Dear World-
This week was hard, really hard. There is no way I can describe the things that I have been put through this week...
The last few days I have been studying about the Atonement and I stumbled upon some interesting insight. Sorry I don’t have time to list any scriptural references. I promise it is all scripturally accurate, maybe next week I will provide you with my references that have brought me to my conclusion.
What is with all the pain and suffering? Why? This world is jam-packed full of hurt, sorrow, and pain. Furthermore, the greatest event to ever happen on this Earth, the Atonement, is yet another example of pain and suffering. Why? Is God’s plan set up to cause us all to be in torment?
I also started to think about the logistics of the Atonement. Justice… justice is an eternal law that must be satisfied. All living creatures have an internal sense of justice. If someone breaks a law, that person must be held accountable; he must be sent to prison. Suppose that person has a loving friend that is willing to go to prison for him. So what? That is not justice, it never was. That person—and no other person—must be held fully accountable for their actions.
So what’s the magic? What is the missing link? Why can Jesus come to this Earth suffer all pains and afflictions in order to free the human race from having to face justice themselves?
I don’t mean to sound like an apostate, but the traditional ways of explaining the Atonement are simply wrong. They are too simplistic. The parable of the debtor, it frankly does not fit.
To say that Heavenly Father represents justice and Jesus Christ represents mercy is simply incorrect; both beings possess an infinite amount of both characteristics. Heavenly Father is the supreme source of mercy, he created the plan, he gave Jesus his calling—Heavenly Father invented mercy. To say that Jesus is some merciful being void of all sense of justice is simply a fallacy.
Where is the missing link? How can this plan be explained? How can we, His children, go back to heaven dirty and stained? No matter how much Heavenly Father loves us, He Himself is POWERLESS to save us. He let go of His power to watch-over us when we left His presence and gained a fullness of agency. If He tried to break the covenant of agency He would fall, He would cease to be God. The inhabitants of Heaven would cease to obey Him, the angels and other Gods would denounce His power. His Honor, His Trust, and His Power would be naught if He lacked His perfect obedience to His perfect ability to keep His Supreme Celestial Law.
So God looks down on this world with loving eyes, loving tear-filled eyes. He wants to help us, but according to His rules, He can do nothing. He came up with this plan. He sent us here so that we could learn ourselves, that we could make mistakes and to grow in accordance to the laws that He would send. There was another part of this plan, He would send the One, the Only, Jesus—Jesus or Jehovah, the eldest. He was the most respected. He was the smartest, the toughest, simply the best of the brightest. Everyone loved Him. He was so good that Heavenly Father chose His intelligence to physically inhabit His own seed in the flesh.
This man, if we can even call Him that, was so good that He never thought a bad thought, He was incredible—absolutely perfect. He lived the Celestial Law since the beginning. He is the only person who was born on this Earth that has the privilege, the worthiness to go to the Celestial Kingdom on their own merits.
More than that, He loves us all. He has told all the worlds, all the universes, all the Gods, all of the angels that He will not go to Heaven without us. He will not leave us behind. Sure we are screw-ups, but He is our older brother, He will not leave us on this Earth to die, to rot away. So He did what He had to. He took us upon Himself; He stitched us to the palms of His hands. He chained us to His feet. He experienced everything that we experienced, all the pains, the sin, the sufferings, the shortcomings. We were lassoed to His waist. We were all molded into one body, the body of Christ. This surgery that He performed is called the Atonement. Get it? At-one-ment: the state of being one; one with Jesus Christ; one with His merits, His accomplishments, His perfection, His glory.
The pain, the pain is the justification. He had to show all of the hosts of Heaven since the beginning of eternity how bad He wanted them to grant His request. The plan was never about justice. No one wants justice. We don’t want justice, Heavenly Father doesn’t want justice, nor does Jesus want justice. They are forced by the Laws of Heaven, by all the inhabitants of the universe to request that justice; they must request that price.
There is one thing that all of those inhabitants can understand. There is one thing that all the angels, all the Gods, all the beings in the universe can feel. That is compassion, they can feel mercy.
When all the inhabitants of all of the worlds saw the act of the Atonement that Jesus Christ performed, willingly, for us, for his younger siblings, they wept. The angels wept. The Gods wept. They knew the law, but the gall of justice was overcome by the bowels of mercy. They could not exercise their hammer of justice. They allowed Jesus Christ to drag us back to Heaven with Him, because of the respect and admiration that they had for Jesus. That is the Atonement. We are made one with Christ, but we must choose.
We must willfully accept (since that is the basis of the whole plan in the first place) to grab on to Jesus Christ’s glorious garments. We must hold on and refuse to let go. As we stay in His shadow, He will drag us back to the Father. He will drag us on the right path, and with him leading the pack we will know where to go. He is the only one who has the map back to Heaven, back to Celestial rest with our Father. We will know what to do only when we follow the example of the Anointed One, the Great Redeemer, the Holy-One of Israel. In and through this journey we will be perfected in Christ. We can and will make it to eternal rest because of the great mercy, compassion, and leadership of our eldest brother, Jesus Christ.
That is the Atonement.
Love,
Elder Brown
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