To appreciate the first lessons in the Old Testament, understanding something about the personality of God helps us see how we fit into His work and His glory.
Perspective on God
Have you ever stopped and just thought about what motivates God to do the things He does? He doesn’t answer to a boss at work, so there isn’t anyone telling Him what to do and when to do it. He doesn’t have to worry about a paycheck, since He is the great creator and make anything He needs. He answers to no one. God is completely free to do whatever suits His fancy. So what is it? What prompts the most powerful being we know to do what He does? If you had no constraints on your time or abilities, what might you do with yourself? Where would you direct your energies?
Our Father in Heaven has answered these questions in the scriptures. Since no one gives God His marching orders, and He is free to choose to do anything He wants, it is comforting to receive God’s priorities from the Savior himself. In Moses 1:37-39 we are told by Christ what the Father’s agenda for a life that is eternal consists of.
37 And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying: The , they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.
38 And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no to my works, neither to my words.
Our earth is just one in a long line of creations and passages. Even as God creates new worlds, old worlds are passing away and being replaced. I remember reading about this very thing in Psalms somewhere. It talks about worlds waxing old like garments and being replaced with new ones. These worlds aren’t being created just because God is bored and has nothing to do. He is fixed with a purpose, and the effort it takes to create entire galaxies to accomplish that purpose is not too great of a work to tackle.
39 For behold, this is my and my —to bring to pass the and of man.
And who is the “man” he is referring to in verse 39? It is us. We only know of this one planet in the universe to have people living and breathing, but there are many others, all with God’s children on them. For all of His children His purpose is the same, to bring about their immortality and exaltation. Let’s make something clear here, we are already immortal. We are as immortal as God ever was, for we have always existed, and always will. The immortality this verse is talking about is as a resurrected being, i.e. a person with a physical body.
Our most native state of which we are aware was as an Intelligence. We know nothing about what that means, other than that it was as an eternal life as a being that couldn’t progress very far in that state. It is God who took us and clothed our immortal selves with a spirit body, making the spirit eternal too. But godhood cannot be achieved in its fulness as just spirits, so God helped us progress as far as we could go as spirits then offered us an opportunity to receive a temporary physical body wherein we could be tried and tested to see if having the opportunity to become gods in the future was really what we were willing to work for. If not, no problem, we had proven ourselves faithful thus far, and God promised that if we remained faithful in what we call our first estate, with the help of a Messiah, or Christ, we would be guaranteed to gain a resurrected physical body that would never die at the end of our second estate. Earth life is our second estate. (The doctrine for this paragraph comes from Abraham 3:26.) The resurrected body is the highest form of existence we know about, and people can be resurrected into bodies that have particular capacities. Those who prove themselves faithful to God’s commandments can have the highest form of resurrection, a celestial body. These bodies are capable of progressing in glory and majesty for eternity, and can have and raise families of their own, just like God has done.
This is the basis for the whole plan of salvation, the Great Plan of Happiness our Father in Heaven has provided for us. The whole of our universe has been designed to support this work of His to glorify His children and give them eternal life – immortality – as resurrected beings. This is the highest form of happiness He can provide for us. Everything in the gospel Christ has taught us is with this in mind. This aim to glorify and exalt us is the why for everything God does and has done in the past. This doesn’t mean we can easily explain the hows and whys of all that has happened in mortality. While here our perspective of eternal things is severely limited, for we come to earth with a veil over our memory of all that has come before. This is God wiping the slate clean so we are free to choose between good and evil without any native bias to hinder our freedom to choose. At some point in the future we’ll get our memories back again. And with the restoration of our perspective, our eternal perspective, we’ll understand more fully all the whys and hows of our current mortal happenings. Patience. We need patience.
Pulling the manual and scriptures together
The manual talks about our need to consider our divine destiny, how we can resist Satan, and our need to consider not just mortality, but where we came from before we came here. The scriptures and the commentary I have provided for week 02 of 2026 uses the same basic set of scriptures the manual is based on. All of it is talking about the same thing, just from different angles.
We need to learn to think of and see our existence from a much broader perspective. We are not the simple beings we have been raised to see ourselves as being. We are children that come from the family of God, the most powerful being in the universe. He loves us with a perfect love, and He wants us to become like Him. When we say that God has spared no expense or effort to achieve His work and glory, it can only be seen as a gross understatement. God has literally moved heaven and earth to give us every opportunity for us to become like Him. He is not an absentee Father. He is intimately involved in all that happens with us during our mortal sojourn. All that the Savior did in his mortal ministry was to demonstrate to us the character of our Father in Heaven. All that Jesus now does continues to show us how much God loves us and wants us to succeed. It was God who gave us a Savior in the first place. His mercy and love are without bounds.
As you read and study this week’s Come, Follow Me lessons, consider how the commentary, the scriptures, and the manual all work together to show us God’s everlasting love for His everlasting children.
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