Grandma Payne was always interested in our lives, and she asked me, “David Rolph, what are you planning to do with your life?”īeing a child of the sixties, I thought long and hard before revealing my well-thought-out plans to a grown-up-a member of the Establishment. We had arrived early, so we had time to visit. I was fourteen, and it was the day that she would ruin my life. In the summer of 1968 I was sitting with my Grandmother Payne at the Manti Pageant. Mosiah 3:19 is one of my favorite scriptures. According to Mosiah 3:19, we too must discern and choose either “the natural man,” which “is an enemy to God,” or yield “to the enticings of the Holy Spirit” to become “a saint through the atonement of Christ” (Mosiah 3:19).
Armed with the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve were able to exercise faith and obedience in discerning between good and evil and in choosing the good. The effects of the Fall made it possible for Adam and Eve to experience mortality with agency-through which they could be tested and tried in order to become like their Creator. As bearers of the divine image, Adam and Eve were to be representatives of God in his creation-to “multiply, and replenish the earth”-and they were to care for the earth and the creatures therein (Genesis 1:28). The biblical story further explains Adam and Eve’s purpose. Uchtdorf summarized what we have learned from modern revelation when he taught, “We are created in the image of our heavenly parents we are God’s spirit children.” Whereas in ancient Near Eastern temples it was common to have the image of the god in that god’s temple, in the Garden of Eden the image of God is found in the man and the woman. This statement teaches us of our divine origins and that from the beginning “the measure of creation” is to be like God (D&C 88:19 see also D&C 49:17).īiblical scholars explain the two Hebrew terms behind the words image and likeness as references to being created in the form of God as well as to having His divine attributes. In the beginning, the crown of Heavenly Father’s creative work was the creation of the man and the woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
In the spirit of Brother Nibley’s parable, let us sketch out, based on the scriptures, the beginning, the middle, and the end of the play in order to help us “do something intelligent.”