Truman Madsen - Lecture on Marriage
Love and Knowledge
The children of Zion should love in proportion to the heavenly knowledge they have received.
Love keeps pace with knowledge; as one increases, so does the other, perfecting together.
Parli Peeprat experienced a pure, intense love after gaining knowledge from Joseph Smith, elevating his soul.
Eternal Family Organization
Parli Peeprat learned from Joseph Smith about eternal family organization.
This includes the eternal union of the sexes in endearing relationships.
These relationships are prized by the intellectual, refined, and pure in heart and form the foundation of happiness.
The wife can be secured for time and all eternity.
Sympathies and affections emanate from divine, eternal love.
These affections can be cultivated and increased eternally.
The Vision of Marriage
A crucial insight into building a meaningful marriage is maintaining the vision.
Without the vision, marriage perishes.
The truth about our past, present, and future is emancipating and motivating.
This truth surpasses other attempts at solving marital conflict.
The Eternity of Sex
Marriage is of God.
The primal commandment was to multiply and replenish the earth.
The highest ordinance is the sealing of husband and wife.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affirms the eternity of sex among the children of God.
The distinction between male and female is not limited to mortal life.
It was essential in our preexistent state and will continue after death in disembodied and resurrected states.
Premortal Existence
The doctrine of preexistence illuminates man's origin.
Man as spirit was begotten and born of heavenly parents.
They were reared to maturity in the Father's eternal mansions before coming to earth.
The Church proclaims man as the direct and lineal offspring of Deity.
All are sons and daughters of Deity in the similitude of the universal father and mother.
Glimpses of the Premortal Realm
We were all present at the great organization in heaven.
We saw the Savior chosen, the plan of salvation made, and we sanctioned it.
We all asked for, prepared for, and anticipated the opportunities of mortality.
Every man with a calling to minister was ordained to that purpose in the grand council before this world.
The organization of spiritual and heavenly beings was agreeable to perfect order and harmony.
Their limits and bounds were fixed irrevocably and voluntarily subscribed to in their heavenly estate.
These principles should be embraced to expect eternal life.
We are lawful heirs according to the flesh and saviors unto our family, Israel, through the priesthood.
Brigham Young's Revelatory Dream
Joseph Smith showed Brigham Young the pattern of family organization as it was in the beginning.
The priesthood had been taken from the earth and needed to be joined together.
This creates a perfect chain from Father Adam to his latest posterity.
Keep the spirit of the Lord; it will lead you right.
They will find themselves as they were organized by our Father in heaven before they came into the world.
Our Father in heaven organized the human family, but now they are disorganized and in great confusion.
Nostalgia or celestial homesickness exists as we struggle to find ourselves and a home.
Ties Between Worlds
The ties of this world will extend to the next.
We had similar ties before this world, some of them at least.
Joseph Smith said that if people knew what was behind the veil, they would try to commit suicide to get there.
The Lord implanted the fear of death to help accomplish His plans.
What is behind the veil is a family relationship with our eternal Father.
We could not stand to stay here if we clearly remembered that relationship.
We are intended to stay to make an eventual glorious reunion possible.
The Church teaches that we lived in a family relationship to our Father and others long before this world.
We should honor and magnify those who belong to us in the blood ties of family.
The Law of Adoption
Have children sealed to their parents and run this chain through as far as you can get it.
It is our duty to honor our father, who begot us in the flesh.
The Spirit of God will be with you when you do this.
Judaism and Family Life
Judaism has a strong tradition of glorifying family life.
In Hebrew, everything in the cosmos is either masculine or feminine.
Jewish lore teaches that man is one stock with the Divine and that there are divine sparks in all mankind.
The Sakhina
Jewish teaching affirms the reality of the sakhina, initially synonymous with the glory of God.
In subsequent centuries, the sekhina has been spoken of as a maternal counterpart of God.
In some forms of medieval Judaism, she is exiled from the divine, and her reunion depends on the redemption of all.
Adam and Eve
Adam was created with two bodies, one of which was pulled away to create Eve.
It is not their final separation from each other that will achieve redemption, but their reunion.
What has God been doing since creation? Making marriages.
How rare is a good marriage? As rare as the parting of the Red Sea.
How important is creation? Every soul is holy ground; every person is an infinity.
Why is murder so abhorrent? If you take a life, you destroy a race.
If you save a life, you save a race.
Abraham and Sarah
Abraham and Sarah are to be honored because Sarah was promised a son in her hopelessness.
On the day Isaac was born, every line in Sara's aged face disappeared; she was rejuvenated.
Sarah dated her age from the birth of Isaac.
Abraham's willingness to sacrifice the only hope he and Sara had elevated that flatland into a sacred mountain.
Man in celibacy is in sublime ignorance, not entitled to the dignified name of man.
The High Priest
The high priest at the holy of holies on the Day of Atonement could only do so if he had a wife.
According to Talmudic law, only if his heart was permeated with the love of wife and children could he offer up family prayer.
The Glory of Women
God breathed into Adam the breath of life, but to Eve, God directed His creative power, translated as lives.
Have, Eve, means life or lives in Hebrew.
The woman is glorified in ways no other tradition matches.
It is woman's persuasive power that led man out of paradise, and it is woman's light that will bring him back.
A father is incomprehensible without a mother.
The Sabbath is a queen, and the mother is the queen of the Sabbath, the bride, the culmination of all aspirations.
At Sinai, women received and accepted the decalogue before the men.
The Hebrew words for man and woman have within them the word Yeah, a divine name.
If a husband marries a bad woman, he becomes bad; if a woman marries a bad man, he becomes good.
God pairs in marriages and appoints all destinies.
Man is bound to pay the same respect to his wife's father as to his own father.
A wife is like an altar, an atonement.
All these things point to making the home a sanctuary.
The temple and the home are sanctuaries, one in the image of the other.
Jesus and the Family
Jesus' teachings, miracles, and parables are rooted in family consciousness.
The most frequent title Jesus uses for the eternal is Father, abha, which means daddy.
Jesus first announced his role as the anointed one to a prodigal Samaritan woman by a well, symbolizing the heart of Abraham's religion.
The water you take from this well will not fully satisfy your thirst, but the water I give will.
Go, call thy husband and come hither.
There is a tie in Jesus' thinking between the well of living water, the gospel, and eternal family.
Both in His mortal ministry and in modern scripture, Jesus speaks of Himself as the bridegroom.
He speaks of the Church as a bride adorned for the day when the bridegroom will unveil the heavens.
His plea is that we must abide His law, the law of the new and everlasting covenant of marriage.
There is a passage that seems to contradict that.
Who is my mother? Who is my brother? Who follows me is.
You must understand that you are to become his disciple by becoming a member of the eternal family.
He who was only begotten now becomes the only begetter of that family, the Church of the Firstborn.
This church will enjoy a fulness of His priesthood and a continuation of the power of creation forever.
The Compassion of Jesus
All of Jesus' miracles have compassion in common.
He manifests the most profound compassion when reality has cut across genuine family relationships.
So, for example, a woman is without issue, and he has compassion and heals her.
The person is the only son or daughter of the man who is crying for help.
The cry that made Jesus weep for Lazarus came from his sisters.
The Glorified Family
Salvation points to securing links in the glorified family.
Jesus created the earth.
In the JST translation of the incident in cana, Jesus' mother comes and says, We are without sufficient wine. And he asks,