The Power of an Embodied Soul Over Disembodied Spirits
Why the body you carry — even mortal, even fallen — is a station of power the adversary can never reach, and the very gift that guarantees your triumph over him.
There is a doctrine restored in these last days that overturns the assumptions of nearly every philosophy of men. The world has long supposed that the body is the prison and the spirit is free; that to be rid of the flesh is to be released into purity. The revelations of God declare the opposite. The body is not a cage but a crown. To possess one is to occupy a station; to be denied one forever is the very sentence pronounced upon the damned. The Latter-day Saint understands that an embodied soul — even a weak one, even a sinful one — holds an advantage and a stewardship over every spirit who has no body and never will.
This is not sentiment. It is the consistent witness of scripture, ancient and modern, and it reframes how we regard the temptations of the adversary, the purpose of mortality, and the unbreakable promise of the resurrection.
The Fallen Lost Their Estate — and Their Bodies Forever
Before this world was, all the spirit children of God dwelt with Him. There a contest of agency and obedience unfolded, and a third part rebelled. Jude records their fall in terms of a forsaken station:
“And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.”
John saw the same war and named its leader and its outcome — Lucifer and his hosts cast down, denied the very passage into mortal birth that would have given them flesh:
“And there was war in heaven… And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”
Why is this loss so catastrophic for them? Because the entire plan of God hinges on a sequence of estates, and Abraham was shown the principle plainly. To keep the first estate is to qualify for a body; to keep the second is to qualify for glory:
“And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon… and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.”
The rebellious never kept the first estate. Therefore they were never “added upon” with a tabernacle of flesh. They are spirits, and only spirits, and so they shall remain through all eternity. Every mortal who has ever drawn breath — the weakest, the most wayward — has already done what one-third of the hosts of heaven failed to do. We kept our first estate. We were given bodies. That alone places us above them.
The Body Is Essential to a Fulness of Joy
The reason the loss of a body is the deepest of all losses is that God Himself has revealed what a complete soul is. A soul is not a spirit alone. It is spirit and body joined — and only in that union can the fulness of joy be received:
“For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; And when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy.”
Mark the words carefully. The fulness of joy is not reserved for disembodied spirits in some far-off heaven of clouds and harps. It belongs to the embodied. Spirit and element must be inseparably connected. The devils, severed from element forever, are by definition cut off from the fulness of joy God designed His children to inherit. They forfeited not merely a privilege but the capacity for the highest happiness in existence.
Even the Righteous Dead Feel the Body’s Absence as Bondage
If a body were a burden to be shed, then the noble dead, freed of it, would rejoice in their liberty. But President Joseph F. Smith, gazing into the world of spirits, saw the very opposite. Even the faithful, even the sanctified, regarded their temporary separation from the flesh not as freedom but as captivity:
“For the dead had looked upon the long absence of their spirits from their bodies as a bondage.”
Here is the witness of the righteous themselves. To be a spirit without a body, even briefly, even in paradise, is to be in a kind of bondage. The condition that the devils inhabit permanently is one the saints endure only temporarily — and even temporarily they long to be released from it. How great, then, is the everlasting deprivation of those who can never be released at all.
The Risen Christ Proved the Glory of the Body
When the resurrected Lord appeared to His disciples, they supposed they had seen a spirit. He corrected them in the most direct way imaginable — not by argument, but by showing them His glorified flesh and bones, and drawing the contrast between Himself and a mere spirit:
“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”
The Savior did not ascend by abandoning His body. He triumphed by taking it up again, immortal and incorruptible. The crowning act of the Atonement was not the shedding of the flesh but its eternal reunion with the spirit. Christ stands forever as the living proof that the destiny of the redeemed is embodiment, not escape from it — and the devils, who can never be embodied, can never be like Him.
The Bodiless Crave a Body — Even a Beast’s
Because the unclean spirits hunger for what they forfeited, they seek to enter and afflict the bodies of others. Their craving is so consuming that, when commanded out of a man by the Lord, they pleaded not to be cast out bodiless but begged for the bodies of swine — preferring even the flesh of a herd of pigs to existence with no body at all:
“And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave.”
This is the secret motive behind every effort of the adversary to seize and degrade the body. He envies it. He cannot have one, and so he labors to defile the bodies of those who do — to lead them into the abuse of appetite, the desecration of the sacred powers of life, the slow surrender of the temple they were given. Understanding this unmasks temptation for what it is: the spite of the dispossessed against the possessors of the gift.
Without the Resurrection We Would Become Like Him
Jacob, son of Lehi, taught with terrible clarity what mortality alone would have meant. Had there been no resurrection, our spirits at death would have been forever sundered from our bodies, and in that bodiless state we would have become subject to the devil — reduced to his own condition, sharing his everlasting deprivation:
“Our spirits must become subject to that angel who fell… and we become devils, angels to a devil, to be shut out from the presence of our God, and to remain with the father of lies, in misery, like unto himself.”
To be permanently bodiless is to be made “like unto himself.” The whole horror of damnation is captured in that phrase. And the whole glory of redemption is that the resurrection breaks the sentence. Through Christ, the separation of spirit and body is not the end of the story but a momentary pause before an everlasting reunion. The very fate that would have made us devils is the fate from which He delivers us.
The Doctrine Drawn Together
Gather the witnesses and the doctrine stands complete. Satan and his hosts forfeited their first estate and can never receive a body. The body is required for a fulness of joy. The righteous dead feel its absence as bondage. The risen Lord proved that exaltation means embodiment, not escape. The devils so crave the flesh they beg for the bodies of swine. And without the resurrection, our own bodilessness would have made us subject to that fallen angel forever.
The conclusion is inescapable: because the adversary can never have a body, every embodied soul — even mortal, even fallen — holds a real advantage and a sacred stewardship over the unembodied. This is why the body is to be mastered and consecrated, never despised. To abuse it is to side with the one who hates it. To sanctify it is to honor the gift that places us above him.
The disciplines of discipleship take on a new meaning in this light. To keep the body chaste, to keep it temperate, to bend its appetites to the will of the spirit — this is not the denial of the body but the coronation of it. We govern the very thing the devils would give anything to possess. In ruling our own flesh we exercise a dominion forever denied to them.
The Gift He Can Never Have
Here, then, is the great and terrible irony of the war we are in. The very body the adversary tempts us to misuse is the gift he can never have. Every appetite he inflames, every desecration he urges, is an attack upon the one possession that proves we kept the estate he abandoned. He cannot destroy our bodies; he can only persuade us to dishonor them. And the moment we see his strategy for what it is — the envy of the dispossessed — his temptations lose their power to deceive.
The resurrection is the permanent, unbreakable seal upon our victory. When spirit and element are joined again, never more to be parted, the contest is finished and the adversary is left precisely where he chose to remain — a spirit, and only a spirit, forever. The body you now carry, with all its weakness and all its struggle, is at once the prize he covets, the proof of your faithfulness in a former world, and the guarantee of your triumph over him in this one. Honor it. Master it. Consecrate it to God. For in the body lies the fulness of joy, the likeness of the risen Christ, and the everlasting answer to the one who has none.