Council of Heaven Sequence of Events

[CV75]

59 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

From your own link:

If "breaking the bonds of physical and spiritual death" are not redeeming us, then I don't know what is.

Then you just keep reading and count how many times everything was done before the foundation of the earth.

As I said, the discussion can be simplified by adhering only to that talk, which I take to be Gospel truth, but I don’t think its purpose was to pinpoint the sequence of events, perhaps because it is not important from where we stand today.

In the talk, “before the foundation of the earth” refers to the pre-existence. The plan of salvation, since we did not yet possess corruptible bodies, was to save us from stagnation, an estate without progress. In the words of the quote, “It included the glorious possibility of a divine inheritance in the kingdom of God.”

It continues: “Central to that plan was the Atonement of Jesus Christ. In premortal councils, He was foreordained by His Father to atone for our sins and break the bands of physical and spiritual death...” The atonement could refer to the kind I mentioned above. The fall, and the resulting bands of physical and spiritual death, could have come about without a devil or committing sin. I think sin might be mentioned in this talk not because it was a given “before the foundation of the earth” (if it were, the opposing spirits could have been redeemed from the sin of rebellion, but they were cast out), but because it was a possible experience for the testing phase. Since things turned out that way, it happens to be the standpoint from which our mortality was initiated, and so it stands to reason the talk brings it up from this perspective.

In the talk, all the references to “before the foundation of the earth” have to do with the items I mentioned before: laws, blessings, temple ordinances, love, glory, our potential, Christ’s foreordination and preparation; “these unseen but sure pillars were in place before the world was. They undergird the everlasting gospel—now restored in its fulness.”

I certainly misspoke when I said these do not include the Lord’s “atoning or redemptive role” – what I mean to say is that they do not include the Lord’s atoning role as synonymous with or defined by the redemptive role. This is why I differentiated between "atone" for resistive opposition and "redeem” from adversarial opposition in my posts above.