17 The Greater Law
As we have seen, Eve’s story is a love story. It is a story of love felt and love exercised. It is a story of love of God, love of partner, love of learning, love of covenant, love of commitment, love for each one of us—but it is also a story of love even larger than that, a love that extends to all waiting to come to earth. It is about promises given and promises kept, of covenant marriage, children, relationships, and supernal hope. It tells us of spiritual yearnings, spiritual reaching, and spiritual reality. Through this glorious and vital story we clearly see that a generous and loving God has given His daughters and His sons clear, eternal patterns to follow.
The story of Eden embraces and illuminates the entire plan of salvation and the reason for our being here. It puts into clear focus the classic struggle of humankind over the forces of the adversary. It acquaints us with the challenges we all must meet successfully if we are to return whole to our heavenly home. Through all of it we see point and counterpoint—good and evil, right and wrong, honor and shame, power and weakness. We recognize that a consistent element in Satan’s attempts to thwart the designs of God is the devil’s effort to disrupt the delicate balance of male-female relationships.
We know that Satan lost round one in this significant battle in the war in heaven. He lost round two when he was unable to thwart God’s plan in the Garden. Round three—perhaps the final round in these latter days—has become an escalated campaign to put men and women at odds and keep them there.This battle, which seems so very modern, is really as old as the earth itself.
In this final dispensation of the fulness of times, Satan has mustered all his forces to drive a wedge between man and woman. He desires to cause men and women to see one another not as empowering partners but as individuals of unequal worth or even as competitors, each coveting gifts the other has. If he can distort our concepts of Deity and of eternal spiritual and priesthood powers, he can distort our responses to each other and poison the well at which we would seek the precious living water the Savior offers.
Satan strives, as he vowed he would, to make the world a battlefield strewn with the souls of even the strong and steady. He can do so if our actions and attitudes make either sex feel diminished in stature, unneeded, or unheeded. If we fail to address material and physical needs, if we fail to provide opportunities for the intellectual and spiritual growth of both sexes, he will rend man and woman asunder. He can distort a correct understanding of the priesthood plan if he can blur or demean the foreordained roles of either man or woman, if he can distort our knowledge of who and what we are, or if he can cause either sex to deny their nature or the measure of their creation.
And he will never cease trying, for as Elder Boyd K. Packer has stated: “The adversary is jealous toward all who have the power to beget life. He cannot beget life; he is impotent. He and those who followed him were cast out and forfeited the right to a mortal body. His angels even begged to inhabit the bodies of swine. (See Matthew 8:31.) And revelation tell us that ‘he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.’ (2 Nephi 2:27.)”1
The Search Concluded
The whole story of Mother Eve and Father Adam, our first parents’ experience in the Garden of Eden, and all that transpired there is a story of exercised agency and courageous choice. Elder John A. Widtsoe declared that “considering our full knowledge of the purpose of the plan of salvation, and the reason for placing Adam and Eve on earth, the apparent contradiction in the story of the ‘Fall’ vanishes. Instead the law of free agency, or individual choice, appears in distinct view.”2
The Garden story brings into clearer focus the choice we faced in our premortal life and that we now face in mortality. We each, by ourselves and for ourselves, decided to forgo static security and embrace the promise of an earthly physical body with all its risks. We elected to suffer pain, guilt, disappointment, and temporal death, not to mention the appalling risk of permanent spiritual death, so that we might fulfill our potential to become like our Heavenly Father. To do that we had to be in a position to confront evil directly and on our own, apart from God’s presence.
That most of us feel inadequate in the struggle goes without saying. But God is not responsible for our inadequacies, nor is Father Adam nor Mother Eve. We were sent to earth to succeed, not to fail. God’s great glory is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). We may be apart from His presence, but we need not be apart from His influence or His promises.
The message of the restored gospel is that the Fall was planned for. Our first parents chose wisely. By their action they enabled humankind to enter mortality and seize the hope of eternal life. As we read Lehi’s words to his son Jacob, we remember that Adam means both Adam and Eve:
“And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.
“And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.
“But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things.
“Adam [they] fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy” (2 Nephi 2:22–25).
We have now come full circle, back to that wonderful statement from Elder Widtsoe with which we began. It places in correct perspective the entire story of the Garden of Eden: “In life all must choose at times. Sometimes, two possibilities are good; neither is evil. Usually, however, one is of greater import than the other. When in doubt, each must choose that which concerns the good of others—the greater law—rather than that which chiefly benefits ourselves—the lesser law. . . . The greater must be chosen whether it be law or thing. That was the choice made in Eden.”3
Chapter Seventeen
^1. Packer, “Our Moral Environment,” 66.