Before the World Was, Identity Was Established
A synthesis of Weeks 1 and 2 — how Moses 1, Abraham 3, and the creation accounts form a single continuous argument about who we are, why we are here, and what all of it is for.
The Argument in One Movement
The first six chapters of the Come Follow Me 2026 curriculum — Moses 1, Abraham 3, Genesis 1–2, Moses 2–3, Abraham 4–5 — read as a single sustained theological argument when taken together rather than treated as separate episodes. That argument can be stated plainly: before the world existed, you were known; the world was created in order to serve your development; and the goal of everything that follows — every commandment, every covenant, every test — is to bring you to the kind of life that God himself lives.
This is not a series of interesting facts about cosmic history. It is the doctrinal foundation of the entire Restoration claim. The Christianity of the creeds insists on an infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity. The Restoration insists on a family resemblance and a shared trajectory. Everything else — every doctrine of salvation, every ordinance of the temple, every promise of the covenant — depends on that foundational claim being true. Moses 1 through Abraham 5 is where that claim is established.
Let us trace the argument from beginning to end.
Step One: Premortal Identity (Abraham 3; Moses 1:1–11)
The argument begins with Abraham 3's revelation that intelligences were organized before the world was — that we existed as conscious, moral beings before we had mortal bodies, before we had this earth, before any of the history recorded in the Old Testament began. God “saw that they were good” (Abraham 3:23). This means that moral character was already present and being assessed before mortality.
Moses 1 reinforces this from the direction of a specific individual: when Moses encounters God, God's first act is to declare Moses's identity as a son of God. This is not a new creation of identity; it is a reminder of an identity that already existed. Moses is not becoming a son of God in that moment — he is being reminded of what he already is so that he can function in accordance with it.
D&C 93:29
“Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”
The premortal existence is not merely an interesting backstory. It is the ground of human dignity. If we are eternally existing intelligences organized by God, then we are not his products — we are his children, with a nature that pre-existed our relationship with him and that he is working with rather than against. This changes what salvation means: not rescue from nothing, but development of something that already existed and was already good.
Step Two: The Purpose Declared (Moses 1:39)
Having established who we are, Moses 1:39 then establishes what God is doing about it: “This is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” The thesis of all creation is stated before the creation itself is described. This is not an accident of textual organization — it is the interpretive key that everything else requires.
God's work is not the maintenance of a cosmos. God's work is the transformation of persons. The worlds, the stars, the vast machinery of the universe that Moses was just shown — all of it is in service of what happens to the beings who inhabit one small portion of it. This is either a staggeringly anthropocentric claim or a revelation about the nature of value: that persons are more important than any impersonal thing, no matter how vast.
The two parts of Moses 1:39 — immortality and eternal life — represent the universal and the particular. Christ's Atonement provides immortality (resurrection) to all. Eternal life (God's kind of life, co-inheriting with the Father) is offered to all but must be chosen and developed into. The plan has both a floor (no one is permanently destroyed) and a ceiling (the fulness of divine life). The entire curriculum from Moses through Malachi is the story of how the ceiling is being made accessible.
Step Three: The Council and the Plan (Abraham 3:24–27)
Abraham 3 then reveals that the means of achieving Moses 1:39 was deliberated, proposed, and decided in a premortal council. It was not simply decreed from above; it was presented as a choice among alternatives, and the alternatives had significantly different implications for what kinds of beings could be produced.
Christ's proposal — to provide a Savior, to respect agency, to accept that some would be lost rather than compel all to be saved — was chosen because it was the only proposal that could produce the kind of beings Moses 1:39 envisions. You cannot produce beings of eternal life, capable of God's kind of existence, by removing the conditions that make genuine development possible. Agency, risk, the possibility of failure, and therefore the necessity of grace — these are not bugs in the plan; they are the mechanism by which the plan achieves its stated purpose.
Abraham 3:25
“And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.”
The word “prove” here deserves attention. In metallurgical use, to prove a substance is to test it under conditions that reveal its true composition. A proved soul is not just an obedient soul — it is a soul whose inner constitution has been revealed and developed through the kind of resistance that only mortality provides. The plan was designed not just to test us but to build us.
Step Four: The Stage Constructed (Genesis 1–2; Moses 2–3; Abraham 4–5)
The creation accounts, now understood in context, describe the preparation of the specific environment in which the proving will take place. Every element of the creation serves the human purpose: light and darkness, seas and land, vegetation and animals — all of it is scaffolding for the human experience that will unfold on it.
The Hebrew word “tov” (good), repeated seven times as God assesses each day's work, is not merely an aesthetic judgment. In biblical usage, “good” often means fit for purpose, suited to its role. Each element is “good” in the sense of being fit for the role it will play in the larger design. The earth is good not just because it is beautiful but because it is ready.
The creation of humanity on the sixth day — last, at the apex of the sequence — and the subsequent rest on the seventh day establishes a pattern: the world is built and prepared, humanity is placed within it, and then the covenant sign of the Sabbath marks the transition from construction to operation. The stage is set; the performance can begin.
The garden, specifically, is the sheltered beginning point — a protected environment where the first humans can begin to develop moral awareness without the full weight of the fallen world bearing down on them immediately. The two trees represent the two modes of being available: the preserved mode (tree of life, direct divine access) and the developmental mode (tree of knowledge, independent moral experience). They are not competing options in a permanent dilemma; they are sequential stages in a developmental arc.
The Thread: Premortal Identity through Creation to Mortal Probation
The thread running through all of this is identity. It begins with who we were before the world was. It runs through the purpose declared in Moses 1:39. It threads through the council where the conditions for developing that identity were established. It arrives at a physical world designed to provide the exact conditions needed for that development. And it places individual beings — Adam, Eve, and all who follow them — into that world with a specific divine identity already established and waiting to be realized.
The Four-Part Structure of Weeks 1–2
- Who we are — Eternally existing intelligences, children of God, foreordained (Abraham 3; Moses 1)
- Why we are here — God’s work and glory: our immortality and eternal life (Moses 1:39)
- How it will be done — Through agency, proving, and grace in a fallen world (Abraham 3:25–27)
- Where it happens — A world specifically organized as a proving and developing ground (Genesis 1–2; Abraham 4–5)
This framework transforms the rest of the Old Testament. When we read of covenants with Abraham, we understand them as extensions of the premortal foreordination. When we read of the Exodus, we see it as a pattern of God preserving his covenant people through catastrophe. When we read of the temple, we see it as the place where the conditions of the celestial world are rehearsed and accessed. When we read of the prophets, we see them as the people who understood Moses 1:39 clearly enough to spend their lives calling others toward it.
The Old Testament, read without the Restoration texts, is a collection of ancient history with theological commentary. Read with Moses, Abraham, and the Doctrine and Covenants as interpretive lenses, it becomes a sustained narrative about God's relentless effort to bring about the development of his children through every means available — through law, through prophets, through covenants, through mercy, and ultimately through a Savior whose own mission was previewed in the premortal council of Abraham 3.
These opening weeks of the curriculum are not a warm-up. They are the doctrinal foundation without which everything else in the Old Testament year would be disconnected facts. Who are we? What is God doing? Why does any of this matter? The answer is given at the beginning, and it is this: you are a known and loved child of God, placed in a world designed for your growth, with an eternal destiny that was planned before you were born. The rest of the curriculum tells the story of how God has been working to bring that destiny about.