John Bytheway: 00:01 Welcome to part two with Dr. Adam Miller. Alma 39 to 42. A change of heart is also an intellectual understanding, a better understanding of what good is. We’ve been talking about you have a son on a mission. How counterintuitive is that? I think I’ll go on a mission to a different country at my own expense. Have people slam doors at me and stuff like that because it’s so good.

Dr. Adam Miller: 00:33 That’s not obvious.

John Bytheway: 00:34 Yeah, yeah. It’s counterintuitive.

Hank Smith: 00:38 I had to learn that with the temple. My wife would frequently, when we were newly married, say, “Let’s go to the temple. Let’s go to the temple.” In my mind I thought, “I don’t have time. I don’t have time to go to the temple.” It’s something you feel like you are sacrificing your time and it’s counterintuitive, like you said, Adam, to realize if I spend the time, if I give up my time, if I want to make that time holy, it will actually improve all the other hours of the day.

John Bytheway: 01:07 Well, an exercise is counterintuitive, isn’t it? I’m going to break my muscles down so that they’ll get stronger. The whole weight room thing, I often joke that there’s that sign right in the gym that says, “No pain. No gain.” All my life I’ve had a different model, which is, “No pain. Good.” Nobody believes that one.

Dr. Adam Miller: 01:35 It’s a little bit like Hank was indicating earlier. It’s a little bit like trying to convince your children that no, vegetables are going to make you happier.

Hank Smith: 01:47 Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 01:48 Your happiness depends to some degree here on your energy levels and you’re going to get more energy out of those vegetables. You’ll feel better.

Hank Smith: 01:56 You will. Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 01:58 It’s counterintuitive.

John Bytheway: 02:00 This discussion reminded me of a Joseph Smith statement and now I like it even more because of what he first says, but I’m thinking about that change of heart of helping us understand what good is. This is from Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, page 51. “The nearer man approaches perfection, the clearer are his views and the greater his enjoyments till he has overcome the evils of his life and lost every desire for sin. And like the ancients, arrives at that point of faith where he’s wrapped in the power and glory of his maker and is caught up to dwell with him, but we consider this is a station to which no man ever arrived in the moment.” I put that under my change of heart file, but that first part says the clearer are his views. Maybe Corianton had to get straightened out up here.

Dr. Adam Miller: 02:52 It’s always a question, not just of heart but of mind, of the way that they’re tangled together. It’s useful here, I think, to see this as being crucial to the very work of restoration, that our salvation is going to depend here, not just on works but on desires and at the center of the work of restoration is the work of restoring us to our true, natural, divinely given desire for what is good then the discovery of what that actually is. And then these desires are what are decisive, and the whole purpose of law and punishment is to give us that educative pedagogical space to discover the truth about ourselves and about our desires so that when we are reunited with God, we recognize him for the thing that we were looking for the whole time rather than fleeing from him.

Hank Smith: 03:46 Reminds me of our T-shirt last year of, love is a law, not a reward.

Dr. Adam Miller: 03:52 Yeah, that’s counterintuitive.

Hank Smith: 03:55 Yeah. You can have love now, come join me in my work.

John Bytheway: 03:59 Speaking of our desires, look at Alma 42:27. It’s one of the concluding verses. “Therefore, oh my son, whosoever will come, may come and partake of the waters of life freely, and whosoever will not come, the same is not compelled to come, but in the last day it shall be restored unto him according to his deeds.” But what I’m seeing there is where are your desires? If you want to come, come. Whosoever will come, may come.

Dr. Adam Miller: 04:31 My intuition is that at the end of the day there’re going to be very few people who don’t want to come.

John Bytheway: 04:37 Thankfully, for all of us.

Dr. Adam Miller: 04:39 Let me suggest two other things about the flipside then of this moment of judgment. Alma describes the moment of salvation as the moment when we are judged not just in light of our works but in light of our desires. That’s potentially a really powerful redemptive moment as we’ve been talking about, but if it doesn’t turn out to be a powerful redemptive moment, then something else happens. The thing that he describes, I think in Alma chapter 40 verse 14, this negative moment of judgment. In Alma 40:14 Alma says, “Now this is the state of the souls of the wicked, yea, in darkness, and a state of awful, fearful looking for the fiery indignation of the wrath of God upon them.” Now at first glance, that seems pretty terrifying and I think that’s probably not wrong. But at second glance, I think Alma isn’t saying maybe what we expect him to be saying.

  05:37 Alma isn’t saying that the state of the souls of the wicked is to suffer the fiery indignation of the wrath of God. Alma is saying that the state of the souls of the wicked is to be in a state where you spend your time looking for the fiery indignation of the wrath of God. That this in a sense is what it means to be condemned to hell, to be condemned to hell and the rest of eternity looking for God to punish you, expecting at any moment that he’s the kind of traffic cop who will take joy in punishing you retributively for whatever it is that you have done. It doesn’t say here that God executes that wrath. It says that the sinners spend their time looking for God to execute that wrath. That’s who they think God is, and that really is what it means to be a sinner is to think that that is who God is, to misunderstand his nature and to misunderstand what he’s offering. And that I think is a pretty surprising turn of events here as well in terms of Alma’s description of how this judgment unfolds.

John Bytheway: 06:36 You’re saying that looking could be like anticipating?

Dr. Adam Miller: 06:40 Yeah. What it means to be a sinner is that I spend my time thinking that God is someone who is going to punish me and I spend my time fearfully looking for that punishment to come when that’s not the work that God’s engaged in at all.

Hank Smith: 06:54 Even the verse before, “These shall be cast out into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” And that’s because of their own iniquity. They don’t understand who God is. It’s not that God wants them weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. That’s the result of not understanding God.

Dr. Adam Miller: 07:13 Yeah, and I think we might get this even more clearly in Alma 41 verse seven, pretty surprisingly he says this, “These are they that are redeemed of the Lord. Yea, these are they that are taken out, that are delivered from the endless night of darkness and thus they stand or fall, for behold they are their own judges.” A pretty surprising twist here that on the day of judgment, if I don’t stay in the presence of God, if I don’t honor the truth about my desires, it will not be because of something that God judged about me. It will be because of a judgment or even misjudgment here that I have made about myself.

Hank Smith: 07:56 That is a wonderful twist. It reminds me, if you don’t mind, I’m going to share a thought from a devotional, from our friend Brad Wilcox. His grace is sufficient. He said, “In the past I had a picture in my mind of what the final judgment would be like, and it went something like this. Jesus standing there with a clipboard and Brad standing in the other side of the room nervously looking at Jesus. Jesus checks his clipboard and says, ‘Oh, Brad, you missed it by two points.’ Brad begs Jesus, ‘Please check the essay question one more time. There have to be two points you can squeeze out of that essay.’.

  08:31 That’s how I always saw it, but the older I get and the more I understand the wonderful plan of redemption, the more I realize that in the final judgment it will not be the unrepentant sinner begging Jesus, ‘let me stay.’. No, he will probably be saying, ‘Get me out of here.’ Knowing Christ’s character, I believe that if anyone is going to be begging on that occasion, it would probably be Jesus begging the sinner, ‘Please choose to stay. Please use my atonement not just to be cleansed but to be changed, so that you want to stay.'” I think that fits pretty well with, “I want you here.” It’s your misjudgment of you.

Dr. Adam Miller: 09:15 Yeah, I think that’s quite right. It’s to me significant that when Alma describes this process of restoration, he says, “Your resurrection is going to do two things. When God restores you in this way to your proper and perfect frame, everyone he says will be resurrected, will receive their body and everyone will be returned to the presence of God. From there, it’s just a question of whether you stay or go.” We often frame our mortal journey here as a question of whether or not we can make it back to God. That’s not what Alma says. It’s not a question of making it back to God. Alma says, “God’s going to restore all of you to his presence.” The decisive question is whether or not you stay.

John Bytheway: 09:58 Do you remember Stephen Robinson? That book he wrote called Believing Christ, he wrote in the nineties, and then wrote a follow-up called, Following Christ? There’s one line I remember from that book that was so good and that was, “The question is not, ‘Am I going to make it?’ The question is, ‘Do I want to stay?'” I think it’s kind of funny in verse seven that you’re delivered from an endless night of darkness and it sounds like he knows what Section 19 teaches that if it’s endless, how can you be delivered from it? It’s like Alma’s suffering endless torment for two days. You’re like, wait a minute. And in Section 19 says, well, it’s called endless because endless is my name. I didn’t say there’d be no end to the punishment. But I love they are their own judges, which is so true in life. You go get a temple recommend, what’s the last question?

Hank Smith: 10:51 Do you consider yourself?

John Bytheway: 10:54 Go to the stake president, what’s the last question? We are our own judge a lot of times in life.

Dr. Adam Miller: 11:01 Yeah. It’s in this sense that as Alma emphasizes, it’s impossible to get away with anything. It’s impossible to get away with evil, or as he famously says, perhaps most famously in all of these chapters, in Alma chapter 41 verse 10, Turns out that wickedness never was happiness. There’s no danger of anyone ever getting away with evil. To think that you could get away with doing evil is to think that it’s only evil because God punishes you with evil, as if it would’ve been good if he didn’t punish you with evil in return. But that’s not the case at all, Alma says.

  11:42 God doesn’t have to punish you with evil in response to your evil because the evil is already evil. Wickedness never was the happiness in the first place. If you’ve chosen what was evil, if you’ve participated in wickedness, that is its own punishment. And God doesn’t have to add anything to that pie in order for you to have already gotten what it is that you chose. God’s not in the work of punishment here in terms of retribution. He’s only in the work of discipline in terms of an education that we need.” The wickedness, being wicked takes care of itself from the start, though, again, coming to discover that wickedness never was happiness in the first place is the very kind of education that we have to undergo in order for us to discover the truth about our own desires.

Hank Smith: 12:29 That is wonderful. It’s not like you stole happiness from some sort of evil thing and you got away with it. Look at me, I got happiness out of evil. It doesn’t exist there.

Dr. Adam Miller: 12:41 Sometimes we wring our hands about the possibility of people getting away with stuff as if wickedness weren’t already wickedness, as if wickedness could have been happiness, but that’s impossible in the first place and to worry about people getting away with wickedness is the kind of moral relativism that doesn’t take seriously the fact that it’s not bad because God punished you with bad for doing it. It’s bad just plain because it was bad in the first place.

John Bytheway: 13:09 My dad joined the church when he was 24 and he said sometimes people would say to him, “Oh, so before that, you got to…” Fill in the blank, “As if wickedness was happiness.” And that’s what he would say. “Oh, you mean so wickedness is happiness, and I got to do all of that stuff?” He would remind them, “I never had a home evening. I never had a youth conference.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 13:33 This is what we do. We mix these categories up, we get it wrong. We think that what’s bad is good and what’s good is bad and it’s not because we don’t want what’s good but it’s because if we’re wrong about which one is which and to be saved is to be saved from my ignorance about the truth there.

Hank Smith: 13:52 Doesn’t Samuel the Lamanite say something about trying to find happiness in iniquity is contrary to-

John Bytheway: 13:57 To the nature of that righteousness which is in our eternal head or something like that.

Hank Smith: 14:03 Yeah. It’s impossible to find. There’s no reason for me to punish my child for hurting themselves. They’ve already hurt themselves, as if they got happiness out of that.

John Bytheway: 14:16 You are, to use a 1970 song, you’re looking for love in all the wrong places, look for happiness in all the wrong places.

Dr. Adam Miller: 14:26 I think this is exactly right. This would be my reading of what Alma means when he says that part of the work of restoration is to bring back evil for evil. I don’t think that that means that God is going to do evil to us because we have done evil. What I think that means here in light of Alma 41:10, the claim that wickedness never was happiness. What I think that means is that God is going to bring back the truth about evil, that it was evil from the start, then you can’t pretend otherwise. And that’s part of what the law of restoration restores. It restores the truth about what evil actually is, that it never was happiness and no evil needs to be added there on top of it because it was already evil in the first place.

John Bytheway: 15:12 The clearer are his views. Could I tell you guys about an experience I had with Alma 40:11 and 12? We had a sister in our ward and her husband called me and said, “My wife’s about to pass and she wanted to say goodbye.” That’s a very poignant moment. My wife and I went over to see Trish. I said, “Trish, can I read you a couple of verses of scripture?” I went to Alma 40, “Now concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection, behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel that the spirits of all men as soon as they’re departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life. And then shall it come to pass that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care and sorrow.”

  16:20 I’ll never forget Trish looked at me and went, “I’m ready.” I got to retell that story at her funeral too. She said, “I’m ready.” To be able to say that I think means she had this understanding of God and what this was all about and I just thought those verses, I always want to have those in my back pocket. We have a hospital in our stake boundary and we go there a lot to give blessings and sometimes the people that we go to see have not been active at all, but those verses can give a lot of hope.

Hank Smith: 16:56 As I read these chapters, and I read about the punishment of the sinner, you might say that they are judging themselves. I’m reading Alma 40 verse 26, “For they are unclean and no unclean thing can inherit the kingdom of God.” They see themselves that way.

Dr. Adam Miller: 17:18 And this is partly a product of the way that if I think that my salvation is about deserving or not deserving God’s love, instead of joining in God’s work of love, then I’m going to always end up judging myself to be insufficient in deserving it. Then I’ll never find it and I will be my own judge here and I will condemn myself to not deserving love, but the problem won’t be that I failed to deserve it. The problem will be that I failed to understand that love was a law and not a reward that you deserve or don’t.

Hank Smith: 17:54 That looking for the fiery indignation, it’s not coming. That’s how I view God. They drink the dregs of a bitter cup. That sounds very similar.

Dr. Adam Miller: 18:07 Yeah, it’s their cup.

John Bytheway: 18:08 That’s what it says. They’re consigned to partake of the fruits of their labors. It’s not, the punisher will hand you a cup. It’s, you made this, now you got to eat it. In October of 2016, Elder Quentin L. Cook, he said, “Alma 42 contains some of the most magnificent doctrine on the atonement in all scripture. Alma helped Corianton understand that it is not an injustice that the sinner should be consigned to a state of misery, but he noted that starting with Adam, a merciful God had provided a space for repentance because without repentance the great plan of salvation would’ve been frustrated. Alma also established that God’s plan is a plan of happiness. Alma’s teachings are most instructive for behold justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own.” And there’s a footnote that says, “Notice justice is male and mercy is female.”

  19:04 I don’t know what to do with that. “And thus, none but the truly penitent are saved.” Still quoting, “Seen in their true light, the glorious blessings of repentance and adherence to the Savior’s teachings are monumentally important. It is not unfair to be clear as Alma was with Corianton about the consequences of sinful choices and lack of repentance. It has often been declared, sooner or later, everybody has to sit down to a banquet of consequences.” And it sounds like, and drink the dregs of a better cup. That comes with the banquet for free at the end of Alma 40 verse 26 there.

Hank Smith: 19:44 Adam, I read in chapter 42, verse 22 and 23 that God ceaseth not to be God and mercy claimeth the penitent, mercy comes because of the atonement. What we’ve been talking about today is that me seeing clearly, mercy claims the penitent.

Dr. Adam Miller: 20:04 Yeah, I think that’s right. To be penitent is to discover that my evil actions were evil and that they now require me to repent, which is to respond to my evil with the good that I now need in order to become good again. And that’s precisely what comes into view here, as we begin to undergo this process of restoration that the atonement itself enacts.

Hank Smith: 20:29 Mercy claims me because I allow it to.

Dr. Adam Miller: 20:33 Yeah, mercy’s always trying to claim me. It’s just a question of whether I will allow it to claim me or not.

Hank Smith: 20:40 Adam, you wrote a book called An Early Resurrection. I think that’s Life in Christ Before You Die, and since Alma has been talking about resurrection, I thought I might bring a couple of thoughts in from that book and have you maybe tie them together with what we’ve been talking about here. I loved this part of the book. “Promises are a certain way of looking forward. When I promised myself to my wife, I didn’t just bind myself to her in the present, I gave her my future without waiting for that future to arrive, without waiting to see what sorrows or joys would come. I promised. Dressed in white, we knelt at the altar in the temple and joined hands. We were terribly young.” Oh, I remember. “The mirror set face-to-face reflected endless futures at which we couldn’t guess, still I loved her. I gave her all those futures as a gift and we kissed, now promised to each other and sealed by a holy ordinance, we live as though those futures had already come.

  21:43 Now, in a very real way, our futures are given as gifts in the present and now we’re empowered by those promises to love each other in the present.” And then you wrote a little later in the book, “My job is to live right now as if I had already passed through death’s veil and into the presence of God. My job is to live my promised redemption in the present tense. The reason I thought of those was the very end of Alma’s speaking to Corianton. Let the mercy and long suffering of God have full sway in your heart, and now you are called to preach the word unto this people. I saw that same commitment to live this entire message now.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 22:33 The process of restoration, it is modeled for us, as Alma sees it, by resurrection. But I think as the Book of Mormon also emphasizes again and again, perhaps uniquely in relationship to our other scripture, this is not a process that we have to wait for. The process of restoration is a process that God is anxious to get going here and now. In some very real sense, the process of my resurrection is something that God is anxious to get started right here, right now, in this life. And especially if it’s the case that the only obstacle here is not God, but me, then there is no reason that I can’t begin to experience my redemption now by participating with God in his work here and now. In the same way that wickedness never was happiness and never could be, it’s also true that righteousness always was happiness and always will be, and that’s as true now as it would be at any future date when I might find myself back in the presence of God.

Hank Smith: 23:40 Corianton can move forward in that way having promised his future to God, just like his father had.

Dr. Adam Miller: 23:48 Yeah, exactly. Especially insofar as he takes up the work of ministry and joins God in the work of restoration. There’s not something else right here, it’s not the case that the work of restoration will get you to some other promised end, the work of restoration and your invitation to participate in it is the thing that’s on offer. It is what you’re looking for.

Hank Smith: 24:11 Adam, last time we were together, we talked about the Book of Romans and I would encourage all of our listeners, if you haven’t heard those episodes, please go back. We can link them in our show notes followhim.co, because it was so fun to get all the feedback that we did from those episodes. It was fun to see people’s worlds open up in different ways to the gospel. With the, love is a law, not a reward, do you see Corianton seeing that love is a reward here and Alma as the opposite saying, you don’t have to see it that way?

Dr. Adam Miller: 24:51 For my part, I think that’s very much what’s at stake in this whole conversation. Corianton thinks that love is the kind of reward that he could succeed at earning or have failed at earning, and at the moment he thinks he’s failed at earning it. And Alma’s entire project here is to explain to him how restoration works. That restoration is not about God now giving him the evil that he deserves because he’s done evil, but that the whole project of restoration as modeled by resurrection is to take what was bad and turn it into what is good, to take what was corrupted and make it incorruptible. And that that is what God is offering, and all Corianton needs to do to find what he’s looking for here is to return to the ministry and participate in the work that God invited him to join in the first place.

Hank Smith: 25:42 He sought for love in, as John said, all the wrong places.

Dr. Adam Miller: 25:47 Or at least the wrong time, and the wrong way.

Hank Smith: 25:50 Yeah. All three of us are parents, and many of our listeners of course are moms and dads. How do we help our children flip that prevalent message of, “God wants to punish you”? How have you done it as a father? Because it can be so damaging. At least I’ve seen it in my own children, to I do something that is wrong, against the rules, against the commandments and now I see myself as not as valuable. At least knowing you, Adam, that’s not what you would want my child to think, so how do I help them not think that?

Dr. Adam Miller: 26:31 I don’t know that I’m much of an example for how to actually do this in practice, but in theory at least, which is what I specialize in as a philosopher, the thing that you can’t do as a parent is to indicate, in any way, that your love for that child depends on their being what you want them to be. You can’t structure your relationship to them as if your love was a reward that they could earn or not, which means that maybe the one basic, essential, non-negotiable thing that I have to be capable of doing as a parent, is that I have to be capable of disconnecting my love for that child from what I want from that child.

  27:25 I have to be able to uncouple here my care and concern for them, from my expectations about what they should or shouldn’t be, such that I become capable of constantly seeing and adapting to what they actually need from me rather than trying to force them into the box of what I want them to be. If I try to force them into the box of what I want them to be, if I try to use them to satisfy my own desires for their lives, I will trap us both and the love that could have sustained us will become impossible.

John Bytheway: 28:07 Sometimes what we talk about maybe is more of a belief than a practice. We try to practice it, but I’ve tried to share with my kids that Heavenly Father has different ways of saying, “I love you.” And one of them is, “I love you.” And one of them is, “Thou shalt not…” That thou shalt not is going to protect you from so much hurt, heartache and sorrow, or as Adam taught us today, to use the words of Alma, “It will be for your good.” Every commandment has love behind it. It’s going to protect you from some pretty bad consequences. I remember reading Elizabeth Smart’s book that helped her through those months of horrific captivity that she remembered how often her mother told her, “I love you no matter what.” And how that sustained her. And she wasn’t doing anything wrong, but a lot of people react to that kind of thing that happened to Elizabeth Smart as if they did something wrong. She didn’t, but that assurance that, “My mother loves me.” Was one of the things that helped her through that.

Hank Smith: 29:22 Adam, I’m going to quote another book called Letters to a Young Mormon by Adam Miller. I thought of it when Alma says at the very end of this letter to Corianton, “Don’t endeavor to excuse yourself. Don’t deny the justice of God.” Almost as if he’s saying, “Don’t hide from this anymore.” And you wrote, “When God knocks, don’t creep to the door and look through the peephole to see if he looks like you thought he would. Rush to the door and throw it open.” Loved that idea. Is that what you see Alma trying to express to Corianton? And I could be absolutely wrong here, but you don’t need to hide from him. He wants to bless you.

Dr. Adam Miller: 30:06 That’s a strong parallel. As Alma diagnoses it, Corianton’s main difficulty here may be in the fact that he’s hamstrung by some expectations about who or what God is, that don’t allow him now to accept the good that’s being offered, and to himself, do the good that needs to be done in response to his own mistakes. And it’s easy, so easy to get trapped in these expectations that, as we said a moment ago, are all structured around our false assumption that love is something that you have to deserve and that the whole point of all of this is to figure out whether or not we deserve it when really the only thing that’s ever been at stake is whether or not we would be willing to participate in it.

Hank Smith: 31:00 There’s a wonderful verse in Alma 42 verse 15 that we haven’t talked about yet. He says, “Now the plan of mercy could not be brought about, except an atonement should be made. Therefore, God himself atoneth for the sins of the world to bring about the plan of mercy.” I want to come back to this talk you brought up from Elder Kearon, God’s Intent Is To Bring You Home. It seems in verse 15, it matches what Elder Kearon says here. “God does not put up roadblocks and barriers, he removes them. God himself atoneth for the sins of the world.” He does not keep you out. He welcomes you in. And then this, “His entire ministry was a living declaration of this intent.” Can you show us, Adam, or talk about how the Savior’s ministry is a declaration of his intent to remove roadblocks?

Dr. Adam Miller: 31:55 Yeah, of course at the heart of his ministry is the work of atonement itself. The work of atonement is, I think as Alma describes it here, the work of restoration. Part of that work of restoration involves justice and punishment as a good that we need. And part of that work of restoration manifests as mercy then, as good in response to our evil, as an invitation to rejoin in response to our evil. And the atonement is really the hinge on which all of that work turns. As God exemplifies what it means to respond to corruption within corruption, to respond to what is bad, with what is good, by restoring what is bad to what is good, Jesus’s mortal ministry exemplifies these same traits. Jesus went about doing good. Jesus went about commanding us to love our enemies. Jesus, before healing someone, never asked if they did or didn’t deserve it. He asked if they were or weren’t willing to participate in it by way of their faith. That’s the pattern. That’s what it looks like to join him in this work of restoration.

Hank Smith: 33:07 We have many listeners out there, Adam, who don’t see themselves as good. There seems to be a view out there that only if I just do a little bit more, work harder, if I can get rid of every single sin in my life that then I measured up. From your point of view, let’s speak directly to that person, just for a minute. You’re so good, at least for me, in these interviews of making me feel like, “Wait, wait. I am enough. It’s not about earning my place. It’s about participating in God’s work.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 33:47 Yeah, maybe I could speak in the first person here. I don’t deserve to be loved. I’m not good enough for that, but my journey in the gospel has largely been a journey of discovering my failure to deserve love isn’t because I didn’t measure up in all the ways that would’ve qualified me to deserve that love, but because I had misunderstood what love was in the first place. I’d mistaken it for a reward, when it was in fact instead a law. It is, in my experience, profoundly liberating to discover not that I had failed to complete the right project by deserving love, but that I had been doing the wrong thing the whole time. Extraordinarily liberating to put down the burden of doing something that cannot be done, and to discover instead that the very thing that I was looking for the whole time, that love, was already right here, freely and wholly available in the invitation to love other people, friends, family, enemies included, maybe especially when that enemy seemed to be myself.

John Bytheway: 35:01 I feel like so often in these discussions we get down to a better understanding of the nature of God. Is he the traffic cop? Is he the university professor that’s trying to see how many he can flunk or is he a perfect loving Heavenly Father who wants relentlessly to get all his children back? When we assign the wrong kind of character to God based on imperfect worldly examples, that’s where the trouble starts and I’m really glad you started with Elder Kearon and that story because that helps us for Elder Kearon to say, “You’re looking at God wrong. That’s not what he’s like.”

Hank Smith: 35:40 I hesitate to add to God’s mission statement, however, I have restated this is my work and my glory to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man as to say something like, This is my work and my glory, to help my children choose to be exalted. I will not force it. What does Alma say? “Whosoever will not come, the same is not compelled to come because righteousness isn’t righteousness unless it is chosen. Exaltation isn’t exaltation…” How can you be like God when he is not forced? If I were to force you, it’s no longer by definition what God does, what he is. Adam, before we let you go, as you can tell, I don’t want you to leave. One way I know I’m feeling the Spirit is, I do not want it to end, and I’m sure there’s many listeners out there who feel the same way.

  36:36 Tell us about the Book of Mormon as a whole. Adam, you are a voracious reader and I only have to look behind you to see that reading is a gift that you have and you’ve developed. Yet, here’s this Book of Mormon that I know you love. Could you speak to what the Book of Mormon has done for you, maybe even specific portions of it that you want to highlight? Because one of my favorite parts of our program is taking someone like yourself, who is in my opinion, and I’m sure many others, one of the best thinkers in the church, especially one of the best philosophers in the church, right there next to Joe Spencer. Can you tell us about the Book of Mormon and your experiences with it?

Dr. Adam Miller: 37:27 I mentioned at the outset that I don’t really have a lot of interest in the Book of Mormon as a historical relic of any kind. My interest in the Book of Mormon is almost exclusively framed in terms of my experience of the book as alive living, an experience of the book in terms of what it can do here and now, and going forward of all the power that it encompasses, all the power that it can express, especially in terms of its ability to open doors to an experience of God. If I love the Book of Mormon, which I do, it’s because the Book of Mormon has introduced me to God more than any other book, in all of my life, that I have ever read. This book has deeply and undeniably introduced me to God.

  38:26 Two things I think have become obvious to me about Book of Mormon over the years, the more time that I’ve spent with it, the more carefully I’ve read it, is that number one, as a people, I don’t know that we’ve even started to read the Book of Mormon. We’ve hardly ever given it a chance to speak in its own voice, to tell us what it wants to say rather than our imposing on it what we expect it to say. To that degree, we’ve really hamstrung the book’s ability to accomplish its own mission of introducing us to Jesus Christ, but I’ve also found over the years that even the weakest effort on my part to engage with the book, to read it, to study it, to understand it, to spend time with it, will be rewarded with not just an understanding of the book, but with a first-person present-tense experience of God, of his love and of his power of redemption. That’s what the book promises, and as best I can tell in my experience, that is exactly what the book has delivered.

Hank Smith: 39:33 Corianton gives us some great hope here, Adam, that your point of view can change, that you can see God clearly, at least from indications later on in the book. Alma 48 says that Captain Moroni, we know that Mormon really likes, he describes him as likened to Ammon, like the other sons of Mosiah and also Alma and his sons. And then in chapter 49, 49 verse 30, that the word of God was preached among the people, declared unto them by Helaman and Shiblon and Corianton. There’s a hopeful part, and I think for every listener, at least for me, you’re helping me and the book is helping me see this can happen for me.

Dr. Adam Miller: 40:23 Yeah, I would hope that it’s obvious that this letter Alma writes to Corianton is itself, a powerfully hopeful letter even in its account of justice and punishment. It is an extraordinarily hopeful count of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Corianton’s good evidence that that hope is justified, and his own father Alma may be even better evidence of the fact that this hope in Christ is justified regardless of what we think we’ve done or how far we think we have drifted from God. God is relentless in his pursuit of us, and his purposes fail not, and his purpose is to restore us and he will.

John Bytheway: 41:06 In our last episode when we talked to Jack Welch, he mentioned that the word, plan, appears 10 times in Alma’s letter to Corianton, and it’s so fun to see what’s taught there because it’s called Plan of Happiness, and Plan of Redemption and Plan of Mercy and Plan of Salvation. There’s God being relentless. He has this plan, as you said, he fails not.

Hank Smith: 41:31 Adam, thank you for spending your time with us.

Dr. Adam Miller: 41:36 It’s always a pleasure to join you. Grateful that you have me.

Hank Smith: 41:39 We love having you on followHIM. As we close this episode, I like to give our listeners something to do, that I’ve listened to this, I’ve loved it. It’s filled my heart, it’s expanded my mind. It’s opened up new things that I’ve never seen before and now I guess I’m a practical person. How do I set down anchor? What would you say if I said, “Okay, what do I do, Adam? What do I do?”

Dr. Adam Miller: 42:07 Let me offer a fun little exercise listeners could do by way of scripture study with the Book of Mormon. This was something that I did the other day preparing for a seminar that I’ll participate in starting next week on Second Nephi, chapter two, trying to help myself become more familiar with the text and it’s details. It’s an interesting historical curiosity that when Joseph Smith dictated the text of the Book of Mormon, he did not dictate punctuation, and it was left to the printer to supply the punctuation so that the punctuation is non-canonical, technically. Here’s a fun exercise you can try as a Latter-day Saint. You can copy and paste the text of a chapter that you’re interested in, into a document, strip out all of its punctuation, and then you do the exercise of resupplying what a punctuation should structure that reading of the text and see what happens. See where it takes you.

John Bytheway: 43:21 I love that.

Hank Smith: 43:23 I love it too. I love it too. We hope everyone listening will take a little time. You might see things you’ve never seen before.

Dr. Adam Miller: 43:30 You will see many things that you have never seen before.

Hank Smith: 43:35 Well, with that, we want to thank Dr. Adam Miller for joining us today. So fun. We’ve talked about Job. We’ve talked about Romans, now we’ve talked about Alma and Corianton. Anyone who’s new to our podcast, go back and listen to all of those previous episodes. They’re so fun. You’ll hear similar things to what you’ve heard today that will help you see in new ways. We want to thank our executive producer Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors David and Verla Sorensen, and every episode we remember our founder Steve Sorensen. We hope you’ll join us next week. Looks like we’re picking up the war chapters on followHIM. Before you skip to the next episode, I have some important information. This episode’s transcript and show notes are available on our website, followhim.co. That’s followhim.co. On our website, you’ll also find our two free books, Finding Jesus Christ in the Old Testament and Finding Jesus Christ in the New Testament.

  44:36 Both books are full of short and powerful quotes and insights from all our episodes from the Old and New Testaments. The digital copies of these books are absolutely free. You can watch the podcast on YouTube. Also, our Facebook and Instagram accounts have videos and extras you won’t find anywhere else. If you’d like to know how you can help us, if you could subscribe to, rate, review and comment on the podcast, that will make us easier to find. Of course, none of this could happen without our incredible production crew. David Perry, Lisa Spice, Jamie Neilson, Will Stoughton, Krystal Roberts, Ariel Cuadra and Annabelle Sorensen.

President Russell M. Nelson: 45:13 Whatever questions or problems you have, the answer is always found in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Turn to him. Follow him.