Since I was a kid, raised in an active LDS home, I’ve had great personal wonderment over three essential questions, namely, “Who is God?” “What is the purpose of Life?,” and What will the afterlife be about?” Because o f what can only be considered a life-long quest to discover answers, most of my thinking and attention has been dedicated to getting viable information to help obtain reasonable responses.
Again, because I was raised a Mormon, I was given specific answers to each of them which, in time, proved to be failures (in my mind) relative to all things considered and especiallyvrelative to sound biblical exegesis. For those who aren’t familiar with the LDS responses to these three questions, let me summarize them:
Who is God?
God was once a man, who inhabits a body of flesh and bones, who is from a long line of other gods. Because He overcame all the obstacles in His own mortal life, He became God – our God and reigns over us, His human creations in love. Some LDS teachings go so far as to say that God has a wife (or wives, depending on who you listen to) and every human being on earth is the spiritual offspring of this couple (or couples).
What is the purpose of Life?
To most Latter-Day Saints, the purpose of this mortal life is to come to earth (remember, we were first created spiritually in a pre-mortal existence through Heavenly Father and His wives) and obtain physical bodies, overcome trials and temptations, all with the hope of become gods and goddesses ourselves in the future.
What will the afterlife be about?
To the LDS, the afterlife consists of four main destinations with many elevations in the top. These destinations include a telestial kingdom, where the sinful and unrepentant will go, the terrestrial kingdom, where good men and women who loved Jesus will go, and the Celestial Kingdom, which can only be accessed by faith, repentance, water baptism and receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit which can only be bestowed by a male holding the LDS priesthood. Once a person enters into the Celestial Kingdom, if they are faithful and true to all sorts of other obligations the LDS present, they may get to the highest level (of many) in the Celestial Kingdom and become gods themselves. The last main destination is called, “outer darkness,” which is reserved for enemies of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter Day Saints, its teachings, doctrines and leadership.
When I came to understand the origins of these unique teachings and how they measured up to sound and reasonable biblical interpretation, I abandoned these views and moved on to embracing standard-fare evangelicalism. And what are the standard answers to the three questions from that perspective? Let’s again summarize,
Who is God?
For Catholics, Orthodoxy’s, Anglicans and Protestants, the traditional view on the nature of God is this:
God is a Trinity, which can be described as the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead.
Additionally, there are some distinctions that go along with this definition of the Trinity and they include that all persons of the Trinity are co-equal, co-eternal, and exist in perfect loving harmony one with another. Trinitarians maintain that there is a clear distinction between each of the three persons, but they are One.
What is the purpose of Life?
The answer to this question is very dependent on the person asked, but from what I can tell, the general accepted response is, the purpose of human existence is to have or be in relationship with God. From there, there are ten thousand variables.
What will the afterlife be about?
Most followers of Jesus and readers of the Bible maintain some rather vague but concrete descriptions of the afterlife which include the following:
- People will either go to heaven or hell – forevermore.
- If heaven, they will spend eternity worshipping Jesus forever.
Again, there are numerous additions to these general ideas, but from what I can tell, these are the essentials that all Trinitarians agree upon.
So, decades passed. Where other men and women have occupations and jobs that they were called or choose to do in their lives, my chosen occupation and job has been to find the best answers to these questions – among others – day in and day out, seven days a week. How? Reading, seeking, writing and presenting information that in some way orbit about the “Big Three” (as I’ve come to call them). Understand that none of my answers were formed outside contextual biblical supports and evidences, but it admittedly takes a lot of work to actually come to see how passages from Genesis to Revelation have helped me understand what I see as the best responses possible. For whatever its worth, these are the answers I have come to accept about the Big Three:
Who is God?
The True and Living God has a name – YAHAVAH. His personal pronoun name is not, YAHWAY nor is it YEHOVAH or JEHOVAH. His name is in all probability, YAHAVAH. He has no beginning, He has no end. He is One Plural and His plurality is perfect Masculinity and perfect Femininity. He is not male and female, He is perfect Masculine and Perfect Feminine and is Spirit and in these two spirit-expressions He is perfectly unified and One. One-Plural. His Old Testament expressions are far more masculine than feminine, and His New Testament expression is far more feminine than masculine (in the man Yeshua of Nazareth). This One Plural God, in addition to being Spirit naturally has a Spirit. It is the spirit of Father and the Spirit of the Son which governs those who walk by faith and seeks to influence all. This One-Plural God made “Man in His own image, male and female made He them.”
What is the purpose of Life?
In creating Man in His image, the One Plural God gave them freewill as evidenced in the Garden setting of our first parents. They fell from His will for them, which was to be in relationship with Him freely and by choice and God sent His living, life-giving Word into the world as the Last Adam who overcame all of the deleterious spiritual effects introduced by the Fall. The world has been reconciled to God by His only human Son, and all people have ostensibly returned to the Garden of Eden spiritually and are in the same place as our first parents – choosing how they will live.
From what I can see, this life, then is a proving ground, where all people are free to live as they choose, and will be REWARDED accordingly, by God, who will take into account all things when He bestows His reward upon us. It seems that the rewards will be in and through the resurrected bodies He chooses to bestow on everyone, the evil and the faithful. These bodies appear to play a role in the afterlife status, ability and habitational destination for everyone. The punishment for sin has been absorbed by His Son who paid the wages of sin, which is death, through His love and obedience to His Father, for the world.
What will the afterlife be about?
It may be – because we do not know – but it may be that in this life all souls are choosing which side or what direction that they are headed out into eternities. This is not to say that there are no reversals allowed but some factors may make it easier or harder to make such changes in the Spirit world to come. Bottom line, I believe that the afterlife will consist of a heavenly destination, equipped with a “kingdom” located and operating out of the “New Jerusalem” and all souls who choose Light (which is Yeshua directly or indirectly) will enter therein. Outside that Kingdom are people who in some way, fashion or intention choose Dark – but the Kingdom has twelve gates that are always open, indicating an ability to somehow enter in and out of it.
In the end and as a summary, I maintain that after this life the heavenly realm will reflect much of what the world represents in terms of communities and cultures, and that all people of like minds will gather together in these disparate locals and cultures. The Kingdom culture, however, will be at the forefront of bringing Light to wherever God directs, and the cultures outside of it might contain both lukewarm souls, indifferent to both extreme light and extreme Dark. In the far out reaches of that realm, far away from the walls of the Kingdom, might dwell the lovers of Dark. They will present opposition to the God of Light forever more and perhaps the afterlife will someone consist of service, outreach and even warfare with oppositional forces throughout the earth and universe.
Just how I see things today – right or wrong.
