papers, 1974, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-e-1-1-july-1843-30-april-1844/346.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Henry B. Eyring, “Legacy of Encouragement,” Liahona, Nov. 2022.