We Have Forgotten What Humans Really Are

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]We live in a world that increasingly desecrates the image of God. And when a society stops valuing God, eventually it stops valuing itself. Recently, we went to England to interview Christian biblical scholar Margaret Barker, who has spent decades studying the ancient temple tradition and the beliefs of the earliest Christians. And one of the things that emerges from that world is a breathtaking idea, theosis, divonization, or deification, however you name it. The idea is that humanity was never meant to remain merely mortal, but that we are divine beings and embryo. That every person around you is eternal. And if that is true, then the way we treat one another has consequences far beyond this life. I'm Hayden Paul and this is the stick of Joseph.

[00:00:53]All right, so we're going to watch a clip from Margaret Barker, one of our many interviews that we did with her today. But first, I want to qualify it with the subject that I kind of laid out in the intro. As I said in the beginning, we live in a time and place where not many people value God. And when we don't value God, the truth is we won't value ourselves. As the Bible says, we're made in the image of God.

[00:01:13]And when we either desecrate God, we're desecrating ourselves, or if we desecrate ourselves, we are desecrating God. And at the end of the day, if we want to have a functioning western society, which I think we all do, then we have to grab hold of this idea that there is a spark of divinity inside of every single person, that every single person around us is eternal. We're giving away $500 scholarships to the Nauvoo Discovery Program. If you're between the ages of 18 and 35, whether you're a student or whether you're not, you can go to Nauvoo for 14 weeks and have housing provided as well as meals, and you can live there, do your online classes if you have them, or if you're just trying to get away and experience something new. Every single week in Nauvoo, there will be presentations and excursions that are going to deepen your faith in the restoration of the gospel.

[00:02:03]So, if you would like to claim your $500 scholarship today, click on the link in the description and join the Nauvoo Discovery Program for this fall or spring of next year. One of my other favorite English people other than Margaret Barker is an Englishman by the name of CS Lewis, and he once said, "It's a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.

[00:02:28]to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which if you saw it now you would be strongly tempted to worship or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare all day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities. It is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another. All friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations. These are mortal and their life is to ours as the life of an NAD. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. immortal horrors or everlasting splenders. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merrynt must be of that kind. And it is in fact the marriious kind which exists between people who have from the outset taken each other seriously. No flippency, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner. No mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippency parodies marrynt. Next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he's your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way. For in him also Christ the glorifier and the glorified. Glory himself is truly hidden. Man, CS Lewis had a way of words. And that, if you're interested, that uh comes from a book called Weight of Glory. Really good book. So, as you can see, in our normal society, we're dealing with immortal beings. Everything else, every political party will eventually die. Every single material good that we could earn from business by potentially exploiting or lying will eventually rust away and rot and be lost to the sands of time. But every single human being that we interact with is immortal. And that means the way we treat each other has immortal eternal consequences. And when we lose sight of that in our society, then we're going to start acting of in a flippant way, which causes serious problems. One of the issues in Latter-day Saint scripture especially that many people find overly prudish or overly hardcore is the idea that breaking the law of chastity is next to murder. Now, let's talk about that a little bit, but as you'll see, there's a reason for this. And we find this idea in Alma 39 3-5, which Elma talking to his son Coranton said this, "And this is not all, my son. Thou dst do that which was grievous unto me, for thou did forsake the ministry, and did go over into the land among the borders of the Lammonites after the harlot Isabel. Yay, she did steal away the hearts of many, but this was no excuse for thee, my son.

[00:05:38]Thou should have tended to the ministry wherewith thou hast been entrusted. Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord?

[00:05:46]Yay, most abominable above all sins, save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost. Now, I don't want people who have broken the law of chastity to put themselves in the company of m murderers. It's not the same thing. I've struggled with this the commandment of chastity in my youth myself. Right? So, but we have to understand that yes, it might be the worst of sins other than murder and denying the Holy Ghost, but I think the gap is pretty wide between those. But the question needs to be asked, why is it so serious? Why does Elma go so hard on this subject? Well, there are two things that can send people on one side of the veil or the other, birth and death. And so when you decide that you are going to become the arbiter of birth, when you're going to bring someone through the veil, then you are stepping into a role that needs to be taken seriously. Because as you guys know, who takes us through the veil in the temple? It is just the Lord. So we're participating in something serious where we're either taking someone on this side of the veil or sending them to the other side. And so to do that flippantly with someone that you do not intend to stay with in a committed eternal relationship, then maybe you should not be participating in something that has eternal consequences. Because sex has the power to bring a spirit across the veil and murder has the power to send a spirit across the veil the other direction. Now obviously murder is very clear. Sending someone to the other side of the veil with malice in your heart before their time, that is obviously evil. But playing around with that power that brings people into this world is something that's deeply sacred.

[00:07:25]So as C. Lewis puts it, we should not be dealing with immortal things flippantly.

[00:07:31]And this is actually tied in the ancient Christian doctrine of theosis. Margaret Barker talked about how the early Christians believed in the idea of theosis. And although maybe it wasn't as fleshed out in the exactly the same way that we as Latter-day Saints understand it, there is evidence for it throughout all the early Christian documents and even in the scriptures themselves.

[00:07:54]So let's watch this clip from Margaret Barker and see what she has to say about this doctrine of theosis >> that when you have moved up beyond just the physical life, then you are transformed. You are a holy one and you are therefore living a different quality of life and for you physical death is something that is past in a sense. Um Colossians chapter 3 verse 1 if you have been raised with Christ tense if you have been raised with Christ seek the things that are above. Mh.

[00:08:32]>> And so when you are aware of your resurrected state, when you have uh been raised up, your values, your world view, all these things are no longer those of the world around you. And that is very important in a society where we love statistics and we love sociology and we love studying society as it is and drawing conclusions from that and predicting the future from that. Whereas in fact what we should be doing as Christians is saying what are the values that we bring to this world not the ones that we derive from it. because if we just derive more values, we're just going to go round and round in a circle and end up as a pile of dust. So, uh if you have um a view of a humanist view that the human being is um just a mortal, you look at that those lines at the end of Genesis 3, dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return. And you say, well, >> that's the end.

[00:09:46]>> That's that's it. But you have to remember that dust thou art, dust thou shalt return is actually the curse on Adam when he has turned his back on God.

[00:09:57]>> Mhm.

[00:09:57]>> And that is hugely important.

[00:10:00]So as you can see this idea that we are immortal, it allows us to participate in the creation of the kingdom of God on earth by bringing down God's mortality or his morality rather to the earth rather than trying to derive morality from the earth itself. And this doctrine of theosis, as she pointed out, it's the idea that human beings are not just creations of God, but literal children of God with divine potential. And if that is true, then suddenly human beings are not random biological machines. They are eternal beings. And if we're eternal beings, an eternal perspective matters.

[00:10:40]Short-term decisionmaking destroys societies. It's the reason we are drowning in debt. It's the reason governments become bloated and overly taxed. It's the reason families fall apart. It's the reason people destroy themselves for immediate gratification because we have lost eternal perspective. We no longer think in generations. We no longer think eternally. And that is why we have so many problems with our society. And it starts with how we see ourselves and how we see our brothers and sisters. Jesus talks about this in the sermon on the mount in uh Matthew 5:23. He says, "Therefore, if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way. First be reconciled to thy brother, then come and offer thy gift." Your brother is an eternal being.

[00:11:35]Your relationship with him is important enough that it can actually affect your ability to participate in the eternal work of God. Think about that. We see a very similar pattern in our own temple worship. Before participating in certain ordinances, we are asked to reflect on our feelings towards others. And if we have hated, if we have hatred, malice, bitterness, or unresolved conflict in our heart, we are told to pause and reconcile ourselves. Because the way we treat people matters eternally. So if you have bad feelings towards somebody, fix that. If you don't necessarily have to go and tell somebody, hey, I secretly hated you for years, but do something, serve them, pray for charity towards them, pray that your heart changes. And if there is an open conflict with someone, go and reconcile that because this is all downstream from seeing people correctly, seeing people as divine. My hope from this video is that all of us, myself included, will remember that our brothers and sisters around us are divine and that when we are actually able to see that divinity in one another, it changes who we are.

[00:12:44]The doctrine of theosis is a beautiful doctrine because it allows us and helps us and guides us with the grace of Christ to become more Christian. So we should not be embarrassed of our doctrine that we are the literal children of God, that we are the same species as God. Because if we can truly remember that, then maybe we can begin treating one another with the same reverence that we would treat the creator of the universe.