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Fall of Adam & Eve Quotes
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18 quotes found
“Life is assumed to be about the fundamental, clear-cut choice between good and evil. Mormonism sees no such simple dichotomy in the primeval options. Yes, obedience and safety and security in God’s presence are presented as one of the choices, But Mormonism is more sympathetic to Eve’s perception of the alternative; the beauty of the fruit, its goodness as food, its desirability ‘to make one wise.’ Not coincidentally, ancient philosophers like Plato considered the triad of ideas – Beauty, Goodness, Truth – to be the highest manifestation of divine virtue. In the Mormon narrative, therefore, the circumstances that define the reality of the human predicament are not a blatant choice between Good and Evil but a wrenching decision to be made between competing sets of Good. The philosopher Hegel believed that this scenario, replicated in myriad artistic narratives, expressed the inescapably tragic nature of the universe. There are very few simple choices. No blueprint gives us easy answers. Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love and loyalty.”
Topics: Doubt, Faith, Fall of Adam & Eve, Trials
“This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else — more ridiculously still — that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realised. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula.”
Topics: Atonement, Creation, Fall of Adam & Eve, Plan of Salvation
“It may appear strange to some of you, and it certainly does to the world, to say it is possible for a man or woman to become perfect on this earth. It is written “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Again, “If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.” This is perfectly consistent to the person who understands what perfection really is. If the first passage I have quoted is not worded to our understanding, we can alter the phraseology of the sentence, and say, “Be ye as perfect as ye can,” for that is all we can do, though it is written, be ye perfect as your Father who is in heaven is perfect. To be as perfect as we possibly can, according to our knowledge, is to be just as perfect as our Father in heaven is. He cannot be any more perfect than He knows how, any more than we. When we are doing as well as we know how in the sphere and station which we occupy here, we are justified in the justice, righteousness, mercy, and judgment that go before the Lord of heaven and earth. We are as justified as the angels who are before the throne of God. The sin that will cleave to all the posterity of Adam and Eve is, that they have not done as well as they knew how.”
Topics: Fall of Adam & Eve, Perfection
“We were born in the image of God our Father; He begat us like unto Himself. There is the nature of Deity in the composition of our spiritual organization. In our spiritual birth, our Father transmitted to us the capabilities, powers and faculties which He possessed, as much so as the child on its mother’s bosom possesses, although in an undeveloped state, the faculties, powers and susceptibilities of its parent.”
Topics: Becoming like God, Fall of Adam & Eve, Potential
“Just as a man does not really desire food until he is hungry, so he does not desire the salvation of Christ until he knows why he needs Christ. No one adequately and properly knows why he needs Christ until he understands and accepts the doctrine of the Fall and its effects upon all mankind”
Topics: Fall of Adam & Eve, Jesus Christ, Salvation
The Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.
Topics: Fall of Adam & Eve, Gospel, Grace, Nature of God, Secularism (Worldliness)
“Some men who are evidently unable to gain respect by the goodness of their lives, use as justification for their actions the statement that Eve was told that Adam should rule over her. How much sadness, how much tragedy, how much heartbreak has been caused through centuries of time by weak men who have used that as a scriptural warrant for atrocious behavior! They do not recognize that the same account indicates that Eve was given as a helpmeet to Adam. The facts are that they stood side by side in the garden. They were expelled from the garden together, and they worked together, side by side, in gaining their bread by the sweat of their brows.”
Topics: Abuse, Fall of Adam & Eve, Secularism (Worldliness)
“Under his forming hands a creature grew, Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair, That what seem’d fair in all the world, seem’d now Mean, or in her summ’d up, in her contain’d, And in her looks, which from that time infus’d Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before.”
Topics: Creation, Fall of Adam & Eve, Women
“Sin and death are not the beginning of the human saga; divine parentage and a planned destiny are. Christ’s central purpose from the beginning was not to correct an Adamic misstep, but to draw us further into a world of joyful sociality. His voluntary mission was not to take us back to an original condition, but to move us forward — from primeval wholeness (‘whole from the foundation of the world’) to a more abundant existence (‘added upon’).”
Topics: Fall of Adam & Eve, Plan of Salvation
“The simple truth is that we cannot comprehend the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ and we will not adequately appreciate the unique purpose of His birth or His death-in other words, there is no way to truly celebrate Christmas or Easter- without understanding that there was an actual Adam and Eve who fell from an actual Eden, with all the consequences that fall carried with it.”
Topics: Atonement, Easter, Fall of Adam & Eve, Resurrection
“Adam wandered alone in the glorious Garden in Eden, which he had dressed and adorned… for sin was not yet in the world. Through all this magnificence Adam wandered, lonely, unsolaced, uncompanioned, the only being of his kind in the whole world, his life unshared in a solitude of exquisite elegance, and, what was of far greater moment, his mission, as he knew it to be, impossible of fulfillment, except the Father gave him an helpmeet.”
Topics: Fall of Adam & Eve, Marriage, Women