Shortly after the Lord led the children of Israel out of Egypt, He instructed His people to build a place where He would meet with them and instruct them. This first structure was called a tabernacle, and it was a mobile unit that could, in a sense, be folded up and carried from place to place. Moses was instructed to build, within the tabernacle, a mercy seat, and Moses was told: “there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony…” (Exodus 25:22) The portable tabernacle would eventually be replaced by a temple when the Israelites were permanently established in their promised land, Canaan. There Temple would have to wait until Solomon became King.
Today we have many permanent temples, places where the Lord can instruct and be with His people, places where we can go and commune with Him and be renewed spiritually. It is the place where we begin to understand His will in regards to the universal nature of the family unit, the patriarchal order of government that pervades in His eternal Kingdom. Not only is the family the basic unit in God’s kingdom but it is also the basic unit in our society. In earthly societies where the family has lost its importance, that society has or will become corrupt. The family is where children are taught the values that have been handed down generation after generation, values that have been proven to make the family and the society strong, vibrant and righteous. We are exalted as families, not as individuals, there is no eternal life (lives) in solitude, without those who have loved us and whom we have depended on for direction and sustenance. The greatest blessings the Lord has in store for us will come through the intact family, and those who fail to, or are unable to, unit their family around them and love them through this mortal probation may have to accept a lesser blessing in the hereafter. When the family is viewed narrowly, as only the immediate family, we are being short sighted and have failed to understand the instruction of the Lord, for families are linked eternally, generation after generation. If you could become acquainted with your great, great, grandfather’s immediate family, with their daily struggles and hardships, the love they had for one another, and the happiness they experienced even during their times of hardship, do you think that you could leave them behind. In God’s scheme of things, eternal life is plural?
The primary instruction given to the Prophet Joseph, well before the Church was even established in the last days (1823), was revealed and recorded in the the Doctrine and Covenants: ”Behold, I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at His coming.” (D&C 2:1-2) Can there be anything else as important as the family that would cause the Almighty to feel that the earth that He created for us should be wasted?
The turning of hearts is not just Elijah’s job, the Lord instructed us to: “Seek diligently to turn the hearts of the children to their fathers, and the hearts of the fathers to the children.” (D&C 98: 16)Elijah brought the keys but the Lord expects us to do the work of turning. How, you may ask, can we turn our hearts, and the hearts of our children, we can by becoming acquainted with them. The answer may be by researching and writing family histories, In this way we come to realize that they were real people, who lived and died, as we live and die, and who had the same range of emotions as we do.
There is a saying to the effect, that to know is to love and to love is to serve. We are encouraged as members of the church to become acquainted with our ancestors, to love them and serve them in the most important way that we can, by researching, recording, writing and submitting their names to the temples. While in the temple, attending to their ordinance work, we will also be instructed. There, in the temple, we can imagine that we are as Moses when he was told that; “There I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony…” (Exodus 25:22) The Temple is the university of the Lord where we can receive eternal truths, there we will be provided the information we need to return to His presence one day.