Abide: Genesis 3–4 and Moses 4–5

Joseph Stuart: “Adam fell that men might be. And men are that they might have joy.” Lehi’s declaration in 2 Nephi 2 is transformative in Latter-Day Saint theology. Marking an event portrayed often in negative terms throughout Abrahamic faiths into something fulfilling and meaningful. That isn't the only way that Latter-Day Saints understand the fall differently than Jews, Christians, or Muslims. In today's episode of Abide: a Maxwell Institute podcast, we explore the scriptural narratives of Eden, post Eden life, agency, and much more. My name is Joseph Stuart. I'm the Public Communication Specialist of the Neal A Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University, and Kristian Heal is a Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute. Each week, we'll be discussing the block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Come, follow me curriculum. We aren't here to present a lesson but rather to hit on a few key themes from the scripture block that we believe will help fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to “Inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the world of religious ideas.” We encourage you to follow us on social media on Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, or Facebook at the handle @byumaxwell.

Kristian, what's going on in Genesis chapters 3 and 4 and Moses chapters 4 and 5?

Kristian: Genesis 3 opens in the garden that the Lord God planted in Eden. This garden is the site of protological events and eschatological hopes. That's to say events that relate to the origins of all humanity- protology. And the hope that Christians have for the future- eschatology. This all starts to make sense when we learned that the Hebrew “gan,” garden, was translated into the Septuagint as “parádeisos,” paradise, which is an old Persian loanword, meaning a “walled garden.” So when we read in Revelation 2:7, “That to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the Tree of Life,” which is in the midst of the paradise of God, we find ourselves in that one eternal round that begins and ends with the garden that God planted in Eden. The scene is bucolic, the setting, familial and pastoral. Adam and Eve are surrounded by fruit trees, evidently including at least one fig tree, with other produce also growing for their nourishment. Only one tree is off limits: The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, planted in the middle of the garden. The gardener is God and He evidently liked to come and stroll in this garden in the cool of the evening breeze and talk to the man and the woman he had placed there. His plans are, however, disrupted by a crafty snake that convinced Eve to eat from the one forbidden tree, starting a chain of events that led to the expulsion of the first couple from the garden with other serious consequences. The protological garden with the Tree of Life in its midst is now protected by the cherubim with the flaming sword and transformed into the eschatological garden of the New Testament, the longed for paradise of Eden. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve, both now named, begin their family in harsher circumstances, bearing children and working together to provide for their household. A second disaster happens in Genesis chapter 4, when their oldest son Cain kills his younger brother Abel, ensuring among other things, that Eve would also know the pain of losing a child. Moses 4 and 5 presents the same events, but in an entirely different story.

Stuart: Thank you for introducing us to the chapters today. Something I'm struck by is the idea that Satan is back. So in Moses 1, we saw the devil as a petulant, tantruming personage, and in the Garden of Eden, he becomes a serpent, something much more cunning, but also something far more casual. Does that stick out to you at all?

Heal: It's really interesting how in the book of Moses, we are thrown into a cosmic battle, rather than a kind of a bucolic scene, with the world rising up as it were against Adam and Eve. There isn't a malevolent anti-God in the Old Testament, at least not in the same way that there isn't the New Testament, or the Book of Moses. So in the book of Genesis, Eve is, is in this battle with the snake she's engaging with. This creature that has been though crafty, is a creation of God. But in the Christian tradition, this serpent is immediately understood to be Satan, the adversary, the tempter. And this is what comes to underpin for example, scriptures like Revelations 12:9, which tell that after the war in heaven, the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out into the earth and the angels were cast out with him. These kinds of scriptures point to the fact that for Christians, even despite what the Bible says, what the Bible meant was, Satan was there in the garden. And so in the revelation to Moses, the Book of Moses, that, given to us by the Prophet Joseph Smith, God peels back the curtain as it were, and shows the prophet what is really happening. And this is this cosmic battle for the souls of humanity, this old serpent may have been cast out of the celestial courts on high, but now he strikes back in the heart of paradise, seeking to undo as it were, the entire work of creation and destroy the world.

Stuart: That's fascinating. I had never thought about how Satan is never named in Genesis, but I had always just imagined the snake or the serpent being Satan. And that is causing me to think about what other assumptions I've made about the text because of Sunday school lessons, or YouTube videos, or children's books that I've read in my lifetime. I'm also thinking, though, about how in Moses, we talked about in Moses 1 about how God is very personal, about how he is revealing himself in an intimate way to Adam and Eve. In Genesis, he walks and talks with God, but in Moses, it seems much closer than that. I would also say, though, that the relationship of the serpent seems much more intimate in Moses as well, that he seems to know Adam and Eve, and that he certainly knows the words of God. And he is using God's words to Adam and Eve, the commandments that God gave to them, to try and get them to do what he asked them to do.

Heal: If Satan is anything, he's a good talker. And this sense of him, I think, this is what stands behind this notion of Satan as the father of all lies. And so, what we have opening is Satan ventriloquising as it were, what comes through the mouth of this serpent, and we see also a, a sustained program of propaganda, where Satan is actively recruiting people to be part of-to worship Him, to be part of his work, and to be part of his team, as it were. Now, his team, as we'll see, sort of later, in the Book of Moses is essentially a secret society. It’s a death cult. And so you…this is a, this effort to bring people on his side is a kind of a personal, as it were, sort of recruitment. And so, some of the interesting additions that we see in the Book of Moses, and especially in chapter 5, relate to this, the way that Satan is recruiting first Cain, and then recruiting Lamech, to form this secret society to create oaths to, to worship to, to swear, loyalty, as it were. And so this becomes then part of at the same time, that God is lovingly teaching his children about the law of sacrifice, introducing them into the gospel, teaching them that his beloved son is going to come and save all of humanity and redeem Adam from this fall. At the same moment that…that this is happening, at the same moment that Adam is praising, “Blessed be the name of God, but because of my transgressions, my eyes are open, and in this life, I shall have joy. And, and again in the flesh, I shall see God.” And the same moment that Eve is pronouncing, “Were it not for our transgressions, we never should have had seed and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption and the eternal life which gives, which God giveth to all the obedient.” This acknowledgment of a fortunate fall. At the same moment that this is going on, Satan is recruiting Cain to kill his brother, who was righteous and showing him that in doing this, he could get gain. Lamech is entering into covenants with death penalties as consequences for revealing them to others. And so we find this introduction of this, of servants of God, learning about him by revelation, and the establishment of this, of this kind of cult or society, with the master mayhem over it, causing havoc and fighting against those who would love the Lord.

Stuart: It seems that the book of Moses just has way more people in it. Which seems like a silly thing to say, now that I'm saying it out loud. But I think about in Genesis as just Adam and Eve outside the garden. There's the angel with a flaming sword just kind of hanging out there, making sure they don't go back in. But Cain and Abel, they're not the only two people there with Adam and Eve. And in fact, it becomes clear in Moses, when, or in Genesis and Moses when Cain says, “You can't just cast me out. There are other people out there, they're gonna hurt me.” And that was something that really hit me hard as I was reading this week, thinking about how it's not just this vacuum that Cain and Abel are taking place in. It also struck me too, that much of Joseph Smith's translation in my estimation, is clarifying or simplifying the words that we find in the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Moses, as the largest section of the Joseph Smith translation. It seems to me that he's adding back in important details that may have been missed. Because, just the reality is the Book of Genesis was not written by some guy named Genesis, or Phil Collins or whoever, it was written by many writers, many translators and adapted across time. In the same way that a text is living as people continue to write and interpret it and make it make sense within their worldviews, the Book of Genesis has been alive for a very long time. And it's important to remember that the Joseph Smith translation that we have is the book Moses clarifies and gives us more information that may have been available at another time.

Heal: Yeah, I think you're exactly right there, that Genesis is this living book, which was formed over a period of time, perhaps reached its final form, many scholars say in the Zelich period, so after the sixth century, when when the Jews are in Babylon, but it is a story that continued then to be retold and retold within the Jewish tradition. And so we find entire figures coming that just get mentioned in Genesis receiving their own book taking on their own lives. And to end we'll hear a bit more about one of them- Enoch in a subsequent episode of this podcast. And so yeah, Genesis is this story, which is about creation, but prompts creation, it's about God acting in the world, but seems to prompt more of God acting in the world. And that way, each of these manifestations is sometimes repeating what's been there before, sometimes adding something new, and giving us a really kind of interesting understanding of these kind of, formatively primeval events.

Stuart: Certainly, we are all the products of the stories that we tell about ourselves, and that we understand about ourselves. And this is something that stuck out to me as well in preparing for the podcast that because the Book of Genesis comes more into its final form during the Babylonian captivity, it's something that is helping Jewish people to understand their heritage to understand where they came from. It's their origin story. And that just seems really important for us to keep at the front of our mind. Though the text is alive, though we have the Joseph Smith translation in the Book of Moses, and in other verses in the Book of Genesis, it's important to remember that it is central to Jewish identity, especially as their collective identity was under assault. Now, moving on, we're thinking a little bit about Eve, and Adam and Eve together, are created as the image and likeness of God. What do you think about that, Kristian?

Heal: I think this really frames our sense of Eve's role, and of our vision of Eve coming out of the text of Genesis. Eve, gets a bad rap. She is often seen as the originator of sin in the world, early Christians called her the Devil's gateway. Not a nice idea, right? I mean, so she, she takes the blame, and is often seen in Christian sort of typology, as the counterpoint to Mary. Mary becomes this, the gateway for Christ, the one who brought, helped bring the Savior into the world. And so, but in doing that, Eve is sort of thrown under the bus as it were. But I think that this verse, Genesis 1:26-27, tells us something interesting about Eve, and that is that together, Adam and Eve, represent the image and likeness of God. And so it's not that man was created in the image, and women were created in the image of man. But together, there's something sort of divine about this pairing of men and women. And something that happens, I think, in our understanding of God, when we see men and women together, side by side, which I think is a really kind of interesting notion.

Stuart: Now, what about the phrase “help meet.” That's something that I know for many people that I've spoken with- in Sunday school, both men and women- it's a word that really sticks out as something with a negative connotation to it. What do we miss, if we don't understand that the Hebrew underpinnings of the word “help meet”?

Heal: This is a fascinating phrase, actually, as you say, one that can easily do damage, right? Because we think of the “help”. We think of somebody who's sort of subsidiary, somebody who is subservient, but a helper, this “Ezer” the, the Hebrew there as in eliezer, and God is my helper, is this notion of a, of one, a person who is serving I think, as a support as an, as an aide, as a sustainer. There's another way of putting it. Interestingly, I think this is really fascinating in the scriptures, where it talks about a helper elsewhere. When somebody looks for a sustainer or a helper, they're always looking for God. And so, I think when we think of Eve as a helper, we should be thinking more in the category of people looking for God's aid, for divine aid, than in the category of somebody looking for a servant to help them. They're looking for somebody to do something perhaps that they can't do for themselves, or to make up that difference that they find lacking in themselves, or to simply provide the extra impetus that is needed for a particular objective. Now, the “meet’ in “helpmeet” is this Hebrew expression “kenegedo”. This is a phrase which is found only in this moment, only in this text in the whole of the Hebrew Bible, where you find the particle “ke” elsewhere. But this particular phrase, and it's been difficult to translate, literally, it means “according to what is in front of him, but that doesn't help her according to what is in front of him.” And so scholars have meant this, understood this awkward, literal translation to mean, “as someone who is equivalent to him, as corresponding to him, or just right for him. “Um, interestingly, medieval Jewish commentator Raschi captures one aspect of the sense of this expression when he says that, “Should Adam not be worthy, then Eve is opposite him to fight.” And I love this notion of this man not being worthy. And, and that Eve is there opposite him, is there right with him to sort of fight to bring to bring a counterpoint to raise an argument, to show reason to show courage, all of these different ways that I think men and women sort of interact with each other when they find themselves in a productive sort of equal relationship.

Stuart: The Old Testament has more women named in it than any other book of scripture. And this is something crucial to remember is that women are present and that, frankly, we need to remember that women are present throughout all of scripture. It's something that Janiece and I spoke a lot about last year in church history, that is true for every dispensation. That women have always been at the forefront, women are always at the vanguard of those who are living and teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's also interesting, but it's also interesting to me that Adam is always with Eve. Sort of have this mental image of Eve is talking to the serpent, and she's underneath the tree, and Adam is off, doing whatever Adams doing, and they're separate. And that's why Eve has caught in this moment of weakness, so to speak, in taking from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And there doesn't seem to be any text that suggests that that's true. Is that correct?

Heal: Yeah, exactly. This, I had the same image. In my mind, really, it's sort of for a long time reading the story. And that is the moment of temptation, the moment when Eve is there with this serpent in the Genesis account, Adam is off somewhere else, tending another part of the garden. And that is precisely that sort of separation that facilitates this moment. But the text of the, of the Hebrew suggests that this is not the case, that Adam was actually right there beside her, perhaps. In the in the New Revised Standard Version, which is a kind of a descendant of the King James Version, we read that she, Eve took of its fruit, that's the tree of knowledge of good and bad, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. And so he in the text, and the King James Bible has this same idea, of course, that her husband is “shama”, her husband who was with her, meant that he was, could mean that he was right there with her, or that he was there with her in the garden. But I kind of like the idea that Eve and Adam are right there. And Eve is the one doing the talking, Eve is the one who takes the initiative shows this gumption that we're used to seeing in biblical women and passes the fruit then on to Adam who passively takes it, which makes verse 12, when Adam sort of blames Eve for doing this a little bit more comedic in some ways. It's sort of, we can kind of imagine Adam, not really knowing what to say, and that this is what comes out.

Stuart: Right. For those with the ears to hear, they may think of George Costanza saying, “Oh, if I had known that was wrong, I would never have done that.” Not understanding that of course, he understood what he was doing when he partook of the fruit. There wasn't just, they were out having an edenic charcuterie board and she passed the wrong fruit to him. He knowingly took of the fruit and understood the consequences as well.

Heal: Yeah, and I think this this, think about Eve’s choice in sort of a number of ways. I've been I've had a number of experiences in my life recently where the problem I encountered was obedience didn't require any sort of abdication of reason, so much as an exercise of patience. And we see reason in, in action here with sort of Adam, Adam and Eve there was not a perhaps a not a fully kind of worked out reason why. She had the commandment on the one hand and then this reason to partake of the fruit, and she saw it, it was gorgeous, and tasty and so forth. And I've had an experience recently where, in the midst of personal wrestling with depression, I struggled with whether or not I should ask to be released from a calling at church, and this is not something which I ever thought I would find myself doing. And, but I was feeling so, sort of overwhelmed by this calling in the midst of all the other things that I was trying to manage at the time between work and family and, and other things. I'm wrestling with this sort of darkness that seems to make you feel as though you're drowning at all times, and that any extra weight is just simply going to push you under. And in this process, I went and asked the stake president to release me as from a, from a bishopric that I was serving. And he was wonderfully sort of understanding, and really, it was a beautiful moment for me to kind of realize that he, how understanding he was my sort of, mental health and things I was wrestling with. But interestingly, just a few weeks later, the bishop who I was serving with was called into a stake presidency and that bishopric was sort of dissolved. And I had another similar experience like this, which suggested to my mind that sometimes God has things in the works, and that are just a little bit more... in the moment when we're kind of tempted to act, if we're patient just a little bit beyond that, we'll find that He then acts. I suspect, after there have been times in my life where that has actually happened. But I tend to always remember the times where it didn't happen, where I acted sort of prematurely and found myself then noticing that God's hand was working in my favor, that plans were afoot, that paths were being prepared.

Stuart: Now switching gears, thinking about the theme of exile and longing for the garden, I think about nostalgia, coming from the Greek word, which means ‘the pain from an old wound’ and thinking about knowing what you had and remembering a time when things were different. And again, thinking about the Babylonian captivity, and this is just one way of thinking about it. But if you're an oppressed people living under the oppressive hand of a different people, you might long for a different time and a different place where everything seemed to be solved. The sort of thought that I wish I'd known that the good old days were the good old days while they were happening, rather than later on being able to reflect on that. But it must have been something else entirely for Adam and Eve to go from the Garden of Eden to a lone and dreary world.

Heal: Yeah, I think this is a really this is where we kind of see the pathos and can imagine the feeling of Adam and Eve, and it comes out in this Book of Moses when they talk to God, but He's in the garden, and they're outside, and they can hear His voice, but they can't, they can’t see Him. So even this sort of sense of separation from, from this life that they previously enjoyed. And we do find, I think this parallel certainly in this story of, of ancient Israel. It’s parallel between them going through a similar phase that Adam and Eve went through of creation and the election of Israel, of commandments given to Adam and Eve and the Torah given to Israel, of Adam and Eve violating the command and being exiled from Eden, and Israel violating the Torah and being exiled from the promised land. And so this story of exile, this story of lost promise is Israel's story. And it's a story that lasts throughout the whole of the history of Israel in many ways. We have Israel spent, has spent much more time, the people of the Jews have spent much more time outside of their land than they spent in it. Almost immediately that they're in it, as we'll find in, in later episodes, they're exiled to Egypt for several hundred years. And this long period, whether they're under the Kings, they then find themselves exiled again into Babylon. And so the story of, of loss and of being away from our land of promise seems to be something which I think resonates with us deeply. I think of Jacob 7:26, that beautiful verse where Jacob tells us that, “The time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away, like as it were, unto us a dream. We being a lonesome and a solemn people wanderers cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren which cause wars and contentions. Wherefore, we did mourn out our days.” And so we I think people of faith often find themselves in a fraught environment in a world where they’re not fully accepted and longing instead, for what for Latter-day Saints would be Zion, longing for this sense of sort of community. And I think that's why we, we miss going to church so much during the pandemic, this sense of being together with our brothers and sisters again, being together in community, kind of returning and feeling that sense. But ultimately that longing, I think, is for this, this heavenly home and I think it's a deep spiritual sense of being exiled from something to which we fundamentally belong.

Stuart: I think that there's also a power in narrative and the stories that we connect to. For instance, I know the history of Latter-day Saint, settler pioneers. But I still love Trek. I feel something when I think about my ancestors walking across the plains, or crossing the ocean or having these sorts of experiences. And it reminded me of something that Adam Miller wrote in his book, Letters to a Young Mormon, where he's writing to his daughter, and he says, “Like everyone, you have a story you want your life to tell. You have your own way of doing things and your own way of thinking about things. But my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my way saith the Lord, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the heavens are higher than the earth. God's work in your life is bigger than the story you'd like that life to tell. His life is bigger than your plans, goals or fears. To save your life, you’ll have to lay down your stories and minute by minute day by day, give your life back to him. Preferring your stories to his life that he has chosen for you is a sin.” And he goes on to talk about how our stories are sort of like a Frankenstein monster sewn together from different experiences that we've had, but also the experiences that our loved ones and those whom we have never met have had. It's our focus on one particular story. And not saying that this is what Israel did with the story of the exile, but just maybe one way of thinking about it. Miller continues, “Like most people, you'll lavish attention on this story until almost unwittingly, it becomes your blueprint for how things ought to be as you persist in measuring life against it. This Franken-Bible of the self will become a substitute for God, an idol. This is sin. And this idolatrous story is all the more ironic when as a true believer, you religiously assign God a starring role in your story, as the one who with some cajoling and obedience can make things go the way you've plotted. But faith isn't about getting God to play a more and more central part in your story. Faith is about sacrificing your story on his altar.” And thinking about exile, that, yes, Adam and Eve made the right choice to take the fruit, but they did not choose the consequences. And it's important to remember that the aspect of the story that we choose to focus in on, with thinking about exile from the Garden of Eden, from being away from God's presence, tells us as much about where we are spiritually, as it does about the narrative that is found in Genesis or in the Book of Moses.

Heal: Yeah, I really love that idea. It makes it so that the the focus on exile is actually a reminder of our calling back to God, rather than creating a story that makes us comfortable in the world.

Stuart: Or that makes us be the one that was negatively affected by somebody else's decision. Right, Adam fell that men might be and men are that they might have joy. It's not just Adam fell, and so I can't do anything about the fallen world that I live in. It's Adam fell that man might be and he and Eve and their posterity found a way to have joy and to become closer to God. Notably Adam and Eve start wearing clothes at this point. Is there anything you'd like to say about the place of clothes in this narrative, Kristian?

Heal: Oh, yeah, there's something um, this is a moment where I get to draw on my, my love for the Syriac tradition, a tradition of Christians from the Middle East who spoke this Aramaic language, and have a very rich and deep symbolic theology. And one of the ways that they describe the plan of salvation is by thinking about Adam and Eve in the garden, where they understood them to be clothed in garments of light, or garments of glory prior to the Fall. And so our normal understanding is that Adam and Eve are naked in the garden, and then God makes garments of skins for them. But in, in the Syriac tradition, and in Jewish traditions, Adam and Eve were not, it's not that they were naked, prior to the fall that they were clothed in these garments of light, these garments of glory. And what humans want in the Plan of Salvation is a return to those garments of light and garments of glory so they can enter back into the presence of God. And so finding themselves stripped from these garments, mankind, humanity waits for Jesus to be born. And he brings this garment of light back to Earth and leaves it then deposits it as the, as the Syriac Christians would have it, in the Jordan River. And this then becomes a place where the garment is to be found for all those who are baptized. Subsequently, all Christians who were baptized go into the waters of baptism, as though they were going down into the Jordan River and taking up this garment of light, and then wearing it again as a promise for those who preserve their baptismal robes unspotted as it were, that they can enter them into the presence of God after the resurrection. And so it's this lovely sort of balanced story where the, the story of this fool becomes one of a promise that's fulfilled in Christ.

Stuart: That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Something that is not quite as beautiful, but something that is also important in Genesis’ narrative, as well as the Book of Moses, is the first murder the first fratricide where Cain, in his jealousy, murders Abel and finds that he cannot hide from God. And when God speaks to him, he tells him that he is cursed and that he must go out into the wilderness to be separate from his family. And this is in Genesis chapter four, verse 11, “And now are thou cursed from the earth which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from my hand. When thou tellest the ground that shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength, a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou has driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid, when I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth, and it shall come to pass that everyone that findeth me shall slay me.” Now he sees a mark of danger from other groups from outside people here, “And the Lord sent them to him wherefore ever whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold, and the Lord set a mark upon Cain less any finding him should kill him.” This short story that is very important that many believers in Abrahamic traditions recognize this as one of the first stories they learn about, was co-opted, in the early modern period to recognize that the mark that was put on Cain was black skin. First of all, that is not true. Though it was taught for a very long time, it is important for us to remember that the curse of Cain or the curse of Ham that will come up when we discuss Genesis 9, are social constructions to explain a racial difference between people with pale skin and people with dark skin. As President Dallin H. Oaks of the First Presidency has said, “We must do better to root out racism. We must discard these myths of racial difference, which in turn become marks of racial superiority.” As Elder Bruce R. McConkey said after Official Declaration 2, when things that he had taught had to be repudiated about the place of people of black African descent. He said, “Forget everything that I have said or that President Brigham Young or whoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation, meaning Official Declaration 2, where any man or woman who was worthy is eligible for the blessings of the temple, and any worthy man is eligible for ordination to the priesthood.” Continuing on, he said, “We spoke with a limited understanding, and without the light and knowledge that has now come into the world, it doesn't make a particle of difference. What anybody ever said about this matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978, as to any slivers of light, or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them.” And I think about that sliver of light or particle of darkness. Last night, I had to start changing a battery on my car. As it turned out, I didn't have the right tools. And so, I was using my cell phone light to try and move this 40-pound battery in my car. Then, my wonderful dad came over with a high-powered flashlight, and an extender for the socket wrench that I was using. And it turns out that when you have more tools, when you have more knowledge of how to do things, you're expected to do them better, and they also tend to go better. And then finally, one more word from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, in an interview that he did for PBS. He said, “We,” meaning Latter-day Saints, “don't pretend that something wasn't taught or practice wasn't pursued, for whatever reason,” in regards to the racial restriction, “but I think we can be declarative in our current literature in books that we reproduce and teachings that go forward from 1978 forward, we can make sure that none of it is declared. That may be where we still need to make sure that we're absolutely dutiful, that we put a careful eye of scrutiny on anything from earlier writings or teachings, just to make sure that that's not perpetrated in the present. That's the least I think of our current responsibilities on the topic. We cannot further narratives that justified racism.” Prophets, seers and revelators have asked us to lead out against racism, and to repudiate the stories that affirmed that racism. And so if in your class, somebody talks about the Mark of Cain being about race, I would encourage you to take some time and say, “That's not something that I'm comfortable with being taught. Racial differences isn’t something that comes from God. It's something that's created by humans.”

Heal: That is beautiful and so powerful. I really feel that part of President Nelson's emphasis to us about an ongoing restoration and repentance is coming to understand the Bible more clearly, coming to understand our own stories more clearly, coming to understand how God relates to society, how God wants us to relate to each other, and being willing to root out those things that have no place in the heart of a follower of Jesus Christ.

Stuart: Have a blessed week y’all.

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