Episode #268 - Foreordination, Destiny & Trials

Have you ever wondered if God truly knows everything.  Omniscience can be a difficult concept alongside agency but the two can live together.  And when they do, the impossible becomes possible and the Atonement of the Savior demonstrates its divine power.

Transcript

Welcome to Episode #268 – Foreordination, Destiny and Trials.   Were we foreordained to certain trials?  How much of our life is random and how much is directed by the Lord?  Did he know every sin we would commit?  Did he truly know how our life would play out to every detail?  How omniscient is God?  Omniscience is often a troubling concept for many individuals.  How does the Lord know that I am going to turn left when I don’t even know that I am turning left today?  Does the Lord know that I am going to turn left somewhere?  I know that many people consider that the Lord’s knowledge of us and his ability to predict and direct our lives can almost make it seem as though we don’t have the agency the Lord says he gives us.  We tend to think that if the Lord gave us true agency then he wouldn’t fully know what we were going to do.  That somehow we would be restricted to a path if he knew every step we would take.  Yet agency says we have choice and so the two must be reconciled in some way.  

What if I said that today giving my knowledge of your habits, patterns and understanding that you have 100 different paths you could take.  100 is just a number it could be any number really.  Those 100 paths represent your agency.  Each leads to another path different from its own and paths are likely to cross and parallel each other regularly.  So we will have a variety of pathways open to us.  Once we make a choice all the other pathways disappear and a new set appears. What if God could simply know every pathway we would take and the consequences or blessings of that pathway and the subsequent pathways?  What if God understands our agency as multiple pathways that he can use to help us, direct us and allow for us to choose.  God doesn’t need to know the exact route you will take if he can predict all of the pathways you are likely to take.  This way he can lead and guide us through those pathways.  Now the alternate plan is that of Lucifer and this consists of one single pathway called destiny.

Destiny is simple.  It was Lucifer’s plan from the beginning.  Remove agency and dictate what will happen to every living soul.  His plan was no matter what we really do, our path was already written. Within the church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints destiny is a false concept of the reality we see.  Omniscience does not destroy agency.  Omniscience only destroys agency when used against the principles of agency.  When used with the principles of agency it is an empowering knowledge and blessing to understand that we cannot go anywhere the Lord does not already know.  He can then direct our lives back to him at any time we choose, and it is our choice. If the Lord did not know every possible move we would make, then some set of circumstances could arise where he would not know what to do and that defeats the purposes of the atonement.  The atonement was to bring everyone in reach of salvation and exaltation regardless of the direction in their lives.  They could then choose to be a part of salvation or even choose how much salvation they wanted without running into circumstances that would make it impossible.  The atonement of the Savior made everything possible.

The church teaches a concept of foreordination. This idea and rule is what the Father provides for his people.  Foreordination is blessings waiting to be fulfilled based on our obedience to certain principles, ordinances and covenants.  This is similar to the Lord directing our lives to a particular path and us choosing that path.  We are foreordained to callings, trials, special blessings.  We receive those blessings as we respond to the spirit to walk a certain path.  We are foreordained to pass through significant trials and burdens as we pass through this life.  These lessons and trials are specific to us and are part of the Lord’s omniscience to place us under conditions where we might learn to become like him.  The majority of our learning on the earth was not necessarily to be academic or book learning but real-life in the heat of the battle type of learning.  We were to be mixed with individuals of all persuasions and to be tested and tried as a part of our mortal learning process.  Did the Lord then know you would have mental and or emotional illness in your life?  Oh yes he did and he prepared you for it.

The Lord must be able to see everything throughout time for these foreordinations to make sense.  And he prepared us to withstand the suffering of mental illness and to come out better on the other side.  However it is our choice as to how we will respond to the Lord’s calling us to humility.  We can accept like Nephi and learn during our eight-year journey in the wilderness or just complain about it like Laman and Lemuel and only become more hardened more complaintive.  By the way, complaint generally shows the hardness of our heart.  Complaint comes from that deep sense of injustice we often feel.  When we feel to complain to the Lord about our circumstances we are most often attempting to counsel him into our way of thinking.  This doesn’t mean we can’t talk to the Lord about the difficulty we feel with our illness.  In fact, he wants us to discuss every part of our illness with him.  Complaint however leaves no room for softening of the heart and willingness to remain in the trial.  Complaint attempts to remove the trial but leave the blessing.  Something the Lord just cannot do and does not do.

Timing is also important to the idea of omniscience.  Bringing Joseph Smith into the world even a decade earlier may not have allowed the church to form as it did.  Timing is critical to the Lord and that includes when those foreordained to callings are born into mortality.  The Lord cannot simply call a prophet.  He must set up the environment with various foreordained callings and assignments. He must provide for the pathway and then use a variety of resources and training methods to get the prophet on the right path.  He must teach the prophet exacting lessons.  He must surround him with support and all that takes significant effort and preparation.  The amount of preparation that went into the restoration would astound us.  The level of detail and development would make our heads spin.  The Lord is most definitely in the details of everything.

So what about guys like Hitler?  Did the Lord foreordain him to be a leader?  Is this also part of the Lord’s processes?  The scriptures do not teach that the Lord foreordains evil only good and the building up of the kingdom.  Did the Lord know what Hitler would do?  Did he know that he would rise to power?  The Lord knows everything and yes he did.  The Lord didn’t authorize it or call the evil leadership but he does allow for evil.  And yes he can see when evil will occur but because he respects agency he does not stop evil from occurring at least most evil.  The Lord cannot restrict the pathways we choose to take. The Lord will intervene with his servants when necessary but he must allow evil its day.  To restrict evil actions or pathways would be to move into the realms of destiny and altering the rules of agency.  To remove evil would be to remove most of our most important lessons of this life and again we are bordering on Lucifer plans.

What we don’t often see is that in the confluence of good and evil a place is created for learning and growth.  With only evil or only good learning is stunted or completely removed.  Even a tilting to one side or the other would cause us significant disabilities to learn.  We need evil as much as we need good in our lives to be able to have agency and to learn.  That doesn’t necessarily mean we need to be or act evil to keep the balance.  Lucifer and his angels are more than enough.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to study evil either.  More than enough will come right to our doors for us to handle.  But it does give us perspective as to how the Lord allows for agency even deeply evil agency.

Now the Lord does not foreordain evil men.  He may use them to his advantage but he does not foreordain them to a particular evil mission in this life.  All missions foreordained by the Father and the Savior were to be for good and to promote and preach the gospel, which is interpreted as the good news.  None of the evil we do is foreordained, however that doesn’t mean that the Lord lacks the knowledge to see what trouble we will find in life.  He fully knows us from the very beginning of spiritual life and he knows what we will do give a certain set of circumstances.  The Lord does not foreordain our evil but he does know that it can happen given a range of circumstances.

So why allow for those circumstances to occur.  Why allow for circumstances to tempt us into evil actions?  Why not remove the circumstances?  First many circumstances involve the agency of other individuals.  Most of the evil we receive will come in human form and many times from those we care about and love.  The Lord cannot remove agency of another to act.  He can certainly influence the outcomes and temper the storm but the reality is that he does not change the evil, he strengthens us to withstand it.  Because the Lord knows of the evil that will occur, he can balance our lives with increasingly difficult circumstances to allow for greater learning.  He can in essence allow for only what we can bear at the time.  He can also tailor our experiences, preparing us for our difficult trials, by educating and inspiring us to certain attributes we will need for the trial.  He can also use the trial to teach attributes and learning while we are being tried.  In our mortal world you give the final exam after the learning has occurred.  In the world of the Gods, the final exams can be an important part of learning and our education.

Thus enters the final exam of mental illness.  Mental distress comes in many ways and is different for each of us.  What might cause my mental illness, may not even affect you in your life.  Mental and emotional illness is a part of the final exam with the Lord.  Most of us come to our earthly mortal final exam lacking in necessary qualities for eternal life.  However, the Lord can test us for exaltation and train us at the same time.  Testing in the mortal world gets increasingly more difficult.  Pathways will become steeper and more difficult to travel if we are heading in the right direction.  Easy tests provide for small learning.  Steep and difficult tests provide for learning leaps.  The steeper the test we can handle, the greater the learning that will occur in our lives.  However, the Lord always tempers the test to the individual.  It would be unfair and unjust to provide for a test that is well beyond our capacity to survive.  And so the Lord provides helps and aids.  However, that help and aid is dependent upon our humility and our ability to keep seeking the Lord.  If we walk away from the Lord during a bitter test, we are likely to feel the full effects of that test when we leave the protection he provides.  In order to pass the test and to learn that which we need, the Lord requires that we stay under his protection and strengthening hand.  In the sense of hiking a difficult path, when we walk out from under the Lord’s protection, we lose our connection with that spiritually nourishing hand.  We begin to lose spiritual nourishment and this causes our steep path to appear steeper.  We lose desire and energy to climb and we lose our purpose.  This causes us to abandon the steeper learning and to wander on a side trail that might seem tempting and easy to hike but in the end leads to nowhere. When we avoid the trails the Lord desires us to take our learning will be stunted.  So often we wander around and around hoping that an easier path can be found but we ultimately know that the answer is the path the Savior has chosen for us.  There is no other way but his way.

So yes our mental illness is a path we must walk for a time.  The intensity and time we must face mental and emotional illness is up to us.  The longer we resist the Lord’s path and wander looking for our own way the more difficult it will be to walk the correct path.  The Lord’s path may not entirely reduce our symptoms or the problems associated with our illness but it will eventually lead to the freedom we desire.  Our own path may lead to some freedoms with serious restrictions that make us feel trapped.  The world’s answers may lead to some aid and relief but in the end that relief will only be temporary if we do not include the Lord.

Yesterday during church I heard someone ask a question about this very problem.  He said “We need help.  Practical help.  How do we get to the healing part of this?  What are the steps needed?”  In essence, I have a great deal I would like to do in my life and my illness is causing me to miss out on so much I could enjoy and accomplish.  I thought to myself, I have certainly been there.  Yes the Lord could heal us and yes would could do more for him and those around us, instead of being what we feel is a burden.  And yes he desires us to have joy and happiness.  But interestingly enough, the Lord sees the greatest benefit in our continuance with the trial of mental illness.  We know that he could heal us.  We know that we have the faith.  And perhaps that is the frustration with the idea of steps to healing.  We can do our part with belief, faith and even action but we cannot force the Lord’s hand when he sees all the pathways.  We are essentially counseling the Lord that our pathway would be better than the one we are currently experiencing.  And yet we know the Lord to be generous and merciful when he has the opportunity.  So the only conclusion we can make is that the Lord sees something we don’t in the pathway we desire and our current pathway is what he desires for us.  That can be troubling on many levels to think that mental illness might be our best pathway forward to eternal life.  But if you throw out the idea that God doesn’t care, then the only possible explanation is that God cares a great deal and that our current road, trail or pathway is the one that he desires.

I admit for me personally it has been a difficult road to accept the pathways that the Lord has chosen.  I have been somewhere between a Nephi and a Laman when it comes to my journey to the promised land.  But I have come to terms that mental and emotional illness is simply a part of who I am.  It is not who I am but simply a part that will one day be gone.  But for now it is going to be my companion and I can accept what the Lord has given me even when I struggle.  I hope today you can feel the Lord’s love for you and his deep concern for your eternal welfare.  Until next week, do your part so that the Lord can do his.