Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:00:03             I’m really goal oriented. I work really hard. I’m high achieving. I could see. All of a sudden it was like, I do it because I’m just trying to somehow match up. I’m trying to be enough. I’m trying to not let people down. I was having this day where I was, I was praying and sort of meditating and I was like, I’m never enough. No matter what I do, I am never enough and I can’t do it anymore. There are words that came into my mind that said …

Hank Smith:                      00:00:31             Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. In the beginning was my co-host, John Bytheway. John, I don’t know if you recognize those few words. They’re from Genesis chapter one, verse one. In the beginning. I know you’re not that old though.

John Bytheway:               00:00:51             I thought it was a baseball reference in the big inning, because I used to play Little League Baseball.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:56             All right. I’m just gonna tell everyone right now. Do not turn this off, I promise. Those jokes are few and far between. John, we are honored today to have with us Dr. Rebekah Call. Dr. Call, thank you for being here.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:01:09             I am very happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:12             Talk about being on call. John, we are talking Genesis, the Creation. Genesis one and two, also some chapters in Moses and Abraham. What comes to mind? We did this four years ago.

John Bytheway:               00:01:24             A couple of things. First of all, don’t look at the Creation accounts as the scientific explanation for things. It’s probably trying to teach something else. The thing that I love about this and the thing I love about having Dr. Call on today is what our theology does for Eve. That’s what I’m so excited about.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:45             Changes everything. What have we heard before? The Book of Mormon sets the record straight on Eve. Dr. Call, as you’ve been preparing for today, and we know that you have not just been preparing for this, but you’ve been studying Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible for a long time. What are we gonna do today? What are you looking forward to?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:02:03             Well, we have some things that I’m very excited to talk about today. The first thing I wanna talk about is ways that we can approach the scriptures that help us get more out of them. I’ll actually touch a little bit on what John just said. We take the Creation not necessarily as scientific record, but what are other ways that we can approach the texts that help us really learn from it and really be fed spiritually by the text without necessarily having to align it to science or other things? That’s the first thing I’d like to do. The second thing, I would like to talk a little bit about the Fall, what we understand about the Fall and take a little bit of a different perspective on it and how that really centers Christ in the Fall. The third thing is I would like to look at Eve, look at the woman in the garden and some potential new translations of helpmeet and how that helps us understand Eve and women at large a little bit better because in a lot of ways, certainly we get this when we go to the temple. Since we get to see ourselves as Adam and Eve, Eve becomes this prototype. The model by which we get to understand women and Adam becomes the model by which we get to understand men. It’s one of the reasons it’s really important that we understand the Creation and garden accounts because it does have so many echoes in how we see ourselves and our relationship to God and our relationship to each other.

Hank Smith:                      00:03:27             I’m already looking forward to this. I was before we started. I like what you said there, both of you. We don’t have to compare the Creation account that’s given to us through what science understands. Genesis, because it’s apples and oranges, they’re not remotely the same thing. I think science can help us understand how the earth was created, but this is why. Why was the earth created? Probably, Rebekah, I’m guessing you can help us understand the setting in which the book is written, because that’s gonna make a difference. What are their neighbors saying? What is Egypt saying about creation? What is Babylon saying about creation? And does that impact how this story is told? Dr. Call comes highly recommended from many of my friends. Well, when I say many, I mean many. I could say 40 because 40 in the Bible is many, yeah, multitude. But our audience might not know a lot about Rebekah Call. This bio, this one might be a little long. Yeah. I don’t know how we’re gonna cut this back. How many different languages should we do it in? All right, John, what do we have?

John Bytheway:               00:04:26             Yeah. Rebekah Call was born and raised in Southeast Idaho, received a bachelor’s degree from BYU in English linguistics, a master’s in the Bible and ancient Near East from Whitefaret Hank, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Of course. That’s a name that’s gonna come up in the scriptures. And a PhD in religious studies from Claremont Graduate University. Right now, Rebekah teaches history and religious studies at Utah State University. Jerusalem, you studied about Jerusalem in Jerusalem and you speak Hebrew.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:05:06             Yes. It was a pretty incredible experience. I have to say, being in the land where things happened really changed the way that I read the scriptures, because all of a sudden when I read about Jesus and the sermon on the mount, it wasn’t some sort of setting that I’m making up in my mind for how it could have happened and what it might have looked like. I’m seeing, in my mind, Mount Arbell, which looks right over the sea of Galilee. Another example is when it says, oh, Christ, he walked from Nazareth down to Jerusalem. When you think, okay, he walked. It was a while. But when you’re there and you get into the Judain Hills and everything is just up and down and up and down, I mean, Jesus was in shape. He’s walking miles and miles of hills. He lived in mountainous terrain. It’s not necessarily that it changes what principles I can learn from the text. You don’t need to go to the Holy Land in order to get a testimony of Christ. It enriched so much. Getting to study these things and then go visit the dig or the sight where it happened and going to the Western Wall and seeing the archeological park by the temple. It just so much enriched my own understanding and visualization of the scriptures.

Hank Smith:                      00:06:15             Wow. That sounds wonderful. Rebekah, you’ll love this story then. About a year ago, I was there with a group. An actual Sea of Galilee storm hit right when I was there. Pulled trees down. I took video for John saying, this is actually happening.

John Bytheway:               00:06:33             Look at this. Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:06:35             Look at this happening. Now, you’re right. You don’t have to go there to have a testimony of Jesus. There’s something about seeing it. If you can see it, it ought to count for something. Rebekah, I’ve heard from many friends that you can converse in quite a few languages. If you don’t mind, tell our listeners what could you speak if you had to, or what could you, what could you try to speak? What could you read?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:07:01             I speak modern Hebrew and I also read biblical Hebrew. I speak German and I can get around in French. I will admit my French is not as strong as my German. My mission language was Cantonese. When I came home from my mission, I learned some Mandarin. So Mandarin’s another language that it’s not great, but I can get around. I’m currently working to learn Spanish much more intensively. It’s a language I can get around in, but it might not be pretty. I’d say those are probably my stronger languages. And then I do have some reading. I’ll need a grammar and a dictionary, but I can slowly translate Acadian, some Greek and some Latin.

Hank Smith:                      00:07:36             Of course. Wow. Rebekah, why don’t you tell us why you’re learning Spanish? Is that an important thing to you lately?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:07:42             It is an important thing to me. I’m getting married, I’m engaged, and my fiance is half Panamanian. Half of my new family connections are Spanish speakers, and it’s really important to me to be able to communicate with them. I wanna have good relationships with them. If someday we’re blessed with children, I would want them also to be bilingual because that’s part of their heritage.

Hank Smith:                      00:08:04             You could say on Mondays we do Cantonese. On Tuesdays, we do Spanish. On Wednesdays we do… Friday…

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:08:09             Every day a new language.

Hank Smith:                      00:08:10             Yeah. That’s wonderful. Should we talk about the Creation? The Come, Follow Me Manual starts this way. “Because the world around us is so beautiful and majestic, it’s hard to imagine the earth when it was without form and void and empty and desolate. One thing the Creation story teaches us is that God can, over time, make something magnificent out of something unorganized. That’s helpful to remember when life seems chaotic. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are creators, and their creative work with us is not finished. They can make light shine in dark moments in our lives. They can fill our emptiness with life. They can transform us into the divine beings we were meant to be. That’s what it means to be created in God’s image after His likeness. We have the potential to become like Him, exalted, glorified, heavenly.” What a wonderful way to start. With that, Rebekah, where do you want to go? We have three books of scripture today, Genesis, Moses and Abraham.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:09:09             Before we jump into the text, I actually want to digress just a little bit. When you’re reading the Come, Follow Me introduction, it talked about God creating. We talk about God creating the world, but I think also each of us is in the middle of Creation right now. My life is in process of being creative. I’m living my life as I’m going and if I’m choosing to live that with God, then God also gets to be creating in my life. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the creative process is messy. Go to any pottery studio, go watch a painter, or go watch the construction of a building. The process of Creation is inherently messy. A lot of times in my life, when I’m like, man, I feel like my life is really a mess right now. I’m not holding things together and this fell through the cracks. I made this mistake. I think it can be helpful to remember that God created the world, and that was a messy process, and look what we have. Look at the beauty that has been given to us in this world. Sometimes the messiest moments aren’t because something is wrong. It’s because Creation is happening. It needs to be messy. There needs to be stuff added in and stuff taken away and stuff trimmed and shaped, and that’s really beautiful. However messy our lives are, we’re in the middle of Creation.

John Bytheway:               00:10:27             Everything is in process. I feel like my boys were sent to earth to enforce the second law of thermodynamics or entropy that things go from order to disorder. Yeah. And they were sent specifically to enforce that.

Hank Smith:                      00:10:43             I’ve occasionally walked into my son’s room and said, here is matter unorganized.

John Bytheway:               00:10:48              Exactly.

Hank Smith:                      00:10:50             Rebekah, this is wonderful. If I’m sitting at home, I can think it’s okay that my life, my house, my apartment, it’s okay that it’s messy.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:10:58             Yeah. It’s more than okay. That’s the plan. There’s one of the lines in the temple that I really love where, Adam and Eve partake of the fruit and the Fall happens, then they will get to go learn by experience to know the good from the evil. But that’s the whole point, that we get to be here. We have the privilege to be here to learn by experience. And if I look back in my life, when I have experiences that teach me good from evil, that almost always means I made a mistake, that something got messy. Those are my most valuable learning experiences because that’s how my own moral awareness can be expanded, that I can see, I can have a greater perspective, a greater view that hopefully is slowly, slowly, slowly transforming to become more like God’s view. The plan is that things get messy because guess what? We have the greatest cleanup squad of eternity on our side.

John Bytheway:               00:12:03             I love the line in Moses 6:55, and they taste the bitter that they might know to prize the good. That’s experience. And I’m grateful that line is there.

Hank Smith:                      00:12:15             Here’s another line, John. Alma 42:17, Alma to his son. How could we repent unless we sin? We came here to repent. Rebekah, we are off to a fun start. Keep going.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:12:27             Repenting really is anything that brings us closer to God. Repenting is when I forgive someone, and repenting is when I take a moment in my prayers to actually have this moment of connection where I feel a connection with God, and repenting is when I pay attention when I read my scriptures, and repenting is when I go to church and when I minister. And that’s all repenting because it’s bringing me closer to Christ. When Alma, how could we repent except we sin? That is actually this gift that we’re allowed to make mistakes, that we sin. In order to help us see, I am not as close to God as I want to be, so then we can engage with Christ, so Christ helps us change who we are.

Hank Smith:                      00:13:04             Yeah. That’s wonderful. It helps you breathe easy that yes, you and your children and your grandchildren are going to make a lot of mistakes, and it’s all part of the plan.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:13:17             It’s all part of the plan. To begin with, one of the things I’d like to talk about are the ways that we can approach the texts that help us get more from our scripture study. A lot of times we look at scriptures and the answers we get or the interpretations we get might be very different at different times in our lives or in different situations. That doesn’t mean that other interpretations are invalid or that they’re wrong or they’re not things we can learn from them. It just means that’s not necessarily where we’re standing. Some of the interpretations that I’m going to play around with here, I am not saying that these are the be all end all interpretations, and sometimes interpretations will appear to contradict. The reason why I bring this up is because we have multiple accounts of the Creation, and actually, they don’t all agree.

                                           00:14:02             Sometimes they flat out contradict each other. Genesis says some things, and Moses says some things, and Abraham says some other things, then if you go to the temple, the temple says some other things. They’re not the same. I actually think, and this is my opinion, that when we say, Okay, well, this one must be the standard, and here’s how Genesis is wrong, and throw away some of those differences, we actually miss out on things we can learn from. Tying in with what John said before, I am not sure that we should always be taking the text literally. I think especially the Creation account has so much to teach us allegorically. When we have three or four different ways of telling a story, maybe there are three or 400 different ways we can understand each of these stories, and they might have each different gems of wisdom to give us, and that we don’t have to make them harmonize perfectly.

                                           00:14:54             I actually find this to be really beautiful because we read in the scriptures that God speaks unto humans, unto man according to their own understanding. I love that God has multiple ways of saying things and multiple ways that we can interpret. Wherever I am, God has a way to reach me. God has infinite numbers of children who each have a unique experience and a unique perspective. Then that means God needs infinite numbers of ways to reach people. I don’t see having differing or even contradicting interpretations as being bad. It just means that’s another way that God can reach people.

Hank Smith:                      00:15:31             Wonderful. And apparently he wants us to know this story.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:15:36             Apparently he really does because we have it over and over.

Hank Smith:                      00:15:38             Over and over again.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:15:40             An experience I had that I think illustrates this point. I remember sitting in, this was several years ago, I was sitting in a Sunday school class. It was during a Book of Mormon year, and we were reading about Lehi and his sons. There was one person who stood up in class and said, I love reading about Lehi’s parenting and what he did with his children and how he went and he spoke to them and exhorted them like with all the feeling of a tender parent and just help me do this with my children. Really beautiful testimony. And then this other sister said, You know, I was reading the story of Lehi. I read about what he was saying to Laman and Lemuel and I just thought, gosh, it seems like Lehi is constantly harping on them and he’s constantly criticizing them and he’s constantly picking on them. And I could kind of feel most of the class going, we shouldn’t talk about Lehi that way. But then this sister got to her point and she said, And as I was reading, I realized I’m picking on my teenagers all the time and that’s why my relationship with them is not what I want it to be.

                                           00:16:32             They don’t want to talk to me because they feel like I’m always harping on them. In that moment, I thought, Okay, actually, the point is not was Lehi a perfect or not parent and can we pick apart his parentings? That’s not actually the point. The point is that two different people read the same text and two different people got exactly what they needed from it. There are so many ways that we can read the text and that we can learn from it exactly where we are.

Hank Smith:                      00:16:58             That’s wonderful. As I teach the Bible, Rebekah, I’ll have students who raise their hand and ask if they should take something literally or figuratively. We talk about the balance there. Here is the Creation account, these seven creative periods, a garden, tree, fruit. Should I take that literally or figuratively? And I like what you’re saying here, which is there’s maybe not a correct way to take it, there’s perspectives that you can take. And of course, we wanna be informed. Someone who speaks Hebrew can help us be a little more informed.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:17:33             Yes. We can recognize that there are different perspectives and that my perspective, because I grew up in a certain place and a time speaking a certain language, in a certain religious tradition, in a certain culture, that will influence my perspective, and some of that is inherent. Each person is going to have their own perspective. Some people’s perspectives might be more similar than others. But I also think that we can learn to try on new perspectives because we can get more from the text. It can be dangerous, and this is really to your point, Hank, that maybe not everyone does this. I know at times in my life I have, there can be the temptation to have this sort of either or. One has to be right and one has to be wrong. And I think we miss out when we do that. Instead of saying, This one has to be right and this one has to be wrong, we can say, Okay, well, what can I learn from this one? What can I learn from this one? What can I learn from this third one or this fourth one? Because they might not all say the same thing. And maybe the interpretation won’t hold up in every aspect of the story, but you can look at it and get a gem from this portion.

Hank Smith:                      00:18:34             Henry J. Eyring and Joseph Fielding Smith wrote back and forth about the age of the earth. It is so funny because they were friends. They disagreed on the age of the earth. Finally, they’re talking in Elder Smith’s office and he says, We talked for about an hour. This is Henry Eyring. He explained his views to me. I said, Brother Smith, I have read your books and know your point of view, and I understand that is how it looks to you. It looks a little different to me. He said as we ended, Well, Brother Eyring, I would like to have you come and let me talk with you sometime when you are not quite so excited. And then later on, he says, is he a prophet? Yes. I just happened to disagree with him about the age of the earth.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:19:20             As we’re talking about scripture and how scriptures might actually say really different things, sometimes when we read scriptures, scriptures might even appear to say different doctrinal statements that might not align, that might not always harmonize well with doctrinal statements elsewhere in the scriptures. So what do we do with that? At times, I’ve had the sort of reflex to just say, well, and try to explain away the differences. Where I am now is I don’t try to explain away the differences. I just let them be different from each other. As a scholar, I do religious studies, which is the academic study of religion itself, how religions change and develop and social factors and economic and political factors. One of the things any religion you study that is a constant in religions is that they change. Even a Latter-day Saint, a member of the church today, if they were to be transplanted, they’d time travel back to the time of Joseph Smith. Even though we’ve studied that history, it would be very foreign in a lot of ways.

                                           00:20:20             There are elements that would be completely different from our current worldview and the way that they’re understanding the text because it was a different time and a different culture. Religious change happens and it’s necessary because cultures and languages change. It’s a testament to us because we believe that we have a relationship with a living deity who has a church that is a living organization. We call this the true and living church. So it’s living, it needs to grow and it needs to develop. Seeing that as we read scriptures that sometimes they say different things, they don’t always harmonize to me just says, okay, people are receiving revelation for their time and their day. There’s small changes that build on each other, and that’s why if we were to be transplanted to the time of Joseph Smith or transplanted to the time of Christ, we would see things happening that we go, I don’t recognize this.

                                           00:21:11             Is this the same religion? Yes, it’s the same religion in the same way that I can show a baby picture of me at six months, and it looks quite different from me now because I am living and growing and changing, and religions also need to live and grow and change. So we see that in our scriptures that we have these books, the Bible is a compilation of books written over centuries from people who are speaking different languages and different cultures and different locations, we should expect that they’re going to say different things.

Hank Smith:                      00:21:42             The Bible is not univocal. Many different people, many different times and places, there are going to be contradictions that’s very healthy. Try to learn why that author said that thing and why this author said this thing. I love it. It’s an exegetical way of reading the scriptures, let the texts say what it says.

John Bytheway:               00:22:02             We have the Book of Mormon mentioning everlasting punishment. Then we have the Doctrine & Covenants coming out and saying, I didn’t say that punishment would have no end. I said it was endless punishment because endless is my name and there’s further light and knowledge in the Doctrine of Covenants than I think the prophets had in the Book of Mormon, and I gotta be okay with that.

Hank Smith:                      00:22:23             Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, John, Keith Erekson was with us, Dr. Erekson, and he said that Wilford Woodruff stood up and said something that kind of contradicted Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. He said, yes, it does contradict them because we now know more. We know more than we did then. It will continue to be that way because we’re getting this further light and knowledge. Rebekah, we are having a lot of fun so far.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:22:50             Let’s keep going. So now, let’s go ahead and start talking about the text itself. One of the perspectives I would like to explore is reframing how we’re understanding the Creation and Fall narrative as a whole. As I read the Creation account, it occurs to me, first of all, that the Fall was inevitable. No matter what, the Fall was going to happen. That was according to God’s plan. What would have happened if Adam and Eve never ate the fruit and they would have just been stuck in the Garden of Eden? I mean, we find this in second Nephi. There would have been no progression, there would have been no children, they wouldn’t have had knowledge. Yeah, they could have just stayed there forever, which to me kind of looks like a problem in the plan.

Hank Smith:                      00:23:35             Yeah.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:23:35             But if God’s like, Okay, you got your choice. And then is he just sitting in the back going like, please, please.

Hank Smith:                      00:23:40             When are they? Yeah.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:23:42             With that as the background, I’m going to pull out some elements of the account that show how I really think that it was a fail-safe plan. The story itself illustrates a fail-safe plan for human development. In order to do this, let’s talk a little bit about liminal spaces.

Hank Smith:                      00:23:59             Okay.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:24:01             A liminal space, liminal comes from the Latin meaning threshold. It’s an in between place. If I’m standing on the threshold of the door, I’m neither in the room nor out of the room. I’m in between. A liminal space is any place that’s in between. So for instance, the birth canal, that baby is neither a fetus nor an infant yet, it’s in between, it’s being born. Or in Hispanic culture, there the quinceanera. When a girl turns 15, there’s this week long celebration and at the beginning of the week she’s a child, and at the end of the week, she’s a woman. In between, she’s kind of neither. It’s this in between time. Temples are really liminal spaces. They’re in between. They’re this place where the sacred, the divine, gets to come meet the profane, the earthly, the human, and it’s this meeting place where they’re not in heaven, but they’re not quite earthly either.

                                           00:24:52             They’ve been consecrated, they’ve been separated, dedicated to be different from the rest of the land around them. They are liminal spaces where we get to go in and have this sort of transference of power because it’s another thing we find in liminal spaces. There’s usually some sort of process that happens where the person upon exiting the liminal space is different somehow. They’ve been imbued or endowed, shall we say, with certain powers or knowledge or responsibility in order to go and fill a new function upon leaving. As I describe this, you’re like, oh yeah, that’s exactly what we do in our temples, except this is used academically to describe other liminal spaces in time. These are patterns that we see. The Garden of Eden functions as a liminal space. Now, a few of the characteristics of liminal spaces are that non-liminal beings or entities are not meant to stay in the liminal space forever.

                                           00:25:51             God’s permanent residence is heaven. He comes to temples, but God doesn’t stay in temples forever. He’s not just hanging out in an easy chair in the celestial room. Humans are also not meant, we go to the temple but then we are always meant to exit back into our own life, having gained more power and to live that life. We’re not meant to just live our whole life in the temple. Liminal spaces are, first of all, always meant to be temporary. Second of all, liminal spaces have very, very clearly defined boundaries, distinctions. For instance, if we look at the Solomonic temple, Solomon’s temple that he built, you have the outer court, you have the holy place, which is a court that’s surrounded by the outer court, and then in the very center, you have the Holy of Holies, and these are different degrees of holiness.

                                           00:26:37             You don’t accidentally go from the outer court into the Holy Place or from the Holy Place into the Holy of Holies. It’s so well defined, you know when you’re in the Holy of Holies versus the Holy Place. With this very clear definition, these demarcations, the marking of boundaries, we find, starting from the very beginning of Genesis one, actually we find the same thing in Moses and in Abraham. The first thing God starts doing, he says, Let there be light, and then he separates. He makes boundaries between the light and darkness. He separates the light from the darkness. He separates the seas from the dry land. He separates, he makes heavenly bodies and then separates the days and the seasons and the day from night and seasons and months and years. He separates the different types of plant life into categories. He separates the different type of animals into categories.

                                           00:27:30             He is making demarcations. When God creates the humans, there’s a couple interesting things that happen. If we look in Genesis chapter one, verses 26 and 28, especially verse 27, I’ll read this. It says, And God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. The word it says for man, it gets translated as man in the King James, but this Hebrew word is Adam and literally just means human or humanity. It’s a singular word. This is the word that later on becomes the name Adam. But in Genesis one through three, it’s never used as a name, it’s always, so when it says Adam, in Hebrew, it’s literally the human. So it’s that God said, Let us make human or humanity in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the foul of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. God created the human in his own image.

                                           00:28:30             In the image of God, he created he, and then the word here that gets translated him is just a prenominal suffix that refers to either him or it. So he created the human. Male and female, he created them. There are especially Jewish theologians who read these verses and they say, Okay, hang on a second. Is this saying God created a man or is it saying God created humanity male and female or is it saying God created, and here’s where there’s some Jewish scholars, He took male and female and put them in one being. If allegorically we look at this imagery, you have two entities, male and female in one being. Then in chapter two, when the woman is separated, they’re separated out into two flesh. And the first thing that the human, the Adam, Adam, says is, This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

                                           00:29:24             This is why a man needs to leave his parents and cleave to his woman so they can be one. Because what it’s saying is, We were one and now we’re separated into two and we need to be one again. I’m not saying this is the only way to read the text. I think there are things we can learn from the text about unity and how we treat each other. So you have a liminal being that means it could belong indefinitely in the Garden of Eden. God starts forcing. No, you don’t get to be liminal. What that means is you need to be able to make your own distinctions. You have to have moral awareness to make distinctions, then you cease to become liminal, at which point you do not belong in the the garden. If we jumped to chapter two, it says the Lord God created the human and in verse 16, puts him in the garden and it says, “And the Lord God commanded the human saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it. From the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”

                                           00:30:21             We often talk about how Adam and Eve were told to not eat the fruit of the tree and they were also told to multiply and replenish the earth and so we have the contradiction. I’m not sure that it can be seen as a contradiction. I don’t know that it’s always overt because they’re commanded to multiply and replenish the earth back in chapter one. It’s never mentioned in chapter two, which is where they’re commanded not to eat of the tree, fruit of the tree. And if Adam and Eve are really innocent, do they understand that the two are not mutually compatible? I don’t know. However, in the Hebrew in chapter two, there is a contradicting command that does not come through in translation. I’m going to retranslate chapter two verse 16, and the Lord God, or Jehovah Elohim, commanded upon the man saying, You will definitely eat from every tree of the garden, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, do not eat of it for on the day you eat of it, you will definitely die. It’s introduced by saying, This is what God commanded, you will eat of every tree. That is an inherent contradiction because if you tell someone you must eat of every tree and don’t eat of that tree, you can either eat of every tree which includes that one tree or you cannot eat of that tree, in which case you’re not eating of every tree.

                                           00:31:39             If you give a person a conflicting command, a person who has potential for reasoning, for reasoning thought, eventually that person is going to realize there’s such thing as choices, there’s such thing as consequences, not all choices are made equal, and I need to choose. And the moment they realize this contradiction, you have the birth of moral awareness. The fruit of the tree is just sort of the thing that … It’s a launchpad, but regardless, the plan happens. The second thing is, in verse 18, Lord God says it’s not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helpmeet for him. And then he doesn’t separate them into the two humans. Instead, he says, Okay, great. Here are all the animals and you need to name them all. I don’t think this is Adam going around and being like, Okay, you’re Rover and you’re Fluffy and you’re Bessie. This is the human looking and saying, Okay, what makes a tiger different from a lion, different from a leopard?

                                           00:32:39             What makes those different from cows and goats and sheep and what makes all of those different from me? You have this birth of the awareness of self, you have the awareness of others, you have the awareness of category. Then, God separates into the two beings. If we look at it this way, the plan is fail safe. The plan always was that the humans leave the garden and go make messes in this world we made for them to make messes. What I love about this reading is that that means, if it was like inevitable, they leave the garden, that means Jesus is always plan A. It wasn’t, well, in case they make a mistake, we got a Redeemer. It’s like, no, no, no. We’ve got a Redeemer ready to go. We have to make sure they can get into the position that they can go learn through experience to know the good from the evil and have messy mortal experiences because that’s what we do.

                                           00:33:34             We make mistakes and then we can learn. We have to make sure that that actually happens. Again, I am not saying this is the only way to read the text. I’m saying it is a fruitful way because it can help us learn things about the Savior, it can help us learn things about choice and accountability, can help us learn things about moral awareness, which is I think is exactly what this text is written to do. One of the things that becomes really interesting is that there’s this question, if no matter what they’re leaving the garden, then what is the serpent doing? The serpent’s trying to get them to eat the fruit of the tree. And I don’t think actually the serpent necessarily cares about the fruit of the tree, because if we read what the serpent’s saying, that suddenly the serpent is functioning in a different role.

                                           00:34:17             I’ll read partially King James and I’ll retranslate a little bit. This is Genesis chapter three, verse one. Now, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field, which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? Now, I wanna retranslate the last part of this verse because in English it’s sort of this very neutral question, you know, did, did, did, did God say this? In Hebrew, there’s this particle “ha”, which is this sort of intensifying question particle. What it does in the Hebrew, it says, and he said unto the woman, Did God really say you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? So that’s the first thing. The second thing that the serpent says, if we jump to verses four and five, the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die. Because for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes should be opened and ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil. What he said is true.

                                           00:35:15             The moment you make a choice, you’re gonna gain moral awareness and you’re gonna know good and evil. But what’s the effect of the serpent’s words? Everything the serpent says is designed to sow mistrust. The serpent puts a breach. He breaches the trust between the humans and God. Also, the effect of this is that he breaches the trust between humans. So you have this unity, again, you have like the man and woman being one and then separated and they’re meant to be one again. You have humans who are one with God and separated from God and we need to be one with God again. And then what does Satan get? What is the serpent doing here? The serpent is making it so that there is less unity. The problem of the Fall is not that we sin. It’s not that we make mistakes. That’s part of the plan.

                                           00:36:00             It’s a part of life that we sin and make mistakes and that we have suffering and sickness and death, but that’s actually the plan. So it’s not really the problem. What is the problem of the Fall? It’s separation. It’s disunity. It is contention. If we go to 3 Nephi 11, that’s the doctrine of the devil is contention, is disunity. What is the first big sin? That there is so much disunity between brothers that one brother kills the other. If we go to 3 Nephi 11, where Christ says, and again, this is gonna be a little bit different reading from the way it’s often read. Christ says, I will tell you my doctrine, and this is the doctrine which the Father has given me. I used to always read this and be like, Oh yeah, the doctrine’s baptism. But actually, he says, This is the doctrine the Father has given me.

                                           00:36:42              And he says, I testify of the Father or I bear record of the Father, the Father bears record of me, the Holy Ghost bears record of Father in me. That’s the first thing. Christ says, This is my doctrine. The doctrine is we’re unified. Then he says, he talks about baptism. And what is baptism? Baptism is when we make a covenant so we can have the gift of the Holy Ghost, which is a member of the Godhead to dwell in us to help us be unified to God. What Satan is doing, what the serpent is doing in Genesis three is sowing disunity. One other scripture jump I’m gonna make, if we go to Ether chapter three, where the brother of Jared, he has the 16 stones, he asks Christ to touch them, Christ touches them, and he sees the spiritual finger of Christ and he says, How can this thing be?

                                           00:37:28             I didn’t know you had a body. Show yourself to me. Then in chapter three, Ether chapter three, verse 11, “the Lord said unto him, believest thou the words which I shall speak? He answered, Yea Lord. I know that thou speaketh the truth, for thou art a God of truth and canst not lie.” I know you’re honest and I will believe, I trust everything you’ll say. “And then when he had said these words, the Lord showed himself unto him and said, Because thou knowest these things, ye are redeemed from the Fall.” Because you fully trust me, you are redeemed from the Fall. I think it’s possible to read the whole Fall narrative as there’s a whole bunch of negative things that we view as being really negative, sickness and death and suffering that are actually necessary. They’re not the problem of the Fall. The problem of the Fall is that we’re no longer unified with God and we’re no longer unified with each other.

Hank Smith:                      00:38:19             I love it.

John Bytheway:               00:38:21             What is the thing that will bring us back to unity or at one? It is the atonement. What does Jesus pray for in his intercessory prayer? That they may be one as we are one. So I really like that perspective.

Hank Smith:                      00:38:38             Rebekah, what if I were to give an example like this? Let’s say I say to my daughter, Madelynn, when she’s a little girl, Madelynn, I want you to go out and live your dreams, but don’t cross the street. Eventually, she’s gonna have to say, Hey, if I really wanna live my dreams, I’m gonna have to cross this street. It has to happen. You wouldn’t expect her to be 60 saying, well, dad, I wanna live my dreams, but you said not to cross the street. As she is working through this, here comes the adversary who says, you can’t trust him. Right? And now she’s questioning whether she can trust me or not, but he didn’t cause her to Fall. He sowed all this distance between me and my daughter. She eventually would’ve come to this inevitably on her own.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:39:33             That’s a great analogy because if your three or four-year-old daughter does not trust you, then horrible, horrible things can be consequences of that. Look at any portion nearly of recorded human history. We can see the tragedy that comes from people not being unified. Firstly, the first priority is to be unified with God and second to be unified with each other. Look at wars, look at suffering, look at starvation, because people aren’t trusting God enough to say, you know what? I’m gonna trust enough to share this with my neighbor. I’m gonna trust God enough to give up my selfish desires for power and ambition. I’m going to trust God enough, whatever the answer is, right? There are a lot of different ways this can play out. So much of the human caused suffering in the world. This is not necessarily disease and old age and death and these sorts of things, but a lot of the human caused suffering would be remedied.

                                           00:40:33             If people could, as Joseph Smith says, have a correct understanding of the nature and characteristics of God, then to be unified with that type of God, because we can make an image of God and then be unified with it and that’s not necessarily gonna solve our problems. But when we understand God, Christ as being this person who is so committed, so committed to unity, so committed to growth and development and second chances that he literally died for it, that’s the kind of God you can become unified with that then transforms you into being the kind of person who is willing to extend that grace to other people.

Hank Smith:                      00:41:16             Look at the adversary inserting himself into the equation. I’m having this relationship with God and he wants to derail that relationship.

John Bytheway:               00:41:26             I can think of another Book of Mormon example if you want one. I asked my students, okay, so Jesus appears. 2,500 people gain an incredible personal witness of Christ. What happens to community when there’s 2,500 with that kind of a witness? The answer is 4 Nephi happened.

Hank Smith:                      00:41:50             4 Nephi. At least the first half right?

John Bytheway:               00:41:53             It’s the contention thing. Mormon’s explaining it going, he says four times, there was no contention. And then he goes on and maybe people are thinking, well, maybe they didn’t have in-laws back then. He says, No, they were married and given in marriage and there was no contention as if to preempt our question because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:42:15             And it was such a lasting impression, such a lasting impression that even though Christ only came to that first generation, it was multiple generations, a couple hundred years before this effect wears off. That’s how powerful Christ is. That’s his transformative power.

Hank Smith:                      00:42:32             Rebekah, go with me in another area and let’s explore here for a minute. I think the adversary, as you showed us, sows disunity, and he does this to Adam and Eve, to shame people. God does not want to see you. God does not want to talk to you. I see that with the young people. They think, I did this wrong, or, I did this wrong, or, I sinned in this way, and God does not want to see me. God, I can’t pray. I can’t go to him. And almost this run, hide from God. Now, that is the ultimate disunity, hiding from him. You can’t trust him. He doesn’t want to see you.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:43:14             We can take that and put it back, really center it in the Genesis account or the Creation account, because this one is where there’s a lot of alignment between the multiple accounts. What’s interesting is that the humans, they take the fruit, they all of a sudden see, we made a choice and there’s consequences and we did the thing we said we were not supposed to do, and they’re ashamed. So they try to cover themselves. In the King James, it says they took fig leaves and made aprons. But the word in Hebrew that gets translated as an apron never means apron anywhere else. It has multiple different meanings, but the most frequently translated use for this, the most frequent context that this occurs in is that this is some sort of strap that gets used to tie on a sword or armor. They’re arming themselves, which I think is interesting.

                                           00:44:03             When we feel ashamed, we want to hide, we put up defensive walls, we become defensive, we’re ready to fight to protect ourselves. They’re trying to cover themselves and protect themselves, but not effectively. What is God’s response? God’s response is, essentially, and I’m doing some extreme paraphrasing here, Come and show yourself to me and let me cover you. What I think is beautiful about that is that the Hebrew word kafar is the word to cover, and it is also the word to atone so that Christ comes and covers our shame. That’s not something that we are capable of doing on ourselves. We can defend ourselves in our shame, but if we want atonement, if we want covering, that is something that God, that Christ is ready to do. What does God cover them with? He covers them with coats of skins. Realize that at this point in the story, Adam and Eve are living in a garden where there’s no death.

                                           00:45:04             They’ve never seen death. Where is this coat of skin coming from? I don’t know. Maybe God is coming down and taking a lamb and slaughtering that lamb and taking the skin and saying, I will cover you with this. I don’t know if we can get much more stronger symbolism for Christ’s atonement. You have this skin that is going to now protect you. Atonement that becomes something you wear, it’s an embodiment of atonement that they’re putting on their bodies. When we look at this as a plan in which it is intended for us to come and learn through experience, and that means to make mistakes, that’s the whole point so that we can grow. Then all of a sudden, if you’re envisioning a God who’s waiting for you to slip up so he can come out with a lash, that’s a very inconsistent God.

                                           00:45:55             Adam Miller wrote a book, Original Grace, really fantastic book, and he talks about when we view God as being, like, waiting to punish us, that viewpoint is actually showing that we believe that sin is original and grace is a response to sin. Rather than saying God is a God of grace and sin is a state that we’re living in now, we’re living in a fallen state, but the whole plan was made from grace rather than saying, oh, well, now we’ve got problems, we better have some grace. I don’t think that’s what God is saying. We have this God who is full of grace and full of mercy and God’s justice which is to make bad things good and good things better. Justice is also working together with mercy and grace to do this. When we feel ashamed, we think, oh, God doesn’t want to see me. No, God so, so much wants to see us so that he can really be with us, like the Emmanuel God with us, that he can be with us in our suffering because suffering again, I think is not the problem. Suffering is an inevitable part of life and Christ wants to be there with us in our suffering to help redeem us through our suffering.

John Bytheway:               00:47:05             Sister Anette Dennis, I thought, oh, I loved this paragraph. I think it’s April 2024. “When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and had to leave the Garden of Eden, they were given coats of skins as a covering for them. It is likely that an animal was sacrificed to make those coats of skins symbolic of our Savior’s own sacrifice for us.” I remember asking one of my professors, Joseph Fielding McConkie said a lamb was sacrificed and I raised my hand and I said, how do we know it was a lamb? And he said, It just has to be. So that was his answer. Continuing Sister Dennis, “Kafar”, as you just said, “is the basic Hebrew word for atonement, and one of its meanings is to cover. Our temple garment reminds us that the Savior and the blessings of His Atonement cover us throughout our lives. As we put on the garment of the holy priesthood each day, that beautiful symbol becomes a part of us.” I loved the idea of being covered by the lamb, and they were covered before they were ever cast out of the garden, which I also think is beautiful.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:48:16             Yeah. Really, I think that’s the ultimate protection. The Adam and Eve are trying with their-

John Bytheway:               00:48:22             To cover themselves.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:48:22             their girdle that they’re making, right, and to protect themselves or they’re getting ready to defend. Ultimately, they’re not capable. We are not capable of protecting ourselves from the things that life will throw at us. I can’t protect myself. Like, maybe in 20 years, I’ll get cancer. I can’t protect myself from that. You know, maybe a close family member or friend will be killed in a car accident. I can’t stop that. The protection comes from having a relationship with Christ. It won’t stop those things from happening, but it can protect us from becoming bitter and having really horrible lives.

John Bytheway:               00:48:57             Who would not want to be covered by Christ every day? Coats of skins, we think of coats as an outer garment, but what is translated as coats?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:49:11             Ketonet. It’s like a tunic. It’s a shirt-like tunic for either men or women, oftentimes. A tunic, if you’re looking at ancient dressing patterns, that’s not the thing you’re wearing on top, like what we would call a coat. That’s the thing you’re wearing underneath. So you’ve got that, and then you might have other robes and things or belts that you put over that, but that’s the thing you’re wearing next to your skin very frequently in more ancient clothing times.

John Bytheway:               00:49:39             Can you say the word again, because I wanna be able to remember it.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:49:42             Yeah, it’s ketonet. You’ll see it printed like kuttoneth.

John Bytheway:               00:49:47             That’s how I’ve seen it. Yeah.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:49:49             Usually the letter that gets written as th, nowadays is pronounced just as a t.

John Bytheway:               00:49:54             I made a screenshot of that word once on blue letter Bible and I just loved it. An inner garment worn next to the skin, which comes down to the knees, rarely to the ankles, worn by both men and women. And I just went, oh, wow.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:50:09             That is accurate.

John Bytheway:               00:50:10             The coats of skins were not outer coats in English. They were inner garments. Yeah. Love it.

Hank Smith:                      00:50:18             Rebekah, here they’re walking and talking with God. Then Satan comes and sows disunity. You can’t trust him. There’s this verse, I’m over in Genesis 3:10. Adam, where are you? I was afraid. That’s an interesting point that almost like Satan was able to convince them to be afraid of God. I wanna throw an idea out at both of you. It seems a big part of the Restoration from what we studied last year, John, was the Protestant view of God in Joseph Smith’s day was, God is going to burn, is gonna burn most of the human race. And here comes Joseph Smith saying, actually, God is, he’s really good. He’s merciful. Wow, he’s even more merciful than I thought. Wow, he’s even more merciful than I thought. Do you see that introduction of fear as an important piece of this story?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:51:23             Yes. I do see it as being a really important piece. I don’t have the official, like, scientific terms, but they have, like, base emotions. I think they’re called primary emotions, and you have secondary emotions that usually come as a response. And so primary emotions are things like anger or fear or sorrow or happiness. These are the primary emotions. And then secondary emotions might be things like frustration or excitement and you feel happy and it might morph into excitement or you feel anger and then it might be turned into frustration or irritation or things like that. These primary emotions, I was reading, it was some psychological, so this is why I, and that’s out of my field, so I know it, I don’t have all the citations for it. But what I remember from what I read is it said that these primary emotions are very, very powerful motivators.

                                           00:52:18             People do things motivated, like fear is a major one. Anger’s a major one, sorrow. Love is another primary emotion. You’ve got these things and what motivates us to do things without thinking things through, to behave irrationally, to sort of block off, to go into that fight or flight mode where we’re not even engaging with a person anymore. You’re engaging with an idea. You’re engaging with an idea of who you think that person might be or how you think that situation might play out. We see this in interpersonal relationships. We see this in marriages. You see it in sibling, friendships, with parents to child relationships. As I’m preparing to get married, finding it, listening to podcasts about communication and reading books. One of the things they’ll talk about is they say, pay attention. When you’re talking and something happens and all of a sudden, like, one thing happened and you just, like, react on a scale of one to 10, it was, like, maybe a 2.3 and you react on, like, a level nine. You’re not engaging with what just happened. You’re engaging with whatever fear or anger or primary emotion response you have from whatever happened when you were a kid or what happened with your dear friend who never speaks to you anymore. We’re complex beings. We have layers. Satan, the serpent, comes and sows fear because now Adam and Eve are not actually interacting with God. They’re interacting with their idea of God. It’s an image of God. There’s a separation in the relationship. That’s not an authentic relationship. If you wanna have an authentic relationship with a person, you actually need to connect to who they are, not who you think they are.

Hank Smith:                      00:53:58             I’ve noticed in the work I’ve done with young people, even not so young people, it’s fear and shame. I did this thing wrong. I haven’t gone back to church since.

John Bytheway:               00:54:11             Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:54:12             Or I’ll be judged, or God probably does not want to talk to me. I’ve even heard young people say, you know, I’m disgusting. I’m awful. They call themselves names. I like the Lord asking in verse 11, Who told you that?

John Bytheway:               00:54:29             Yeah. What’s your source on that? Where in the world did you get that?

Hank Smith:                      00:54:34             Can I get a citation on that? Who told you that you’re disgusting? Who told you that you’re, that you’re no good?

John Bytheway:               00:54:42             Who would want you to believe that?

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:54:44             What’s interesting is when he says, who told you that? ‘Cause he says, I was afraid because I was naked. And what is being naked? It is the state of being uncovered. Adam and Eve in the end of chapter two, it says, they’re naked in front of each other and they were not ashamed. They’re not ashamed because they’re unatoned, but there’s nothing that needs to be atoned. When they gain moral awareness and they realize there’s choice and consequences and we make mistakes and we’re not perfect and this whole idea of this is gonna be a fallen existence comes crashing down onto them and all of a sudden they’re like, oh, I’m not atoned. I’ve gotta hide that. I have to hide the fact that there’s nothing making up for my inadequacies. Then when God comes and says, who told you there’s no atonement for you? Who told you there’s no one to cover you? Because that’s not accurate. Christ is here to cover you. He’s got you covered. The nakedness, that unatoned state, becomes covered.

John Bytheway:               00:55:41             What is the opposite of being covered? It’s being exposed. Listen to Amulek, this is like, wow. “Thus, mercy can satisfy the demands of justice and encircles them in the arms of safety.” Think of garments, you’re circled about. “While he that exercises no faith unto repentance is exposed to the whole law of the demands of justice.” So amazed that he would use that word when we’re not kafar-ed . Let’s add an -ed to the word kafar.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:56:13             I like it.

Hank Smith:                      00:56:15             I don’t know about either of you, but I’ve had moments where I’m saying my prayers. I’ll hide certain topics and the Holy Ghost says, do you wanna talk about that? No, but I hope you’ll bless the missionaries. Well, what about that? Mm. Well, please bless my family. We try to hide our topics, right? Our vulnerabilities like, oh, I don’t really wanna talk about that. That hurts. That’s painful. I don’t really wanna do anything about that, so I’ll hide it from you. It’s almost funny. Like, we’re gonna hide from God. Really? You’re gonna hide from God.

John Bytheway:               00:56:48             Right. That’s the thing. Is this even possible?

Hank Smith:                      00:56:52             Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:56:53             Yeah. Building on what you’re saying, Hank, if we go to Matthew six, this is Sermon on the Mount, and this is right before Christ teaches the Lord’s Prayer. And he talks about, don’t be like the hypocrites. And he says, verse seven, “but when you pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think they shall be heard for their much speaking.” Verse eight, “Be ye not therefore like unto them. For, your Father knoweth what things you have need of before you ask Him.” I used to think there’s vain repetitions like, don’t say the same thing over and over again. So I was like, Okay, well, what if I’m actually feeling that, but I won’t say the same thing over and over again, right? No. It’s saying, make this a sincere prayer. God already knows what you need. If you know you’re talking to somebody who already knows it all, who already knows what you need, how does that change what you’re saying? How does that change what you ask for? And I think that can really change our prayers that the vain repetitions is not bothering to maybe engage with our deepest selves when we pray.

John Bytheway:               00:57:56             Yeah. Speaking of that idea of God knows what we need already, Romans 8:26. “Likewise, the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Sometimes a prayer is, ugh. And the Lord gets it.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             00:58:20             Yeah. I remember once having a blessing and in the blessing it said, Heavenly Father hears the prayers you did not know you prayed. This was years ago that I had this blessing, and I’ve thought a lot about that. How often are we in our hearts praying for things that we don’t even know we’re praying for and God hears those too? I think that’s really beautiful.

Hank Smith:                      00:58:40             It is. Speaking of exposing yourself to the Lord, not hiding, just saying, this is what happened. This is what it is. This is what I’m dealing with. I’m human. I’m what scientists call alive. This is Elder Kearon. God’s intent is to bring you home. I’m sure you both remember this. He says, “He did not cast away the woman with the issue of blood. He did not recoil from the leper. He did not reject the woman taken in adultery. He did not refuse the penitent no matter their sin and he will not refuse you or those you love when you bring to him your broken heart and contrite spirit.” Your nakedness, we might say, from Genesis. “That is not his intent or his design, nor his plan, purpose, wish, or hope. No, he does not put up roadblocks and barriers. He removes them.” It’s almost like Satan put the disunity in and he’s saying, the Lord is trying to come to remove the walls that we put up. The hiding we did, the aprons we made. He does not keep you out. He welcomes you in. His entire ministry was a living declaration of this intent.

John Bytheway:               00:59:56             It reminds me, we had Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat on and he said the mindset of the churches at the time of Joseph Smith was, we’re gonna save you from hell. And then Section 76, Joseph discovers hell is not what I thought it was. It’s a temporary abode. Then the mindset today is, well, actually, God is there to bring to pass your immortality and eternal life. Just completely different way of looking at it. Save you from hell? No, actually, God’s here to bring to pass our immortality and eternal life. As Elder Kearon would say his plan is one to bring us home, not one to keep us out.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             01:00:34             Don’t hide in our shame, let ourselves be fully exposed. I actually think that that is a key step to receiving Christ into our lives. I know there was a time, this was several years ago, when I saw my whole life put out before me and I realized I’m really goal-oriented, I work really hard, I’m high achieving, I could see, all of a sudden it was like, I do it because I’m just trying to somehow match up. I’m trying to be enough. I’m trying to not let people down. I was having this day where I was praying and sort of meditating and I was like, I just can’t do this anymore. I’m never enough. No matter what I do, I am never enough and I can’t do it anymore. There were words that came into my mind that said, of course you’re not enough. You were never meant to be enough. Jesus is enough, so stop focusing on yourself and start focusing on Jesus. I remember even being on my mission, so this is even years earlier, preaching Jesus, but not necessarily feeling Jesus in my life. I have a lot of perfectionist tendencies, so I was trying to do it all myself. Fast forward to when I was praying and, you know, you’re not enough, you’re never meant to be enough, Jesus is enough.

                                           01:01:45             After I had that experience, I started feeling that maybe instead of fighting against the fact that I’m fallen and not enough, I just acknowledge it. I am not enough. I am fatally flawed. I am inherently weak. I am inherently fallen that this is who I am. Not necessarily saying that to be like, well, fine, just do whatever. But to use it as a starting place to say, okay, this is who I am, and if I now focused on the Savior, how does that change? How do I let the Savior abide in me? How am I every single day trying to open myself so that the Savior has a place to abide? As I do that, I started finding that I was changing. It was a course of a few years, but I remember after I’d had that experience and trying to really have the Savior abide in me and let there be the Savior’s grace in my life.

                                           01:02:39             After a couple years, I remember one day realizing I didn’t feel guilty all the time. I wasn’t beating myself up all the time, and it wasn’t because I was focusing on not beating myself up all the time internally. It was because I stopped focusing on my inherent inadequacy, which is there. I acknowledge it, it’s there, but I focused on Christ. That’s what Christ is about. He’s about healing that. He’s about when you have an infinite gap that separates you from God, there is nothing I can do to bridge an infinite gap. I can do all this stuff and I’m still gonna be about three millimeters into eternity like, of infinity. Christ bridges the gap because Christ is the only one infinite enough, big enough to bridge that, to make that, God with us, that abiding, that unity that we can have with God. It’s actually a really crucial step to say, okay, I will be completely exposed before Christ and let him do what he does.

Hank Smith:                      01:03:42             I think we can see this. 2 Nephi 4, Nephi’s been writing his record. You know, he’s an old man and he’s writing his record and he seems pretty put together the whole time he tells this story, and then he gets to the point where his father dies and he’s going to tell the part where he separates from his brothers, right? This has happened decades earlier, but he’s writing about it. He falls apart a little bit.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             01:04:05             He does.

John Bytheway:               01:04:06             I’m not enough moment.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             01:04:07             Yeah.

Hank Smith:                      01:04:08             “O, wretched man that I am, my heart sorrows because of my flesh, my soul grieves because of my iniquities. I am encompassed about by the temptations and sins which easily beset me.” I don’t stand a chance. “My heart groans because of my sins.” As he turns it around and he turns to God almost in his, like you would say, he just fully exposes himself to God saying, this is who I am. Isn’t this sad? Right? And then this phrase, John, you might have already quoted it. He said, he starts to quote all this good stuff about what God has done for him and, “why should I yield to sin? Why should I give way to temptation? Awake my soul! No longer droop in sin.” And then this phrase has new meaning to me, Rebekah, because of what you’ve taught us, he says in verse 33, “Lord, wilt thou encircle me around in the robe of thy righteousness.”

John Bytheway:               01:05:11             There it is again, kafar.

Hank Smith:                      01:05:13             Cover me.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             01:05:16             Not just with kafar, but this encircling with the robe, but also with things like the sacrament where we’re literally eating emblems to remember Christ and it strikes me just how embodied it is. This is not just something that we say, oh, I believe in my heart. It’s something we do physically and it’s not even just an action that we do. It is something we put into our bodies or on our bodies. There is a very embodied sense to this. It’s one of the things that I love about our doctrine that at the same time that we acknowledge that we live in mortal, physical bodies that are fallen, at the same time, these bodies are also a vehicle for our salvation. Yes, they’re mortal and fallen, but they are also sacred and holy and divine and they are gifts. We get to do things with our body to take Christ literally into our body and to take, when we partake of the sacrament, and to put Christ onto our body as we wear our garments because we’re not disembodied brains or disembodied spirits that need to return to God. We are souls combined. It’s another type of unity that we have this unity that we get to work with this body toward our exaltation and toward our salvation.

Hank Smith:                      01:06:38             Coming up in part two.

Dr. Rebekah Call:             01:06:39             And then I wrote a poem that is from her perspective after Abel has already been killed. In my mind, she has Seth as a baby and she’s holding and sort of singing this song to Seth. I’m gonna briefly walk you through the lyrics because they’re all grounded in different research or different traditions. Like I’ve got some things here from Hebrew tradition and Jewish tradition, and I’ve got a couple Hebrew words, so I’ll explain that and then I’ll sing the song for you.