What Is the Fruit which Adam and Eve Partook of in Eden?

What is the Fruit which Adam and Eve Partook of in Eden?

There were two focal point trees in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The trees are figures, the tree of life referring to the Lord and his atonement, and the tree of knowledge to mortality and all that pertains to it.* To eat of the fruit of the tree of life simply means that those who partake are receiving the blessings of the atonement. To partake of the mortality tree means that one has chosen to enter mortality and participate in the probationary experience. This is not a fruit such as an apple, pomegranate, fig, pear or other vegetation. The fruit is the reward that flows from the choice made. It was significant enough to cause death to come upon all life, including plants and animal. It also caused the earth to fall from its orbit about Kolob to its orbit around the sun. Eating an apple cannot cause this to happen. The idea that Adam and Eve ate some fruit that changed their chemistry and that they then had to go about the garden giving portions of it to every animal and insect so they would fall too is not true. *(See A New Witness for the Articles of Faith, p.86)

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What Is the Endowment?

What Is the Endowment?

If we were to give a succinct definition of the endowment we might say that it is: The announcement of the plan of exaltation, the illustration of the plan in our first parents, and the ordinances which secure the blessings of the plan to the obedient.

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Who Was the Angel at Gethsemane?

Who Was the Angel at Gethsemane?

In his last conference talk my father (most beloved) spoke on the Lord’s sacrifice for us, and said of his suffering in Gethsemane: We know that an angel came from the courts of glory to strengthen him in his ordeal, and we suppose it was mighty Michael who foremost fell that mortal man might be. (Bruce R. McConkie, April Conference, 1985; see also Mortal Messiah 4: 124)

Commenting on this, Robert J. Matthews remarked, “If this angel was Adam (and there seems to be no reason to doubt it), here was the Messiah in the Garden of Gethsemane in his greatest of all trials, shedding his blood to redeem mankind from the effects of Adam's transgression in the Garden of Eden and also from the results of each person's own sins. There appeared from heaven to strengthen him the very person of Adam himself-he who brought mortality and blood and death and sin into the world. The parallel issue is unmistakable! …. Each had fulfilled his foreordained part, and now the two principals were together as Jesus triumphed over sin and mortality.

This seems so apparent to me that it could hardly do else than strike us with the truth of father’s statement. The Prophet Joseph taught us that “Christ is the great High Priest; Adam next.” The Lord and Adam are partners in the work of salvation. Christ’s mission was predicated on Adam’s. Their paths cross at every vital juncture: in the war in heaven, in creation, in Eden, in Gethsemane, in the spirit world, at Adam ondi Ahman, in the great battles at the end of the world. The thing that electrifies us in understanding what occurred in the garden is the knowledge we gain from Joseph F. Smith’s Vision of the Redemption of the Dead. Adam or Michael is presiding over the spirits of the dead that are waiting the Lord’s entry into the spirit world upon his crucifixion. They are obviously aware of the humiliation of the trials, the payment in Gethsemane where the Lord was strengthened by Adam, and the recurrence of that suffering at Calvary, and his eminent appearance among them.

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