What fascinates me about the plan of salvation, is that it is so simple that we can teach it to small kids in a way that they can understand. But there is also so much depth to the doctrine that we can spend a lifetime learning about it and feel we are still only scratching the surface. The simple version is that we lived with our Heavenly Parents as spirits. God created an earth for us that we were sent to. Here we prepare to return to our Heavenly Parents and live with them again in celestial glory.
We can split this in two parts. The first part is the transition from immortality to mortality, the invisible to the visible. This is the pattern of creation as discussed in part 1 of this series. It also characterizes the coming of Christ to earth. Similarly, we all transition from the timelessness in the premortal existence as spirits to the mortal and fallen world with a body. But this is obviously just the first part of the plan. The second part is the same pattern in reverse. Christ conquered death and returned to immortality in a glorious resurrection. We can follow that path. This is the transition from the mortal and visible to the invisible and eternal. Part 1 of this series dealt with the first part of the plan of salvation. We looked at how the double meaning of the hebrew 'dbr' root, "word" and "thing", is manifest in the creation account. In part 2, we saw this pattern in Alma 32 and the journey towards the tree of life. It is actually a journey of the creation in reverse, completing the full cycle of the Plan of Salvation. There is beautiful symmetry in the plan that I hope to be able to demonstrate in this post.
Lord Wilmore (the other blogger and my study companion on the other side of the Atlantic) discovered and shared another meaning of the Hebrew 'dbr' root with me. In the ancient temple, there was an inner sanctuary or "holy of holies". In Hebrew, this was called, 'debir', probably derived from the Hebrew word for speaking that we have discussed. The Holy of Holies in the temple was a place of speaking, where "the word" is found. This may seem like a strange name but it does make a lot of sense in this context and I will try to explain why I find this to be quite profound.
The creation has always been an important part of temple worship. The ancient temple was formed after the pattern of the creation account. According to scholar Margaret Barker:
The Temple was a model of the creation, and the liturgy of the temple preserved the creation. Genesis 1 was not an account of the historical process of creation, but a record of the great vision granted to Moses and others of how the world is made. In the six days when Moses was on Sinai, before the LORD called to him (Exod. 24.16), he saw the six days of creation, and was then told to replicate these when he built the tabernacle. A few ancient sources say that Moses saw the heavenly temple; but most assume that he saw the process of creation, and that the tabernacle represented this. Ancient material such as this is sometimes difficult to read, but the last section of Exodus 40, describing how Moses assembled the tabernacle, corresponds well to the days described in Genesis 1. (Source)
How did the tabernacle, or Solomon's temple that had a similar construct, model the creation? Barker gives some detail in her book, Temple Theology. The below table is copied directly from the book.
|
Day |
Temple/tabernacle feature |
Meaning |
|
1 |
Holy of holies |
The throne of God, the
hidden heart of creation, the source of life |
|
2 |
The veil |
The web of matter that
conceals the throne of God from human perception |
|
3 |
The table for the bread |
The vegetation of the
earth, wine and incense |
|
4 |
The seven branched lamp |
The sun, the moon and
five known planets |
|
5 |
The altar of burnt offering |
The symbolism is no
longer clear because the text of Exodus 40 differs in the Greek and the
Hebrew. It is probable that the altar represented non-human creatures |
|
6 |
The high priest |
The human as the high
priest of creation |
In addition, there are lots of other elements in the story about building the tabernacle that echoes the creation. The following is obtained from this source.
- The tabernacle instructions (Exodus 25-31) are given in six segments, each beginning with “Yahweh said to Moses” (25:1; 30:11, 17, 22, 34; 31:1). “Speaking” these six “creative” words to Moses parallels the six creative words of Genesis 1 (vv. 3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 22).
- The seventh creative word in Exodus 31:12 introduces the Sabbath command. As in Genesis 1, we see a seven-fold creative act culminating in rest.
- In Exodus 39:32 we read that the work was “completed.” This is the same Hebrew word used in Genesis 2:2 to refer to the completion of God’s creative work.
- In Exodus 39:43 we read that Moses “inspected the work and saw” that they had completed the work according to plan. Likewise in Genesis 1 God inspects his creative work and “sees” (same Hebrew word) that it was good.
- Just as Moses “blessed” the people after completing the work (Exodus 39:43), God “blessed” (same Hebrew word) his creation in Genesis 1:22, 28; 2:3.
- In Exodus 40:33 we read that Moses “finished the work,” which parallels how God “finished his work” (same Hebrew vocabulary) on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2).
Later, when the tabernacle was replaced by the Temple of Solomon, the same structure was used. The most important ritual in the tabernacle and temple was on the Day of Atonement. The high priest would walk through the temple all the way into the Holy of Holies. Since the temple is the creation in reverse, the high priest on this journey would symbolically peel back layers of the material creation until he passed through the veil and entered the divine presence in the eternal and invisible realm. When the high priest had entered into the Holy of Holies, he would speak and utter the name of God, Yahweh, the name that was so sacred that it could not be uttered any other place or time. The Holy of Holies was therefore 'debir' in Hebrew, a place of speaking, and a model of the beginning of creation when God spoke and the world came into existence. "In the beginning was the Word". This word was in fact Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. When "the Word" became flesh, it followed the pattern of creation. But when his flesh was sacrificed and Christ went all the way through the veil into the Holy of Holies in his role as high priest, as the Epistle to the Hebrews describes, he went back to "dabar" (the word).
In a blog post a while ago, I described how the atonement literally and symbolically reverses the fall. The following is from this post:
Acts 5:30:
The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree
1st Corinthians 15:22:
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive
The atonement is the reversal of the fall! The fall came about when Adam took the fruit from the tree. The atonement came about when the firstfruit of God was hanged on the tree. The fall was figuratively a fall to the ground, to the carnal and the captivity of the devil. The atonement enabled mankind to rise, to "cultivate the ground", i.e. to become master of the carnal instead of subject to it. It enables us to eat fruit instead of dust.
The story of the fall immediately follows the creation account. Seeing how the temple or covenant path is a creation in reverse adds to this symmetry. We have a chiastic structure looking something like this:
A. Creation: Word becoming matter
B. Fall: Introducing physical and
spiritual death
B’. Atonement: Conquering
physical and spiritual death
A’. Temple/covenant path: Passing through the material creation back to “the
word”
I find much beauty in symbolism and symmetry, and am overwhelmed by the beauty and depth of God's great plan for us. Thanks to Lord Wilmore for pointing me to the interesting relation between the Hebrew 'dbr' root and the temple.