I've been reading "Lost Christianities" by Bart Ehrman. Great book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know why we have the bible that we have today and the fights and compromises that created the Christian Creed that most doctrine in all Christian churches is built on. One guy even got the pre-existence down almost perfectly. This is like 2 BCE so we aren't talking during the restoration or even the reformation that this knowledge was had.
It makes me think about what it would be like in the post resurrection of Christ. I know after the apostles were killed the priesthood had been taken from the earth so the authority to act in the name of God was taken from the earth but the Holy Ghost remained. The constant comforter guided and directed the people that truly wanted to know and wanted to live a life that would bring them closer to their Heavenly Father and Christ. When you could see that someone was actually looking for the truth, because it had only been a few hundred years since the Truth was on earth, they would come so close. But then you read about the ones that were just working to further their own agendas, to subjugate the early Christians to believe in a way contrary to the word of God, but no so much so that they were sinning. Books were owned by the rich and the poor had to believe in who they thought were best to teach them. Then they'd leave and leave these ignorant presbytery on their own to figure things out. And, if you have ever played the telephone game, you know how messed up things can get when you have to teach things by oral traditions. Dr. Ehrman used the term "eternity past", and it got me thinking about eternity in general. We have been taught to think of our life before the flesh as the "pre-mortal existence", but that denotes a start in our spiritual evolution. Like *poof* one day we appeared from the miasma of the universe and became a sentient being with the desire to grow and learn and progress through the mortal coil and forward. But we have always been, we always are, and we always will be. That's hard to wrap my brain around at time, but it sure does take the pressure off of my perceived failures and inabilities of this life.
With the new term, Eternity Past, that means we are in Eternity Present and we are heading into Eternity Future. Eternity....What a way to live!
