Sacrifice

I fell asleep... again. My favorite place in the world, and the most sacred place in the universe and my eyes drooped pulling me into a moment of sleep.  Next time, it'll be different.  I'll find specific things to look for and I won't fall asleep! The Temple really is one of the most important place in the world where we learn about the creation.  Sometimes, it's hard to stay awake because the story of the creation is something often repeated in church lessons.  I hear it so often that it stops becoming a learning experience, but stays just a story.  However, there is so much we can learn from the creation!  In my religion class, I picked up some gems to look for the next time I went to the House of the Lord.

My favorite thing I learned is about sacrifice, and the possible backstory to this scripture:

Moses 4: 27  Unto Adam, and also unto his wife, did I, the Lord God, make coats of skins, and clothed them. (also found in Genesis 3:21)


At first when we read this verse, I was like... Cool!  They get more comfortable clothes than fig leaves.  That's nice... But then our professor pointed something out.  Adam named every animal in that garden.  They were familiar and probably had a deep love for all of the animals in that garden.  Also, Adam and Eve had never seen death before, nor had any idea what death really entailed.  So I'm sure, when God took an animal to make animal skin clothes, they were appalled.  I'm sure they knew the animal that their clothes were made from.  And they wore them.  They wore these clothes and continued to offer sacrifices to the Lord, even though they did not really know what they symbolized.  Now, we have a better understanding of what sacrifices like this symbolized (even though we don't do them anymore.  They were replaced with the sacrament).  It symbolized the atonement and death of Christ.  So, what could that mean?  They were clothed with the skins of a sacrifice and thus (kind of, symbolically) had Christ with them as they traveled in the lone and dreary wilderness.  They were never truly cast out of God's presence as they had things like this to remember Christ and his sacrifice in their everyday lives.

Just like Adam and Eve were never alone, we are also never alone.  We have the opportunity to always have the Holy Ghost with us, and we know that Christ and our Heavenly Parents will never forget us or lead us to eternal failure.  They know our trials and can help us overcome them so that we can learn to be perfect like them.

I am very proud to say, the next time I went to the temple after this lesson, I did not fall asleep :)