“Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Ne 2:25)
One thing that I have having trouble understanding with LDS theology is the belief that Adam’s transgression in Eden was a good thing. God made it impossible for Adam to play his part in the salvation story without sinning: according to the LDS, Adam HAD to sin by eating of the fruit in order to learn how to procreate. That strikes me as very odd.
Also, if God desired such disobedience, then why did Satan help out by tricking Eve?
Any LDS out there that can help clarify my confusion?
Hi, Insomniac,
I hope you are doing well.
The fallen angel, Lucifer, “knew not the mind of God”, but knew that Adam and Eve had a commandment not to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. His rebellion was against God and against the possibility of progress of all the other spirits through their use of their own personal free agency through making their own choices. He still wants to be in control of and force all the choices, to gain a sense of power that is completely false but is the only sense of power he derives.
Adam and Eve were given a commandment with a unique consequence: that they would physically die if they partook. They would also die spiritually if they partook because of having broken a commandment, since no unclean being can dwell in the presence of God. Heavenly Father and Christ understood all of the progress that humankind could experience in this world through making choices and experiencing the many mortal consequences of making both right choices and wrong choices, because the kind of knowledge humankind was going to need to progress beyond being just a spirit was experiential knowledge within the dimension of having a physical body.
But how to “let” Adam and Eve choose whether to experience the painful and what would eventually be horrible mortal conditions caused by their posterity? God doesn’t want the horrible conditions caused by man’s inhumanity to man to exist. But He had foreknowledge that those horrible conditions would exist through humankind’s deliberate acts of disobedience and through their listening to the power of Satan’s temptations rather than the power of Christ’s light of their individual conscience and the promised blessings through obedience to the commandments.
How? By placing them in a wonderful garden and a wonderful situation, with a simple commandment which had very large consequences which they would be choosing if they made the choice to partake. (By choosing to eat, they were choosing the whole set of consequences: death, the physical experience of pain, the possibility that their posterity would injure themselves and each other, but in the midst of all this the favorable consequence that humankind would be learning by making all of the choices that would be theirs to make.)
An analogy in this life would be, say, a team in the sports world that wants to be a really good team. Do they choose to play against only “easy” teams as opponents? No! They would want to play against some challenging teams, in order to see “how good they are” and also to raise the level of their own playing skill by “rising to the occasion.”
How much did Adam and Eve know about the human, mortal world they would be bringing into existence if they partook of the forbidden fruit? I don’t know. But they seem to have understood that they weren’t making very much “progress” being in the condition they were in within the garden of Eden. They had no knowledge of good and evil or the consequences of good and evil. They had no knowledge of pain within their physical body, or illness, or physical impairments. Should they partake, and begin the process of finding out about these things? or should they “play it safe” and keep that commandment which had such a huge (negative but potentially positive outcome) consequence?
Eve chose not to continue “playing it safe”. She chose adventure! She chose new experience! She chose a “not easy” opponent (mortal experience) for her “team” (her posterity) to compete against, which really is that we bring consequences on ourselves collectively as well as individually. Those consequences mean growth, but they are not easy.
Imagine how rejoiced Adam and Eve were when they found out that there was a Redeemer who would rescue them from death and from being shut out from the presence of God, but still allow for all the progress of their “team”, their posterity, humankind! We (humankind) are on the winning team, despite the difficulties of this life!
Through Christ and only through Christ, we are promised that “our team will win” and we will have progressed mightily as a collective group of spirits. We ought to be helping each other (without force) with all the ingenuity and encouragement we can muster, to conquer Lucifer’s false ideology and to raise our sights on all the blessings of living by the light of the gospel that Christ has given to the world.
