Yesterday, I was asked to speak on the topic, “Why We Need a Savior,” as part of our church Christmas Program. I was happy to receive the request because this question is at the heart of the Atonement.
I was asked to take no more than 7 minutes on this subject. This raised an interesting challenge. I can talk about the Atonement for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours or more without difficulty. However, how could I speak about the essential elements of the Atonement in 7 minutes?
Following is what resulted after quite a number of drafts:
At this time of year, we remember some of the titles Isaiah used to identify the Messiah – Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6).
Many other words also describe Christ and his countless attributes, but, for me, two sacred titles stand above all others – Savior and Redeemer.
But why do we need a Savior?
Our Savior and Redeemer holds those exalted titles because His Atonement saves us from sin and the consequences of mortality and allows us to return to our heavenly home.
We cannot understand the Atonement unless we understand the Fall.
When Adam and Eve were placed into the Garden of Eden, their bodies were immortal – they would never age or die. Those bodies were also incapable of having children.
In the Garden, Adam and Eve enjoyed the presence of Heavenly Father. They could see God with their eyes and hear Him with their ears. That association made a strong spiritual connection easy and natural.
When Adam and Eve transgressed the law and ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, four things happened:
1. Their bodies became mortal and subject to mortal death.
2. They could no longer remain in the presence of Heavenly Father. That separation is spiritual death.
3. They understood the difference between good and evil and were accountable for their choices.
4. They were able to have children so God’s spirit children could come to earth.
After the Fall, “Eve . . . was glad, saying: Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.” (Moses 5:11)
The Fall was not a mistake, it was a choice. Just as Adam and Eve chose to live in mortal bodies, each of us made that same choice — we chose to come to earth and gain mortal bodies, knowing we would be separated from our Father.
Elder Bruce R. McConkie said, “The atonement is the child of the fall, and the fall is the father of the atonement. Neither of them, without the other, could have brought to pass the eternal purposes of the Father.
“The fall of Adam brought temporal and spiritual death into the world, and the atonement of Christ ransomed men from these two deaths.” (Elder Bruce R. McConkie, The Three Pillars of Eternity, devotional address at Brigham Young University on 17 February 1981)
Two scriptures encapsulate our mortal lives and describe why a Savior is essential.
1. “No unclean thing can dwell with God” – 1 Nephi 10:21
2. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” – Romans 3:2
A) We cannot sin and be with God and
B) We all have sinned.
We need a Savior.
The Atonement is key to everything Heavenly Father does and all He has created. “This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39)
These two terms may sound the same, but have different meanings.
Immortality is how the Atonement saves us from physical death.
Eternal Life is how the Atonement can save us from spiritual death, depending upon our faithfulness.
Amulek describes how Christ saves us from the death of our body and gives us immortality:
“Now, there is a death which is called a temporal death; and the death of Christ shall loose the bands of this temporal death . . . . The spirit and the body shall be reunited again in its perfect form; both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame . . . . Now, this restoration shall come to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous; and even there shall not so much as a hair of their heads be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame . . . .” (Alma 11:42-44)
Virtually everyone who will ever be born on this earth will receive immortality through the Atonement of Christ. Their bodies will be resurrected from the grave and returned to a perfect form, then their spirits and bodies will be reunited and never die. Worlds and time without end, they will live. Mortal death will be permanently defeated.
What about Eternal Life?
Eternal Life is the kind of life that Heavenly Father lives. Through the Atonement, immortality comes to all men, righteous or wicked. Eternal Life is “the greatest of all the gifts of God.” (D&C 14:7.) We obtain Eternal Life, according to the Lord, “if you keep my commandments and endure to the end.” If we do this, He promises, “you shall have eternal life.” (D&C 14:7.)
If we are to gain Eternal Life, this greatest of all gifts, it will be because we become like God. God is perfectly clean and pure and we must become the same way.
How can imperfect people possibly do that?
“We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” (Third Article of Faith)
This brings us to justice and mercy. One of the most important ways in which Heavenly Father is perfect is that He is perfectly just and perfectly merciful.
Perfect justice is not terribly difficult for us to understand. Any time a law of God is violated, justice imposes an appropriate penalty.
Our problem arises because of that scripture we mentioned earlier, “No unclean thing can dwell with God” (1 Nephi 10:21)
Does justice make us clean?
No, justice ensures that a proper penalty is paid when a law is violated. It does not remove the effects of sin upon the individual who is punished. When prisoners are released from the penitentiary after having served their sentences, we say they have “paid their debt to society.” Prison has not made them clean and pure.
One way to be perfectly clean and pure is to never sin at all. That describes our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, and no one else. He is the key to perfect mercy. Christ is the only way to recover from our sins.
Lehi tells us, “[R]edemption cometh in and through the Holy Messiah; for he is full of grace and truth. Behold, he offereth himself a sacrifice for sin, to answer the ends of the law, unto all those who have a broken heart and a contrite spirit; and unto none else can the ends of the law be answered.” (2 Nephi 2:6-7)
A perfectly sinless Christ took upon Himself all the sins of all the people who will ever live on this world. At Gethsemane and Calvary, he paid the full price that justice imposed for every one of those sins, great or small.
Christ “satisfied the demands of justice by His own suffering, ‘the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God’ (1 Peter 3:18). He removes our condemnation without removing the law. We are pardoned and placed in a condition of righteousness with Him. We become, like Him, without sin.” (Elder D. Todd Christofferson, “Justification and Sanctification,” Ensign, Jun 2001, 18)
In place of the demands of justice, Christ provides merciful commandments that ordinary people can obey. He allows us to repent of our sins without being condemned by them. Describing His commandments, Jesus said, “Whoso repenteth and is baptized in my name shall be filled; and if he endureth to the end, behold, him will I hold guiltless before my Father at that day when I shall stand to judge the world” (3 Nephi 27:16)
Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer. We celebrate the Manger because of what Christ did on the Cross.
David P. Vandagriff
The following is an excerpt from a story by Ardeth G. Kapp, former General Relief Society President, entitled “The Gift.” Sister Kapp tells of a Christmas season visit to the home of an eighty-six-year-old friend who had been injured and the opportunity to meet his grandson, Brent, who was eight.
While we exchanged greetings and hugs, Brent stood anxiously waiting for the first opportunity to ask a question. In a most forthright and direct way he simply asked, “Have you ever shaken hands with the prophet?” The eagerness with which he asked gave me reason to believe that he may have rehearsed that question in his mind several times in anticipation of my visit.
“Yes, Brent,” I said. “I have shaken the hand of the prophet.”
“Oh,” he said. His eyes were wide, and his voice reminded me of what a great privilege that is. “If I could just shake the hand of the prophet,” he went on. His tone suggested that should that be a possibility, it would surely be the greatest Christmas gift he could have; and if not the greatest, at least it would be among the very top.
Sensing the love and respect Brent obviously felt for our prophet, and wanting to somehow provide a tie between the prophet and the young boy, I reached out my hand. “Brent,” I said, “this hand has shaken the hand of the prophet.”
He grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously. Then, letting go, he turned his hand over from front to back to examine it thoroughly. “I’ll never wash my hand,” he said. Considering the problems this decision might cause, I suggested that he probably should wash his hand and just keep the memory in his mind. This suggestion was not acceptable. He had a better idea. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll wash my hand, but I’ll save the water.” That seemed like a good suggestion, although I supposed he was only joking. Shortly Brent left the room. The warmth from the fire and the lights from the tree created a wonderful setting to visit. Together with Brent’s adopted grandfather and his grandmother, we shared memories of Christmases past.
A few minutes later Brent returned, this time carrying a plastic bag dripping with water. Before anyone could question him, he proudly announced, “I washed my hand,” holding up the bagful of water for all to see. We talked about the water in the bag and how that was a distant connection to the prophet; then our visit about Christmases past continued. Brent sat on the floor facing the Christmas tree, his knees peeking through his faded bluejeans, and from the corner of my eye I watched him examine the bag of water as if he were expecting to see some evidence that this was holy water. The fire burned low and the lights on the tree seemed to brighten.
After a few minutes Brent got up and, taking his treasure with him, left the room. While I wondered if we would see him again before we left, he returned-this time without the plastic bag full of water. He had determined a better solution for his desire to be in touch with the prophet. Standing in the door way with his T-shirt wet all the way down the front, he explained what he had done. “I drank the water,” he said.
. . . .
The sacramental prayer had been offered, and the sacred emblems were being passed quietly and reverently. The Sunday before Christmas brings a sensitivity that makes important things even more important-a time of recommitment and rededication, of sorrow for wrong-doings and resolve and hope to do better in the new year. As the sister on my right passed the sacrament tray and held it while I raised the small cup of water to my lips, into my mind came this thought: “I want to get this water on the inside.” I thought of Brent, a newly baptized member. I remembered the baptismal covenant. I thought of the symbolism of the water, the washing away of our sins. The cup of water of which I would partake renewed the promises and blessings of the atonement of Jesus Christ. It was his birthday we were celebrating. I could hear in my mind again the sacramental prayer on the water: “that they do always remember him, that they may have his Spirit to be with them. Amen.”
It was Christmas, a holy celebration in memory of the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. The symbolism of the water was to represent his blood, which was shed for each of us so that we might live and have eternal life. The words of a little verse I had heard many years earlier came to my mind with new meaning: “Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,/ If he is not born in thee thy soul is still forlorn.”
“Thank you, Brent,” I said to myself, “for this wonderful gift you have given me, the increased desire to drink the water-the symbolism of his atonement-to get it on the inside so that I might become more like him.”
A father once scolded his son a few days before Christmas because the little boy was terrorizing the house and creating a constant mess. The father said, “If you aren’t good, Santa won’t bring you anything.” Soon the father wondered where his boy had gone-things were too quiet. He found the little guy lying very still on his back, looking stonily at the ceiling. “What are you doing?” the father asked. “I’m being good,” said the boy. He was avoiding evil by avoiding movement. That is not what it means to prize the good. We seek more than neutrality, more than avoidance. We seek to be good, as the character of God himself is good in its very nature. And that state of being is, like charity, ultimately a gift of Christ’s Atonement, bestowed upon the humble and obedient followers of Christ, after they learn from experience all they can discover by themselves about prizing the good.
So, does the Atonement work in our lives as an event or as a process? If it is an event, life is a simple test that we either pass or fail. We compile a certain number of black marks and white marks. At life’s end, we add up the marks, compute our repentance points, and check the score. Above some fixed level of repentance, the Atonement applies, our sins are paid for, and we go back to square one. With this approach, repentance is essentially another white mark-something we do to earn forgiveness. But something is missing here. For one thing, if the Atonement simply returns Adam and Eve to Eden, theirs is a story with no plot, no character development. Nothing happens to them, because the Atonement seems to erase what has happened to them. There is nothing here about what it means to have learned to recognize evil and to prize the good.
Moreover, this view sees our repentance as mechanically earning enough grace to offset our black marks. If that is how we think the Atonement works, we are unlikely ever to feel the full freedom and meaning of forgiveness and belonging to Christ. As long as we believe that we totally earn forgiveness, we will still feel guilty, because we will sense intuitively that we do not have the power to make ourselves completely whole. The Lord’s forgiveness is ultimately an act of grace-it comes as his gift, not as something we have a “right” to, even though we must repent as a condition of receiving it.
Consider, however, the Atonement in our lives as a process rather than an event. The process of Atonement applies not just once but, potentially, throughout our lives. Along this path of life, Adam and Eve did not simply return to Eden; rather, they moved onward from Eden through the telestial world. Because they accepted the gospel, then learned to cast Satan’s influence from their lives, they kept moving with the blessings of the priesthood into the terrestrial world, and finally into the celestial presence of God.
During this arduous journey, our first parents learned from their own experience to distinguish good from evil. By the sorrow and sweat of earthly life, they learned the taste and, ultimately, the very meaning of the sweet and the good. They did not come to this understanding merely by partaking of the forbidden fruit. Their first taste of the tree of knowledge was but the beginning of a lifelong quest for meaning-not an event but an extended process, marked by having children and discovering misery, sin, goodness, joy, and the very meaning of eternal life.
Elder Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen,
The Belonging Heart: The Atonement and Relationships with God and Family, Deseret Books, 1994
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
A friend told me today that one of the women in his family was informed in her Patriarchal Blessing that she was one of the multitude of the heavenly host mentioned by Luke.
I wonder who else was in that multitude. You? Me?