Who You Are Before What You Do

Moses 1 and Abraham 3 open the 2026 Old Testament study not with commandments but with identity — and that sequence is the entire argument.

God's First Word to Moses Is Not a Commandment

When Moses stands in the presence of God in the opening verses of Moses 1, the first thing God says is not “keep the commandments” or “build an altar.” It is a declaration about who Moses is:

Moses 1:4

“Behold, thou art my son; wherefore look, and I will show thee the workmanship of mine hands.”

This is not incidental framing. The entire vision that follows — the panoramic display of God's creations, the declaration of his purposes, the direct confrontation with Satan — is built on the foundation of that opening identity claim. Moses can withstand what he is about to face only because he knows who he is first. This is the doctrinal logic of Moses 1, and it is missed when we read the chapter as simply a dramatic prelude to the creation narrative.

The ancient world largely understood the human being as a creature defined by function, status, or fate. You are what you do, what you inherit, or what the gods have decreed for you as a category. The Restoration opens the Old Testament curriculum with a fundamentally different claim: you are a child of God, and that identity precedes and outranks everything else that could be said about you.

Satan's Counter-Move: Identity Erasure

What makes the Satan episode in Moses 1:12–22 so theologically instructive is not that Satan tempts Moses with anything in particular — he doesn't initially offer Moses anything at all. His opening move is purely definitional:

Moses 1:12

“Moses, son of man, worship me.”

Notice the address. Not “Moses, son of God” — which is what God had just said — but “son of man.” This is not mere politeness or alternative phrasing. It is a deliberate identity replacement. Satan is attempting to reclassify Moses from the category God established (“son of God”) to a much smaller category (“son of man” — meaning merely mortal, merely human, merely biological). If Moses accepts that reclassification, he has no ground to stand on.

Moses's response is remarkable precisely because he doesn't argue doctrine with Satan — he simply refuses the reclassification:

Moses 1:13

“Who art thou? For behold, I am a son of God, in the similitude of his Only Begotten; and where is thy glory, that I should worship thee?”

Moses does not primarily rebuke Satan for making a theological error. He reaffirms his own identity and then asks a devastating comparative question: where is your glory? The implication is that Moses has seen true divine glory, and Satan's counterfeit doesn't measure up. Identity secured, comparison made, threat assessed — this is the doctrinal sequence of spiritual resistance the chapter is modeling.

Moses 1:39 — The Thesis of All Scripture

After the vision, after Satan's failed assault, after Moses questions how it is possible that man is nothing yet God has concerns about man (Moses 1:10), God delivers the most concentrated summary of divine purpose in Restoration scripture:

Moses 1:39

“For behold, this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

Two things are easy to miss here. First, God's work and glory is not creation — it is transformation of persons. The worlds, the stars, the vast cosmos Moses just witnessed are not the point. The point is what happens to human beings. Second, “immortality and eternal life” are not the same thing in LDS theology. Immortality (resurrection, living forever) comes through Christ's Atonement and is universal. Eternal life is qualitative — it means God's kind of life, co-inheriting with the Father and Son. The verse therefore encompasses both a universal gift and a particular aspiration.

The placement of this verse matters enormously. It comes before the creation account. We are told what creation is for before we are shown the creation. God's purpose is not to make a world and then populate it with incidental beings; God's purpose is to bring about the exaltation of persons, and the world is the instrument for that purpose. This is not a footnote to the creation narrative — it is the thesis that explains why there is a creation at all.

Abraham 3 and the Premortal World

Abraham 3 contributes the missing backstory. Moses 1 reveals what God is doing and why. Abraham 3 reveals that this was already underway before the world was created. The chapter opens with a cosmological vision of stars and intelligences, then pivots to a scene in the premortal council that has enormous doctrinal weight:

Abraham 3:22–23

“Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones; And God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers; for he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born.”

Several doctrinal claims converge here. First, intelligences are “organized” rather than created ex nihilo — the language of organization appears here as it does in the Creation accounts, and it carries the same implication: material already existed that was shaped and structured rather than conjured from nothing. Second, the evaluation is moral: God “saw that they were good.” Pre-mortal character was already being discerned and recognized. Third, foreordination is selection based on demonstrated capacity, not arbitrary decree.

This last point is widely misunderstood. Foreordination in LDS theology is not predestination in the Calvinist sense — it is not an irresistible decree that overrides agency. It is an appointment based on God's foreknowledge of what a person would do when given the opportunity. The calling is real, but so is the possibility of forfeiting it. Paul understood this when he wrote of making our “calling and election sure” (2 Peter 1:10) — it requires our active participation.

The Council in Heaven: Two Responses to a Single Problem

Abraham 3:27 records the pivotal moment of the premortal council when God asked who would go and be sent to accomplish the mission of redemption:

Abraham 3:27

“And the Lord said: Whom shall I send? And one answered like unto the Son of Man: Here am I, send me. And another answered and said: Here am I, send me. And the Lord said: I will send the first.”

The contrast between the two responses goes deeper than ambition or motivation. Moses 4:1–3 provides additional detail: Lucifer proposed to “redeem all mankind” by destroying agency, guaranteeing outcomes, and claiming God's glory as his own. Christ's response, by contrast, was one of submission: “Father, thy will be done.” The difference is not only between coercion and freedom — it is between a model that eliminates the possibility of becoming (because becoming requires the possibility of failure) and a model that accepts the risk of loss in order to make genuine development possible.

Lucifer's plan would have guaranteed immortality for all but foreclosed eternal life for anyone. You cannot grow into something if you are compelled toward it. You cannot develop faith if there is no risk. You cannot exercise love if there is no alternative to love. The plan that was rejected was not rejected because it was wicked in intent — it may have been offered with genuine concern for success rates — but because it was structurally incompatible with what God was actually trying to produce. God's work and glory is not merely to deliver beings to a destination; it is to transform them along the way.

This is why the war in heaven was not primarily about this world; it was about whether this world would even be possible. Lucifer's rejection was the rejection of the very conditions that make growth possible. The third part who followed him did not lose a battle — they rejected the process by which they could have become something greater than what they already were.

Mortal Life as Continuation, Not Punishment

One of the most important contributions of Moses 1 and Abraham 3 together is the reframing of mortality. In many theological traditions, being in a mortal body is understood as either a punishment (Gnostic and Platonic strands) or as an arbitrary starting point (tabula rasa traditions). The Restoration teaches something distinct: mortality is the continuation of a journey that began premortally, and the conditions of mortality were chosen precisely because they provide what a premortal existence could not.

Cross-References

• D&C 93:29 — Intelligence, or light and truth, was not created or made
• D&C 138:55–56 — Faithful spirits were prepared in premortal life for their mortal missions
• Alma 13:3 — Priests ordained according to foreknowledge of God, based on exceeding faith and good works
• Jeremiah 1:5 — Before thou camest forth out of the womb I knew thee; and I ordained thee a prophet

Abraham 3:25–26 makes this explicit: “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.”

The word “prove” here is not adversarial — it is the language of metallurgy and testing, the process of demonstrating what something is made of. Mortality is not a sentence; it is a proving ground designed to reveal and develop capacities that could not be developed in any other way. The body itself is part of the gift — without it, the fulness of joy promised in D&C 93:33 is impossible: “For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.”

The Brilliance of Beginning Here

There is profound pedagogical wisdom in the order the Come Follow Me curriculum follows by opening with Moses 1 and Abraham 3 before Genesis 1. The traditional Genesis narrative begins in the middle of the story. It tells us what was made but not why, and it tells us very little about the persons involved before their mortal experience began. Moses and Abraham fill in what Genesis assumes.

When we then read Genesis 1's declaration that mankind is made in God's image and likeness (Genesis 1:26–27), we understand it not as a poetic flourish but as a literal doctrinal claim: we are made in the image of God because we are, in some profound sense, of the same species as God. D&C 130:22 is the doctrinal statement of what Genesis implies: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's.” The image is not metaphorical.

Reading Moses 1 and Abraham 3 first means we come to the entire Old Testament with a different posture. We are not anonymous creatures reading about distant events. We are participants in a story that was already in progress before we were born, playing roles for which we were foreordained, in a world that was created specifically so we could become something more than we already were. That is the frame within which the rest of the Old Testament makes sense.

Practical Doctrinal Implications

The doctrinal content of these two chapters has direct practical implications that are rarely drawn out explicitly. First, spiritual confidence is not arrogance. When Moses says “I am a son of God” in the face of satanic pressure, he is not being prideful — he is being accurate. The capacity to withstand spiritual attack is directly proportional to one's certainty about one's own divine identity. Doubt about identity creates vulnerability; clarity about identity creates strength.

Second, foreordination is a call to responsibility, not a guarantee of effortless success. Abraham was told he was one of the noble and great ones — and then spent decades in a foreign land, childless, waiting for promises to be fulfilled. The calling does not eliminate difficulty; it provides the identity frame within which difficulty makes sense. You are not being punished by your trials; you are being proved.

Third, God's work and glory being defined as the transformation of persons means that every interaction, every commandment, every covenant has this as its purpose. The law is not arbitrary; it is the structured curriculum of becoming. The Sabbath, the dietary laws, the temple ordinances — these are not tests of obedience for obedience's sake but instruments of formation. God is not trying to see if you will perform; he is trying to shape who you are.

Key Doctrinal Points

• Identity before commandment — God establishes who Moses is before asking anything of him
• Satan's tactic is reclassification — reducing “son of God” to “son of man”
• Moses 1:39 defines all of creation's purpose — transformation of persons, not mere production of worlds
• Foreordination is responsibility, not guarantee — based on foreknown capacity, requiring agency to fulfill
• Mortality is continuation, not punishment — the proving ground designed for becoming

The question Moses 1 leaves us with is not “what did God make?” It is “who does God say you are?” And the answer given there — repeated by Christ at his baptism (Matthew 3:17), repeated in the Doctrine and Covenants to every ordinance recipient — is that you are a beloved child with a divine nature and an eternal destiny. Everything else in the Old Testament, from the covenants to the sacrifices to the prophetic warnings, is an elaboration of that claim and an instrument in the service of its realization.