Lehi’s digression, In addition to its other purposes, tells us a little more about the moral universe we find ourselves in. That moral world is intelligible by only by means of contrasts or opposites. For man to be free he must be “as God, knowing good and evil” (v. 18). A very large part of God’s “eternal purposes in the end of man” is the intent that we have joy and do good (v. 23). This would simply be impossible if we were to “know no misery” and to “know no sin.” To bring about the purposes of God in relation to human freedom “it must needs be that there was an opposition” (v.15).
Lehi points out that God built such an opposition into mortality from the very beginning. He did so both by providing a “forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life” (v. 15) and by allowing a devil to have access to us (v. 17) – a being whose intent and influence is diametrically opposed to the divine purposes for human existence. Where God wants us to do good, the adversary seeks “that which is evil before God” (v. 17). Where God’s purpose is that we “might have joy” (v. 25), Satan “had become miserable forever” and “sought also the misery of all mankind” (v. 17).
As Lehi succinctly puts it: “Wherefore the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other” (v. 16).
Our freedom to choose was no election ballot from a totalitarian state where there is only one option offered and an opportunity to just say “yea” or “nay.” For God’s type of freedom to exist there had to be viable options (at least for the short term) and persuasive advocates for those options. God structured mortality such that “men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil” (v. 5). Such instruction includes tasting the bitter and the sweet, experiencing both the joy and the blessings of obedience as well as the misery and punishments of sin. Of course we experience neither in their fullness, for both the full happiness of the saints and the full “punishment of the law” are reserved until the “great and last day” that we might in be more “free to act, and not be acted upon” (v. 26). In this way, our existence becomes a “state of probation” (v. 21) where the conditions allow us the necessary range of choice to “prove” ourselves (the root meaning of probation).
In such a universe Freedom and Consciousness are very concrete realities. So are Good and Evil and their consequences. We experience Good and Evil in relation to a standard that Lehi calls the law—“And men are instructed sufficiently that they may know good from evil. And the law is given unto men.”
In keeping with my stated determination to stay away from building Rube Goldberg machines, I’m not going to speculate about the nature of the moral law we find within ourselves. I’m just going to look at from the perspective of mortality. How do we experience the law?
I am going to use the example of Vaclav Havel, imprisoned in communist Czechoslovakia, asking himself if his principled stand for freedom had any meaning. I quote Havel here because his description of his relationship with an “ultimate” or “higher horizon” against which all of his actions are measured and judged uses vocabulary that echoes Lehi’s—
“What in fact is man responsible to? What does he relate to? What is the final horizon of his actions, the absolute vanishing point of everything he does, the undeceivable ‘memory of being,’ the conscience of the world and the final ‘court of appeal”? What is the decisive standard of measurement, the background or the field of each of his existential experiences? And likewise, what is the most important witness or the secret sharer in his daily conversations with himself, the thing that—regardless of what situation he is thrown into—he incessantly inquires after, depends upon and toward which his actions are directed, the thing that in its omniscience and its incorruptibility, both haunts him and saves him, the only thing he can trust in and strive for?”
“Ever since childhood, I have felt that I would not be myself—a human being—if I did not live in a permanent and manifold tension with this “horizon” of mine, the source of meaning and hope—and ever since my youth, I’ve never been certain whether this is an ‘experience of God’ or not. Whatever it is, I’m certainly not a proper Christian and Catholic….
“Something…that is typical of my god: he is a master of waiting, in doing so he frequently unnerves me. It is as though he set up various possibilities around me and then waited silently to see what I would do. If I fail, he punishes me, and of course he uses me as the agent of that punishment (pangs of conscience, for example); if I don’t fail, he rewards me (through my own relief and joy)—and frequently, he leaves me in uncertainty. (By the way, when my conscience bothers me, why does it bother me? And when I rejoice, why do I rejoice? Is it not again because of him?)”
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