Line upon Line

The materialist sneers at Genesis because it does not read like a physics textbook. The fundamentalist panics at the fossil record because he, too, has accepted the hidden premise that “truth” is nothing more than a photographic record of physical events instead of a way of being. Both commit the same fatal mistake: they assume the creation account is chiefly an explanation of how things were forced into existence, rather than a revelation that existence itself is a moral invitation.

To read Genesis with the disenchanted eyes of a technician is to miss the glory of the Agent. It is to stand in a temple counting bricks while ignoring the covenant that makes those stones a house of God.

The Temple of Agency: Creatio vs. Bara

If we want to recover the wonder of creation, we must first learn to hear the text as the ancients—and the prophets—heard it. For many centuries, traditional Christian theology has leaned on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo — creation out of nothing. The Restoration does not merely correct a detail here; it offers a more robust, more enchanting, and profoundly more relational vision.

On April 7, 1844, in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith quietly toppled a philosophical pillar that had propped up Western theology for ages. Preaching on the Hebrew word bara (often translated “create”), he said:

“You ask the learned doctors why they say the world was made out of nothing; and they will answer, ‘Doesn’t the Bible say He created the world?’ And they infer, from the word create, that it must have been made out of nothing. Now, the word create came from the word baurau which does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize; the same as a man would organize materials and build a ship. Hence, we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos—chaotic matter, which is element.”

That distinction is not mere semantics; it is the key that unlocks a moral universe — the difference between a universe that is commanded like a corpse and one that is courted like a bride. If God creates out of nothing, He appears as an absolute autocrat imposing will upon a void. If God organizes, He appears as an Architect bringing purpose to existing intelligence and element.

And crucially, this organization is cooperative. In the Book of Abraham, the Gods do not simply shout matter into mute obedience. They speak — and then they wait: “And the Gods watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed” (Abraham 4:18). Creation proceeds only as the element abides the light and knowledge given to it. The cosmos, then, is not a machine; it is a responsive community.

Doctrine and Covenants 88 makes the same astonishing claim: “the earth abideth the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law” (D&C 88:25). The earth is not a dead object but a law-abiding participant in God’s glory. We inhabit a temple of agency, where even “things” behave more faithfully than our theories about them.

The Microcosm of the Heart

If the macrocosm — the universe — is a temple organized by God through command and response, then we must turn to the microcosm: the human soul. If the story of the earth is the story of a place prepared for God’s presence, then the creation account also discloses God’s pattern in redeeming the Saint.

We are not distant spectators watching a divine construction project. Nor are we passive products of climate and chemistry. We are agents. The same divine acts we see in the making of the world are at work in the remaking of the heart.

The “covenant path” is not a checklist tacked to the wall of a heavenly bureaucracy. It is the genesis of a new heart — a new way of relating to God and neighbor. It is the process by which we, who often sit in the darkness of our own accusing stories and self-justifying habits, are invited into a truthful way of being.

I. The Light of Christ: The Awakening

The narrative begins in darkness. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” That is the landscape of the self-deceived soul. We begin in a spiritual tohu vavohu — a chaos we ourselves maintain through our accusing emotions and carefully edited inner narratives, for the modern ego will endure almost any misery so long as it can still be the editor. We are not malfunctioning machines. We are people who can turn or return, but who keep ourselves busy in the dark.

Then comes the first and greatest interruption: “And God said, Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). This is the intrusion of Truth. It is the moment the Light of Christ — the Spirit of Truth — cuts through the fog of our self-betrayal.

“For that which doth not edify is not of God, and is darkness” (D&C 50:23). The physical earth received that first light and was revealed as an ordered dwelling for God. Likewise, the Light of Christ comes to us. It separates the day of honesty from the night of deception. To accept this light is the first covenantal step. It is the decision to stop resisting the truth about ourselves and to admit that much of the darkness was of our own making.

II. The Firmament: Born Again to See

Light alone does not yet yield life if the waters remain a single, undifferentiated mass. So the Creator speaks again: “Let there be a firmament… and let it divide the waters from the waters” (Genesis 1:6). In the physical world, this is the lifting of the primeval fog — the making of an atmosphere where sight is possible.

In the soul, this is the first stage of being born again: being born again to see.

The Savior explains this to Nicodemus in a midnight conversation. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3, emphasis added). This corresponds beautifully to the Second Day of creation. Before we can enter the kingdom, we must perceive it. We must have a firmament in our minds—a clear division between what is of God and what simply belongs to our own self-maintained chaos.

To the self-deceived mind, God’s law feels like a foreign imposition, a ceiling pressing down. To the repentant, the same law is not the roof over a prison but the sky over a promised land. To the repentant heart, the law is a firmament. It holds back the drowning flood of our selfishness. By accepting the laws of the gospel, we are not surrendering our freedom; we are finally using it. We are choosing a structure — a heavenly architecture — within which we can treat others not as tools but as souls.

We leave the mist of self-concern. We begin to see the kingdom of God, to distinguish the holy from the merely convenient.

III. The Dry Land: Born Again to Enter

On the third day, the waters are gathered and the dry land appears. This is the visible threshold between drowning and dwelling. It is also the second stage in Nicodemus’s lesson. After his confusion, the Lord clarifies: “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5).

Seeing the kingdom is not enough. We must cross into it — for a man may gaze at promised land all his life and still die in the desert.

Joseph Smith taught, “It is one thing to see the kingdom of God, and another to enter into it. We must have a change of heart to see the kingdom of God, and subscribe the articles of adoption to enter therein.”

Those “articles of adoption” are the covenants of baptism. Just as the earth rises from the deep to become a place where life can flourish, so the disciple passes through the waters. We are buried in baptism — our old, self-justifying way of being symbolically laid in the grave — and raised to walk in newness of life. The Third Day is the day of entering.

And the land does not rise from the water as a sterile stone. It is summoned to fruitfulness: “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed” (Genesis 1:11). Once we have left the chaos and stand on the firm ground of covenant, the seed of Christ can be planted in our soil. As Alma teaches, if we give place even for a portion of His word, the seed begins to swell within us (Alma 32:28). We are carried from the barrenness of accusation into the fruit-bearing work of discipleship, trading the meager harvest of being right for the rich harvest of being righteous.

The Principle of Growth: Grace for Grace

Here, between foundations and fullness, we must pause. Why does God not simply “zap” the soul into instant perfection? Why days? Why seasons?

The dedicatory prayer of the Kirtland Temple gives a luminous answer. Joseph prayed that the Saints might “grow up in thee, and receive a fulness of the Holy Ghost” (D&C 109:15). The purpose of the temple — and of the universe — is not mass production but organic, moral growth in relation to Him and one another. We are commanded to “grow up” in the Lord.

This growth echoes the path of the Savior Himself. Section 93 tells us that even Christ “received not of the fulness at the first, but received grace for grace” (D&C 93:12). The creation account is the enacted parable of that law. The earth does not bear fruit on Day One. There is first separation, then light, then firmament, then land, then life. It moves grace for grace, degree by degree.

We, too, stumble when we judge ourselves by Day Six while still living in Day Two. We look at our present chaos and quietly assume that the Creator has withdrawn. But the doctrine of “growing up in the Lord” teaches that the process is itself the point. We are being fitted to receive a fulness. The Lord is not late; He is patient.

IV. The Greater Lights: The Gift of the Holy Ghost

On the fourth day the heavens are filled with ruling lights: the sun to govern the day, the moon and stars to govern the night. In the growth of the soul, this corresponds to the Greater Light of the Gift of the Holy Ghost.

The Light of Christ (Day One) awakens all. The change of heart and baptism (Day Three) plant the seed. The Gift of the Holy Ghost (Day Four) establishes a constant, governing light within the firmament of the soul.

“For intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence; wisdom receiveth wisdom; truth embraceth truth” (D&C 88:40). The Holy Ghost becomes to us what the sun is to the earth: a fixed and faithful light by which our days and seasons are ordered. He marks our times. He illuminates our morning decisions and our midnight fears.

He is not merely an external lantern we occasionally borrow. He is an indwelling light by which we come to see everything else, the strange miracle by which the very candle teaches the room to exist. He guides us toward “the perfect day” and teaches us to navigate the long night seasons with the quiet assurance that the Sun of Righteousness will rise again.

V. Life and Endowment: Clothed in Glory

On the fifth day, creation teems. Waters swarm with life, and the sky fills with winged motion. The story of the Saint, too, rises into a new abundance as we approach the temple to receive the endowment.

In the holy house, we are metaphorically and literally clothed. This mirrors the fifth day, when life is no longer simply rooted to the soil but moves in currents and in the air. To be endowed is to be “clothed with power from on high” (D&C 38:32). As the creatures of Day Five receive new domains in which to move, the endowed Saint receives keys, covenants, and knowledge that open the way toward the veil.

This is schooling in a new manner of life. We are not to remain creatures of mere impulse and habit. We are invited to become initiates — students of the “mysteries of godliness.” The endowment does not mechanically alter our substance, as if holiness were a spiritual paint. It is less like being varnished and more like being apprenticed — clothed not in costume but in responsibility. It names us, instructs us, and situates us as “living souls” in God’s work.

We are called to lay down our old, accusatory, self-protective patterns and to be tutored in charity. We cover the nakedness of self-concern with the robes of the holy priesthood, and we begin to act not only as recipients of grace but as officiators in God’s presence.

VI. The Image of God: Priest and Priestess

The crescendo of this liturgy comes with covenant marriage — the union of souls that images God’s own relational life. On the sixth day, the Lord turns to His divine council and says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:26–27).

Here is the astonishing boldness of Latter-day Saint theology: the imago Dei — the Image of God — is not fully realized in solitude. The man and the woman, sealed in the new and everlasting covenant, are called to function as high priest and high priestess. They stand at the summit of creation, not as isolated monoliths but as a communion that reflects the very nature of God, proving that in heaven the highest thing is not a solitary throne, but a shared table. “Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:11).

One of the great teloi — the intended ends — of creation is precisely this: a union of souls capable of perfect love. Yet all the earlier acts — light, law, land, life — are already meaningful, already holy, because each opens another door into truthful relation with God and with others.

Still, in the covenant of exalted marriage, we move from the dependence of spiritual childhood into the interdependence of godhood. We are not only to be saved by God. We are to become like Him, together.

VII. The Sabbath: God’s Rest and Rule

At last comes the seventh day. “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested” (Genesis 2:2).

In our hurried, utilitarian age, “rest” usually means a brief pause between bouts of productivity. In the theology of the temple, it means something far weightier. In the ancient world, a deity “rested” in a temple only when chaos had been subdued and order fully established. A king rests when the enemies are defeated and he sits enthroned.

The seventh day, then, is not a divine nap. It is a coronation. It is the moment when the glory of the Lord fills the temple — the day when God stops working not because nothing is left to do, but because nothing more is needed to love.

This is the maturity of the covenant path: to enter into God’s rest — a way of being in which we cease to wage war against reality. It is not merely “heaven” as a distant neighborhood in the sky; it is a condition of the heart and a station of power. It is the peace of a conscience that no longer needs to excuse itself or accuse others.

The end of our spiritual creation is to become a living temple, fit for His indwelling, where God truly reigns. As we “grow up in the Lord” and “receive of his fulness” (see D&C 93), we enter that rest spoken of in Alma 13. We share in His glory, having been drawn from chaos into a house of order—a house of God.

The tohu vavohu of the soul is not conquered by brute force but by the relentless, organizing love of the Savior — love we finally stop resisting.

The Reenchanted View

Seen in this light, the world is reenchanted — not by superstition, but by moral meaning.

The sunrise is no longer just the rotation of a rock in space; it is a daily sermon that the Light of Christ stands ready for all who will receive it. The parting of land and sea is not only geology; it is a living parable of baptism and of the planting of the word. The union of husband and wife is not a bureaucratic contract; it is the echo of the Gods — signed not only in ink, but in tears, in laughter, and in time.

We are not accidents of chemistry, nor helpless victims of our circumstances. We are agents invited into the ongoing work of a Master Architect, stones that are asked before they are set, and pillars that consent to bear the weight. The universe is His temple. Your soul is the Holy of Holies He desires to fill.

The same God who commands the sun to rise is quietly speaking to you: “Let there be light.” He is willing to organize your chaos, to draw bright firmaments in your thinking, to gather the waters of your fears, to bring forth fruit in your barrenness, to clothe you, crown you, and seat you in His rest — if you will let His word be obeyed in you.

He is waiting for you to grow up in Him. The question that remains is disarmingly simple: Will you yield? For in the end, the only thing creation cannot be forced to organize is your heart.