"Men are Free" (2 Nephi 2:27)


Remember we said there was more to the Fall than only physical death, or Adam and Eve changing from immortal to mortal? Adam and Eve were created in a state of innocence (2 Nephi 2:23). So what changed when that state of innocence became a knowledge of good and evil?  There is something important that happened in that switch from the state of innocence to the state of knowledge that can be easily overlooked.

The Fall wasn’t some big mess that God had to reactively just “deal with” in the aftermath. It was carefully planned for and anticipated as a vital part of God’s plan for His children.  God knew the conditions that needed to be present in order to set Adam and Eve, and ultimately all of His children, onto the path of Godhood. Ministering is actually part of this broader plan.  There are necessary details that must be present for us to have the opportunity to develop into a god. One of them is that this process requires our willingness. Brad Wilcox said, “The Lord can’t perfect them without their consent” (Wilcox, The Continuous Atonement, 75). We are free to choose because of the conditions God set-up for us. Our freedom to choose is vital to God’s plan for us to not only return to Him, but return like Him.

While discussing the Fall with his children, Lehi says this, “Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.” (2 Nephi 2:27, emphasis added).

Tad Callister shares four components of freedom. I am going to present them here in a different order than he did in his book. I think this order can shed a little more light on what was so important with Adam and Eve no longer being in a state of innocence.  In order for us to be free to choose, first, there must be an intelligent being.  Callister says, “Man is a conscious, thinking entity” (Callister, The Infinite Atonement, 252).

We sing:

“Freedom and reason make us men;
Take these away, what are we then?
Mere animals, and just as well
The beasts may think of heav’n or hell” (Hymn #240).

Although we share some instincts with animals such as those that serve to protect us like when our nervous system and body kick us into fight, flight, or freeze mode, God made us different from His other creations.  He gave us the ability to understand and to reason and problem-solve.  He designed us to seek for improvement. We will talk in great detail about gaining better access and making better use of that in the next chapter. Although we share those and other instincts with animals, we cannot play to a “mere [animal]” or instinctual level argument.  We do have these tugs and pulls from our physical bodies; however, as children of our Father, we have been given what we need in order to rise above it.  God created Adam and Eve as intelligent beings.

The second component of freedom is having available choices. God honors agency.  We can see that reflected from the earliest records of what happened in the Pre-Earth Life.  “...also a third part of the hosts of heaven turned [Satan] away from me because of their agency” (D&C 29:36). Heavenly Father allows Satan and Satan's followers to tempt us as part of our experience in mortality because “...it must needs be that the devil should tempt the children of men, or they could not be agents unto themselves; for if they never should have bitter they could not know the sweet” (D&C 29:39). Satan "sought to destroy the agency of man" (Moses 4:3). Satan’s rebellious response to God’s plan was to force each one of us to do what is right all of the time.  Not one of God’s children would be lost this way.  But, remember, agency is important to God.  That is part of becoming like God, for gods have the power to choose.

“And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter. Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other” (2 Nephi 2:15-16, emphasis added). Both good and evil are required for us to be able to choose.

Freedom requires “a world of opposites in which men and women can learn by their own experiences to know good from evil” (Source).  Right from the start, God fulfilled this component by giving Adam and Eve the conflicting commandments to “multiply and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28) and not to partake of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Moses 3:16-17).  This component was in full force at the time God placed Adam and Eve in the garden, too.

Third, we must have the power to execute or carry out our choices. “We may have knowledge of good and evil; we may even have choices placed before us; but unless we have power to execute, the power to fulfill, then our freedom is but a facade...All men have some power from God.  The Lord declared, ‘Men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; for the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves (D&C 58:27-28).  How can we enhance this power?” (The Infinite Atonement, 256).  He then speaks of obedience. “...obedience is not the antithesis of freedom, but the foundation of it” (258). We will discuss obedience further in the next section.  For now, it is sufficient to say that Adam and Eve were given the power to carry out their choices.

So what is missing from this four-part recipe to create freedom? Callister points out that we must have a knowledge of good and evil.  This was the only component not in full force at the time of the Creation. It is also the only component missing as we inherit our mortal bodies through birth and begin our time here on the earth. It is God’s plan that we learn through experience.  He desires for us to be “agents unto [our]selves.”  Listen to how Elder Dyches describes such an agent. “When we lay down ‘the weapons of [our] rebellion’ (Alma 23:7), we become ‘agents unto [ourselves]’ (D&C 58:28), no longer blinded by the sophistry of Satan or deafened by the discordant noise of the secular world” (Source).  In order to “no longer be blinded by... Satan,” we cannot simply be handed knowledge by the wave of some magical wand. We must learn to lay down the weapons of [our] rebellion, those personal ways we turn away from God towards Satan. This is a process of experience.

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