What Do Latter-day Saints Believe About the Final Judgment?

Hey everyone, so throughout this series we’ve done a lot of episodes about what Latter-day Saints call the Plan of Salvation. In these two episodes, we gave you sort of a birds-eye view of this plan, but then we’ve also taken some time to go more in-depth on a variety of subjects, such as premortality, the Spirit World, the Second Coming, the resurrection, the Millennium, Heaven and Hell, etc. Today, we’re going to dive a little deeper into the Final Judgment.

Alright, so while Latter-day Saints believe in a Final Judgment, we really don’t think that the outcome of your judgment is going to be much of a surprise to you. It’s not going to be this anticipatory situation where you’re crossing your fingers, hoping for a good grade. It won’t be surprising because before the final judgment, there will be a couple of mini-judgments, so to speak, that are going to clue you in to what your final judgment is going to look like.

For example, Latter-day Saints believe that when mortals die, their physical bodies of course go into the ground, but their spirits continue to live on in what we simply call the “spirit world”. As Alma chapter 40 in the Book of Mormon explains, the righteous will be received into a state of paradisiacal happiness in the spirit world, while the wicked will be received into a state of — for lack of a better word — Hell (which we talk more about in this episode). There is obviously a form of judgment going on here.

Now, when Christ comes again, we believe he will reign personally on earth for a thousand-year period known as the Millennium, which we talked about in this episode. Eventually, we believe that every single person who has lived and died, righteous or wicked, will be resurrected. But as we talked about in this episode, not everyone will be resurrected at the same time. People will be resurrected at different periods throughout the Millennium. And the order in which you are resurrected correlates with the degree of heaven you have prepared yourself to receive through your choices in mortality. Thus, your resurrection will also be a mini-judgment, of sorts.

To read the entire article: Faith & Beliefs