The New Birth and Growing up in Christ   The Pearl of Great Price Lecture 07 by Hyrum Andrus
Channel: Light and Truth
Date: 21/07/2016

Hyrum L. Andrus
All rights reserved January 25-27, 1996
LECTURE - 8 PRE-EARTH LIFE
Lets move to another area. We need to say something about pre- earth life and I want to get into the subject and will take the next hour to cover it and then get back on course and get some of these other things that we need to discuss into the mill this afternoon.
The other day we indicated that The Pearl of Great Price doesn’t say anything directly about the earliest stage of life. The primal life. That life that we call intelligence, or light of truth. It doesn’t say anything about that directly. It does infer it indirectly. When you read Abraham’s vision he says, “Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was,” [Moses 3:22] And as we indicated the other day, the word intelligences is a synonym for spirits, organized spirits. The word intelligences is not directly a synonym for primal life.
He goes on to say: he, Abraham, “stood among those that were spirits.” So The Pearl of Great Price itself doesn’t say anything directly about primal life. You have to go to the Doctrine and Covenants, Section 93, in order to pick that one up. It has three basic statements and I have learned a little about one of them that I didn’t know years ago, so I’d kind of like to update some of the things in that sense.
When he talks about intelligences, they were spirits and they were the noble and great ones. Now, these intelligences were organized. This implies that they were something prior to the organization of spirits. That is the inference. It is in the Doctrine and Covenants that you have the basic statement on that and I’d like to turn to Section 93 and pick it up.
By the way, Section 93 is one of, if not the greatest revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants. Particularly when it comes to disclosing basic principles concerning God and man’s relationship to God. There are several great revelations. Sections 76 and 132 and 88 and 93, and I don’t know, it is kind of hard to say which is the greatest of them, but 93 is without peer. It is that important. It opens so many doors into a knowledge and an understanding. It is one that you should study enough so that you’ve almost memorized it. So that in your minds you can say, okay, now how does this word go in here? It has that kind importance and it is well worth your time to do that.
In verse 29, Section 93, the Lord says: “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” As you study the meaning of that term in early LDS literature, the thing I did years ago was to go through early LDS literature, everything Joseph Smith said, everything Brigham Young said, everything Orson Pratt said, everything that anyone said, who said they had heard anyone say anything.
I went through all that, through the journals and through the discourses simply with an open mind and saying, what does this mean? Then trying to get what light I could get from the Lord on the subject. The end result was something like this, you pick up the same statement, the similar correlating statement in verse 33. “For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy;” Now this is just a brief statement---man is spirit.
It doesn’t say man is A spirit. It says man IS spirit. The primal stuff in you is spirit. Then as you study this point of view, you find that the scriptures teach and the Prophet Joseph and others did, that we are living in a living universe. Every element of the universe has inherent properties of life within it. As with any inherent properties. Some to greater degrees than others. So that Lehi could say that some things are organized to act, and some things only have the capability to be organized to be acted upon.
Those with the lesser inherent properties are those that pertain to the grosser sphere of substance, that we would call gross matter. The Lord can’t start and organize life out of gross matter because the properties of life that are there, that are needed to bring that organization into being and to give it meaning and to sustain it, are just not enough to hold it together. But spirit, as a purifying substance, has within it inherent and acquired properties of life. So does gross matter, or can have at least. It has the potential to it. It has in it inherent and acquired properties of life on a high level. Somewhere near to what the Pratt’s used to say, the capability of mind of man. You are talking about a living universe. You are talking in the Doctrine and Covenants about the earth being alive. It keeps the law of its existence. You are reading meaningfully what the record in Moses says when the earth nauseated just regurgitated its feelings to the Lord Ö Get the full transcription from www.hyrumandrus.com!