Time Only Is Measured unto Men

Ask a Christian what eternity is and you will usually hear one of two answers. The first is that eternity is a very long time. The calendar simply never runs out. The second is the answer of the theologians: God stands outside of time altogether, seeing every moment at once, with no before and no after in His own existence. Augustine taught it. Boethius refined it. Most of Christian theology has held it for well over a thousand years, and it deserves respect, because it was protecting something true. God does not age. God is not surprised by tomorrow.

Both pictures leave the hard questions standing. If eternity is only more time, why would more of it make anyone holy? If God is outside of time altogether, how does He walk in a garden, answer a prayer tonight, or send His Son in a particular year?

The scriptures are plainer than either picture, and stranger. Alma was writing to his son Corianton, whose mind was worried about the resurrection, when he said this:

“Time only is measured unto men.” Most readers pass right over those words. They should not. They say time is something MEASURED out, and measured to someone. Follow that thread through the restored scriptures and you end up somewhere few people have looked: at a God who appoints times to kingdoms, a man in a garden living on the Lord’s reckoning, and an Atonement performed in one hour that reaches every hour.

Look at the verbs. We say time passes, as though it were weather. Scripture says time is measured (Alma 40:8), appointed (Abraham 3:4, Alma 40:10), reckoned (Abraham 3:6) and granted (Alma 42:4). Those are things somebody does. An appointment has someone who made it, someone it was made for, and a purpose.

The word “eternal” needs the same care. Nearly everyone assumes it means lasting forever. The Lord corrected that assumption directly when He explained why the scriptures speak of endless torment:

Eternal punishment is God’s punishment. The word tells you whose it is. It does not tell you how long it lasts, and verse 6 says so: “it is not written that there shall be no end to this torment.” So when Jesus says “this is life eternal, that they might know thee” (John 17:3), He is describing a kind of life, God’s kind. For a soul that cannot die, a long life is no achievement. Everyone gets that.

The Bible has been pointing this way all along. God is “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:2). A thousand years in His sight are “but as yesterday” (Psalm 90:4), and Peter repeats the thought (2 Peter 3:8). Isaiah calls Him the One “that inhabiteth eternity” (Isaiah 57:15), which is an odd way to describe a being who has no relation to duration at all. None of these verses says God is outside of time. That idea came later, from philosophers.

The most overlooked revelation on time may be the one Joseph Smith received in the winter of 1832 and 1833, which he called the olive leaf. Section 88 is usually read for its teaching on the degrees of glory. Read it again for what it says about space:

Read that slowly. There is no space without a kingdom. There is no kingdom without space. Every kingdom has a law, and every law has bounds and conditions. What is a kingdom? The revelation will not hold it to one size, “either a greater or a lesser kingdom.” A few verses later it names the earth, the sun, the moon and the stars, then says “all these are kingdoms” (D&C 88:45–47). Some readers take this to mean other universes. That may be so. The text says only that there are many.

Then the same revelation ties those kingdoms directly to time:

LAW comes first, and times come from the law. “All these are one year with God, but not with man.” The revelation closes the subject with a sentence worth memorizing: “every kingdom in its hour, and in its time, and in its season, even according to the decree which God hath made” (D&C 88:61). Ten years later Joseph was asked whether God’s, angels’, prophets’ and men’s time is reckoned “according to the planet on which they reside.” His answer was one word. “Yes” (D&C 130:4–5).

So here is the first inference, and it is ours, not the text’s. A kingdom is a space, the matter and energy that fill it, and the law it is given. Its times belong to it. Time, on this reading, is one river only to the people standing in it. There are as many times as there are kingdoms, and God appoints them all.

Before we go to Eden we need to ask a simple question. What is a day? Most people answer without thinking: one turn of the earth. Scripture never defines it that way.

The Gods called the LIGHT Day. That is the first definition the word ever receives, and Genesis 1:5 gives the same one. It comes before any sun. Three days are counted before the lights are organized “for days and for years” (Abraham 4:14), and the greater light is not set “to rule the day” until the fourth time (Abraham 4:16, Abraham 4:19). Whatever those first days were, they were not measured by the earth turning under the sun.

Notice what Abraham does next. Genesis counts a first day and a second day. Abraham counts “the second time,” “the third time,” and “the sixth time” (Abraham 4:8, Abraham 4:13, Abraham 4:31). Day and time trade places. A single day can even hold the whole of it: “in the day that the Gods formed the earth and the heavens” (Abraham 5:4).

A day can also be a span of work. “The day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors” (Alma 34:32). Jesus said He must do His Father’s works “while it is day” (John 9:4). The Lord says “now it is called today until the coming of the Son of Man,” and calls that “speaking after the manner of the Lord” (D&C 64:23–24). Is today twenty-four hours long? Not in that verse.

So a day in scripture has layers. It can be the turn of a body: “one revolution was a day unto the Lord.” It can be a count within a reckoning: “after his manner of reckoning” (Abraham 3:4). And it can be an appointed span of light in which a work gets done. It is all of these, and more than any one of them. Facsimile 2 even says celestial time “signifies one day to a cubit,” tying a day to a measure of length (Figure 1). Does that sound strange? A day is time and a cubit is length. In 1842 everyone knew those were two different things.

Physics no longer thinks so. Time and length turned out to be bound together. Take a muon, a tiny particle made high in the atmosphere that lives only about two millionths of a second. It should decay long before it reaches the ground, yet it arrives. Why? Ask from the ground and the answer is TIME: its clock runs slow. Ask from the muon’s side and the answer is LENGTH: its clock runs normally, and the distance to the ground has shrunk. It is the same event, the same result and the same factor. Time stretches for one observer, length contracts for the other, and what one reckons as time the other reckons as distance. Our units now work the same way. The meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second, and astronomers measure the universe in light-years.

Is that what the facsimile meant? We cannot say, but look at the sentence. It is about measurement, and it reads like a conversion: “One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth.” “One day to a cubit” has the same form as “twelve inches to a foot.” A day is a unit, set against a unit of length. Physics does the same thing with light: one second of time goes with one light-second of distance. The Bible had already measured time this way. “The measure of my days” is “as an handbreadth” (Psalm 39:4–5), and when Jesus asked who could add “one cubit unto his stature” (Matthew 6:27), many scholars read the Greek as span of life, not height. Nothing in the text says this cubit is built on light, and one proposal reads it as an angle in the sky. But a day measured against a length is no blunder. In 1842 anyone who laughed at it had common sense on their side. Physics has since taken that side away.

Now we can read one of the most remarkable sentences in all of scripture on this subject. It is easy to miss. Abraham is retelling the commandment given in Eden, and he stops to add a comment of his own:

Three things are stated there. First, there was time in Eden: “in the time that thou eatest thereof.” The garden was not a timeless state. Adam tended it and named the animals, and one thing followed another. Second, that time was “the Lord’s time.” Third, Adam did not yet have a reckoning of his own, because the Gods had not appointed it.

Why does that matter? Because the commandment has a famous problem. Genesis says “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17), and Adam then lived 930 years (Moses 6:12). Did God’s warning fail? Abraham’s comment answers that, whether or not he meant it to. The time was the Lord’s, and the Lord’s day, by His own reckoning, is a thousand of ours (Abraham 3:4). Adam died inside it.

This reading is very old. The Book of Jubilees, written before the time of Christ, solves the same problem the same way:

Christians knew the idea too. Irenaeus reports in the second century that some placed Adam’s death within the thousandth year, “since a day of the Lord is as a thousand years.” We should be careful here. Jubilees did not reach English until 1888, long after Abraham was published, but Irenaeus was in print and Psalm 90 was in every Bible, so this proves nothing about where Joseph got it. What it DOES show is that Abraham 5:13 is no modern oddity. It stands in an ancient line of reading.

What was Adam’s condition, then? Lehi gives the other half. Without the Fall, “all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end” (2 Nephi 2:22). Time, but no running out. Sequence, but no death. Adam was an immortal man living on the Lord’s reckoning.

Then he fell, and the Lord says what followed:

“Appoint unto man the days of his probation.” Set that beside Abraham’s “had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning.” Scripture never says in so many words that the reckoning was appointed at the Fall, so this is inference, but it is close to the surface. The law Adam lived under changed, and he was cast out “from my presence” (D&C 29:41). If times come from law, then his time changed with it. Doctrine and Covenants 77 speaks of the earth’s “seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence” (D&C 77:6). The word comes from the Latin for time. Temporal means time-bound.

Two cautions belong here. Brigham Young went further and taught that at the Fall the earth itself “fell into space” from near God’s throne. That is a sermon, not scripture, and nothing below depends on it. And none of this settles how old the earth is, or how Adam’s body came to be. The Church has left those questions open. If the seven thousand years count the temporal span, the one under an appointed reckoning, then scripture simply has not told us how long anything lasted before that reckoning began. How could it be measured in units that had not been appointed?

Most people assume mortal time is the curse. We get old, the clock runs down, and we blame Adam. Alma reads it the other way around. After the Fall, cherubim and a flaming sword kept Adam from the tree of life. Why?

“Having no space for repentance.” Death was the penalty. Time was the MERCY that came with it. Even in this case notice how space and time are being interchaged.

Alma once heard this used against him. Antionah, a chief ruler in Ammonihah, heard that the soul can never die and reached for Genesis: God set cherubim and a flaming sword before the tree of life, so “there was no possible chance that they should live forever” (Alma 12:21). It is a fair objection. Look at how Alma answers it. If Adam could have eaten “at that time,” there would have been no death (Alma 12:23). To his son he says “immediately” (Alma 42:5). Both answers turn on WHEN. The tree was never withdrawn for good: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life” (Revelation 2:7). We read the sword as saying not yet, rather than never. Instead of the tree, Adam received “a space granted unto man in which he might repent,” so that “this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God” (Alma 12:24). Lehi says “their time was lengthened” (2 Nephi 2:21). Had they eaten of the tree, “they would have been forever miserable, having no preparatory state” (Alma 12:26).

Think about what that means. A fallen being who could never die, and who had no span in which to change, would simply stay what he was. Forever. So God gave him an appointment: a beginning, an end, and room between them for a different choice. The clock on your wall is not your enemy. It is the reason you can still become something else.

For two centuries educated people believed what Isaac Newton wrote: that absolute time “flows equably without relation to anything external.” One clock for the whole universe. It was common sense, and it was wrong.

Einstein showed in 1905 and 1915 that there is no such clock, and every test since has agreed. In 1971 atomic clocks flew around the world on airliners and came home disagreeing with the clocks they had left, by close to the amounts relativity predicted. In 2010 physicists at NIST raised one clock 33 centimeters, about a foot, and measured the difference. Engineers build the correction into every GPS satellite. NIST has calculated that clocks on the Moon run about 56 millionths of a second a day faster than clocks on Earth, and lunar missions will have to allow for it. All of this is established. Time really does differ from place to place. Each body carries its own time along its own path, and physicists call that proper time.

What sets the difference? Matter and energy shape the geometry of spacetime, and a clock runs according to where it sits in that geometry and how it moves through it. People sometimes say that the density of energy in a place sets its time. That is close but not quite right, because the rate follows gravitational potential, not local density. A clock at the center of a hollow shell feels no gravity at all and still runs slow. The honest summary is that what fills a space shapes the time of that space. Readers of Section 88 will notice the parallel. It is a parallel, not a proof.

Is time itself fundamental? Here we cross from established to open. In general relativity spacetime is real and dynamic. Many researchers working on quantum gravity suspect that space and time emerge from something deeper, and they have real results in simplified model universes. No one has shown that for the universe we live in. So time MAY be emergent. Anyone who tells you it is settled is ahead of the evidence.

Then there is light, and this is where the physics gets interesting. You have probably heard that light experiences no time. Is that true? Nearly. Along the path of a beam of light the spacetime interval is exactly zero, and there is no frame of reference in which light is at rest, so no clock can ever ride along with it. Strictly speaking, the question of what light experiences has no answer, because there is no vantage point from which to ask it. Light does not experience timelessness. It has no clock at all.

Now compare a proton. Almost none of its mass comes from the mass of its quarks. Calculations from the theory of the strong force put about 95 percent of it in the energy of what is confined inside. Energy held in one place has mass, and anything with mass travels slower than light and has a clock. Einstein saw the root of this in 1905: a body that takes in energy gains mass. Put simply, free light has no clock, and bound energy does. To bind energy is to give it a time. That looks a great deal like the doctrine of embodiment, and we will come back to it.

Did Joseph Smith know relativity? We cannot say. He left us no physics, and no one can read his mind. What we can do is read what he gave us, and it goes further than most people have noticed.

Start with the key verse. One revolution of Kolob “was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest” (Abraham 3:4). That is one event, measured two ways, by two reckonings that do not agree. It has the same shape as time dilation. In Newton’s universe that could never be anything more than two calendars. In Einstein’s universe it can be two physically different rates of time. And since a day is more than the turn of a body, this verse may hold far more than a rotation period.

Does it? The text does not say, and a careful reader should know why. There are simpler readings to weigh. Venus takes 243 of our days to turn once, and nobody needs relativity for that. But a thousand years is another matter. A day normally means a spin, and a planet turning once in a thousand years would be unlike anything reasonable: about 1,500 times slower than Venus, with an Earth-sized equator creeping along at about a millimeter per second. A thousand-year orbit is easy, but an orbit makes a year, not a day. Abraham also calls Kolob one of the stars (Abraham 3:2–3), and there the case is less clear. The longest star rotation pinned down so far is 29 years, though astronomers infer some of several centuries and perhaps a thousand years. So the plain spin reading is hard for a planet and unproven for a star. It is not the only simple reading. The verses that follow build a ladder in which the lesser light has a longer reckoning “for it moveth in order more slow” (Abraham 3:5), with “the revolutions thereof” in view (Abraham 3:4). As far as Abraham could see, that reads as periods. And the visible part of the ladder runs the other way from clock rates. In relativity the faster traveler’s clock runs slow and a higher clock runs fast, and the Moon’s clocks do run faster than ours. How far up the ladder the simple reading holds, the text does not tell us.

What would it take to reach a thousand years to a day? That is a factor of 365,250, and relativity gives two ways to slow a clock. The first is gravity. Among the stars we know, general relativity will not let a stable star slow a surface clock by more than a small factor, about three for an ordinary star. Reaching 365,250 would mean hovering a few inches above the horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. But that is a limit on the matter we know. Kolob is “after the reckoning of the Lord’s time” and “set nigh unto the throne of God” (Abraham 3:9), and every kingdom has its own law (D&C 88:38). We do not know what it is made of. By gravity alone, Kolob would be unlike any star we have measured.

The second way is SPEED, and speed has no such limit. As a body nears the speed of light relative to us, its clock runs slow by as large a factor as you like, whatever the body is made of. A factor of 365,250 takes a speed about one millimeter per second short of light. That sounds impossible, but particles in the cosmic rays reach the earth every day moving faster than that. Notice too how the verse is worded. It counts the thousand years “according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest” (Abraham 3:4), from Abraham’s side, and that is the side from which a fast body’s clock runs slow.

Two cautions belong here. Relative speed cuts both ways: each side reckons the other’s clock as the slow one, until one of them turns around and comes home, and the one who made the journey has aged less. Keep that picture for when we come to the God who comes and goes. And Abraham never says Kolob moves fast. “Moveth in order more slow” seems to point the other way, though it is said of the lesser light (Abraham 3:5), and a long revolution does not mean a low speed. Our sun takes about 230 million years to circle the galaxy, and it moves some seven times faster than the earth moves around the sun. So physics does not rule the idea out by either road, and the text does not tell us which road, if either, it has in view.

Two other points need saying. The thousand-to-one ratio itself was not new; it was already in Psalm 90 and 2 Peter. And the setting is ancient. Latter-day Saint scholars have shown that Abraham’s astronomy reads as geocentric, like nearly all ancient astronomy, with the earth as the point of reference. Critics, for their part, point to Thomas Dick’s Philosophy of a Future State, a chapter of which ran in the Church’s Messenger and Advocate in December 1836 (source).

Now look at what no star chart explains. Abraham 5:13 treats a reckoning as something a PERSON has and can be given. God does set calendars for peoples (Exodus 12:2), but here the reckoning is Adam’s own. Section 88 gives each kingdom its own times by law. That sits very close to proper time, which belongs to the traveler and not to the universe. Here is what can be said with confidence:

Restored scripture never assumed one universal clock for God and man. These texts date from 1832 to 1843, when Newton’s absolute time was simply how educated people understood the world. They speak of one event measured by two reckonings, and of a reckoning appointed to a man. Relativity later showed there is no universal clock, and that different reckonings can be physically real. So these texts may mean more than anyone in 1842 could have seen. We should not offer that as proof, because the simpler readings remain open. It is a remarkable congruence, and it is worth the reader’s attention. For the star itself, see Kolob and the explanation of Facsimile 2, which places it “nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God.” God is not said to live on it. He is said to be near it.

Near in what sense? Look at how the text measures it. The ladder runs “in point of reckoning” (Abraham 3:5), one planet above another “until thou come nigh unto Kolob” (Abraham 3:9), and Abraham is given “the set time of all the stars that are set to give light, until thou come near unto the throne of God” (Abraham 3:10). No verse gives a distance. The measure scripture gives is TIME. Kolob is the star whose reckoning stands nearest to the Lord’s. Abraham does see the star itself as nearest (Abraham 3:2), so we cannot rule out place as well, but what the text measures is a reckoning.

If every kingdom has its own hour, what is God’s relation to all those hours? Section 88 answers with a parable, and it is told of “all these kingdoms.” A man has a field and sends twelve servants into it, promising to visit each one in his own hour:

Notice what the lord of the field DOES. He comes. He tarries. He withdraws. Then he comes to the next. The revelation applies this directly: “every kingdom in its hour, and in its time, and in its season” (D&C 88:61).

Our second inference comes from this. God is not SUBJECT to the time of any kingdom. He enters it, He is present in it, and He leaves it for another. The times are His to set: “the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7). “He changeth the times and the seasons” (Daniel 2:21). Speaking of His own view, He says “unto myself my works have no end, neither beginning” (D&C 29:33). While He is in a kingdom He keeps its law, for He is a God of law, and He would not be God otherwise (Alma 42:25).

This also clears up what looks like a contradiction. Scripture says God HAS a time of His own (D&C 130:4–5, Abraham 3:4). It also says all things are “manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord” (D&C 130:7). To Moses: “all things are present with me, for I know them all” (Moses 1:6). The Times and Seasons, in an unsigned editorial in an issue Joseph Smith edited, said that “the past, the present and the future, were, and are with him one eternal now.” Which is it? Does God have time, or is everything present to Him? Both. His visits in the parable come in order, so He is not timeless. But a being bound by no kingdom’s clock can hold the whole of a kingdom’s hours before Him at once. The classical theologians were right that God sees it all. They went too far in saying that He has no time of His own.

How does He move between kingdoms? It has not been revealed. We do have one careful description of a heavenly messenger leaving, from Joseph Smith:

What follows is a picture and nothing more. General relativity permits, on paper, a passage joining two distant regions of spacetime, usually called a wormhole. In principle the two ends could even show different clock readings, which is why the idea is so suggestive for beings who move between kingdoms. Now the limits. No wormhole has ever been observed. Holding one open would require matter with negative energy density, which no known substance has in any useful amount. Stephen Hawking suspected that physics forbids the time-travel versions, and that question remains unsettled. Joseph said “as it were,” he was describing Moroni, and he named no mechanism.

Still, one objection is weaker than it sounds. Physics says no KNOWN matter would do it. Doctrine teaches that there is matter we do not know: “All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (D&C 131:7). Celestial matter is about as exotic as it gets. No scripture says it has the property a wormhole would need, so this answers the objection and proves nothing else. No doctrine in this article rests on it. If the picture is wrong, nothing here changes.

Where do you fit in all this? Further back than most Christians have ever been told.

Abraham adds that spirits “have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal” (Abraham 3:18). What is intelligence? The verse answers that itself: it is “the light of truth.” The same section says it again: “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36). The Church has not ruled on every detail, such as whether each person’s intelligence was a distinct individual from the start, and faithful Latter-day Saints read that in more than one way (Intelligences explores those readings). The core is revealed. Intelligence is the light of truth, and it was NEVER made.

When did an eternal intelligence first have time? Look at who was at the council. Abraham saw “the intelligences that were organized before the world was,” and God “stood among those that were spirits” (Abraham 3:22–23). These were not bare intelligences. On the reading this site takes, a spirit is an intelligence already embodied in spirit matter, and that body is the first estate. Then there was a council, a choice, a rebellion, and spirits who kept or did not keep their first estate (Abraham 3:22–28). You cannot have a council, a choice or a rebellion without TIME, and every one of those happened to embodied beings. So embodiment does give you time. The first body brought you into a reckoning, and each step after it gives you a NEW reckoning, under a new law: spirit, then flesh, then resurrection, each one “added upon” (Abraham 3:26). Intelligence itself is eternal. Its formation and embodiment as a spirit is what gave it time. That is our inference from the word “organized” and from everything that followed, because no verse says so outright.

Why be embodied at all? Because “spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; and when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:33–34). A body is an increase.

Now see how far Section 88 carries that same phrase. It calls Christ “the light of truth,” then continues: “Which truth shineth. This is the light of Christ. As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made” (D&C 88:6–7). The light that lights your eyes is “the same light that quickeneth your understandings” (D&C 88:11), and it is “the light which is in all things” (D&C 88:13). All of that is revealed. Intelligence is the light of truth, the light of truth shines in the sun, and the revelation calls it one light. Scripture joins them, so we will not pull them apart.

What scripture has not given us is the physics of that connection. It does tell us this light is more than an instrument can read. Truth is “knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come” (D&C 93:24), and intelligence is free “to act for itself” (D&C 93:30). Nothing in a physicist’s description of light knows anything or chooses anything. So physics may be describing the edge of something much larger, and we do not know how the two fit.

It does offer a picture, and a striking one. Free light has no clock, while bound energy gains mass and a place in time. Now look at embodiment. An eternal intelligence, the light of truth, is clothed first with spirit and then with element, and it is BOUND to that body, “inseparably connected” (D&C 93:33). What is a Spirit? calls embodiment “the union of energy and matter.” Binding gives energy mass and a clock. Embodiment gives an intelligence capacity it did not have and a reckoning to live by.

How far does the likeness go? We do not know. All spirit is already matter (D&C 131:7), and the element in your body was bound energy long before it was yours, so physics does not describe the step itself. How spirit bodies are organized has not been revealed. We see one pattern in two places, and that is as far as the evidence goes.

Everything so far leads here. The Creator of all these kingdoms, who is bound by none of their clocks, entered one of them and lived by its clock:

“The Spirit knoweth all things; nevertheless the Son of God suffereth according to the flesh.” Alma’s “nevertheless” carries a great deal. God already knew. But there is knowing, and there is knowing “according to the flesh.” Christ “descended below all things” (D&C 88:6). He took on the appointed reckoning, the one that ends in death, and He felt each hour of it. “Would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink” (D&C 19:18). That sentence could only be spoken by someone inside of time, in an hour he wished would pass.

And that hour reached backward. Enoch saw it and said “the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world” (Moses 7:47). King Benjamin taught that whoever believed could “receive remission of their sins, and rejoice with exceedingly great joy, even as though he had already come among them” (Mosiah 3:13). Abinadi spoke “of things to come as though they had already come” (Mosiah 16:6). The revelation on Church organization says eternal life belongs to “all those from the beginning, even as many as were before he came” (D&C 20:26). Why was any of this known so long beforehand? Alma answered that for his son: “is not a soul at this time as precious unto God as a soul will be at the time of his coming?” (Alma 39:17).

Can physics explain that reach? Not today. Relativity cannot. It can reorder events that are too far apart for any signal to pass between them, but Adam’s life and Gethsemane are not such events. Adam comes first in every frame of reference there is. No shift of frame inside this kingdom will put Gethsemane before Adam. Anyone who tells you relativity explains the Atonement has misread relativity.

Quantum physics is stranger, and it deserves a fair hearing. In one experiment, a choice made AFTER two photons had been recorded settled whether those photons counted as entangled, and the team described it as “quantum steering into the past.” Serious physicists argue that the future may influence the past. But that is an interpretation, not a finding. The classic delayed-choice experiment can be modeled with no backward influence at all, though some variants make that harder. Entanglement has never carried a message, and recent work on messages to the past studies time loops that no one has shown to exist. So the line between past and future may be less simple than common sense supposes, and that is worth noticing. It does not explain the Atonement. These are correlations among particles, and remission of sins is something else.

The kingdom framework gives a better account, and this is inference. The One who stands beyond this kingdom’s clock has all of its hours before Him. An act done in one of those hours is known to Him in all of them, and He can honor it in all of them. We need not say the Atonement travels backward through time. God, who is not bound by that time, applies it.

How far does that “as though” go? Can a man before Christ really be forgiven? Some have answered no: the sins of the ancients were only covered until the debt was paid, the Holy Ghost did not come until after Christ, and real remission and real relief from guilt had to wait for the Atonement to be finished. There is good scripture behind that view, and we will come to it. But the Book of Mormon has a witness who stands squarely in the way. Roughly five centuries before Gethsemane, a man named Enos prayed all day and into the night:

He asked the very question this article is asking. “Lord, how is it done?” How can a sin be forgiven by a sacrifice that has not happened? Enos’s guilt was swept away, then and there, and the Lord does not correct him. Alma the Younger, about a century before Christ, cried out to a Jesus not yet born and says “I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more” (Alma 36:19). King Benjamin’s people received “a remission of their sins” and “peace of conscience” (Mosiah 4:3). Adam himself was “baptized with fire, and with the Holy Ghost” (Moses 6:66). The Lamanites received the same before Christ came to them (3 Nephi 9:20). The peace was real. The remission was real. So was the Spirit.

Does that mean the date of the Atonement did not matter? Not at all. Mercy cannot rob justice: “If so, God would cease to be God” (Alma 42:25). Abinadi puts the whole weight of it in one sentence: “if Christ had not come into the world, speaking of things to come as though they had already come, there could have been no redemption” (Mosiah 16:6). Paul says God dealt with “sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Romans 3:25). The blood of animals could never “take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4), and Christ’s death was for “the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament” (Hebrews 9:15).

So every forgiveness granted before Gethsemane was APPOINTED, and the appointment held only because the debt would truly be paid. This was no whim. “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated” (D&C 130:20). Repentance was “granted” by law (Alma 42:22), “on conditions of repentance” (Alma 42:13) that a person could meet THEN, by faith in Him who would do it. Enos met them, and Enos had the peace. The payment was still ahead, in a garden, by a Man who would ask whether the cup could pass. Forgiveness was never unconnected to the event.

The resurrection stands under a different condition. It is not a verdict on a soul. It is a body raised to immortality, in a reality bound by its own law, with “bounds also and conditions” (D&C 88:38). No one’s faith could meet that condition ahead of time, because the condition was the deed itself. Christ had to rise first: “every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits” (1 Corinthians 15:23). So NO ONE rose before Him, however fully forgiven. Lazarus came back to mortal life, not to immortality (John 11:43–44). That this is a law of the kingdom and not a mere schedule is our inference, because scripture gives the order and not the mechanism. Some things had to wait for the deed itself:

The Bible Dictionary is careful on the Holy Ghost: statements that He did not come until after the resurrection “must of necessity refer to that particular dispensation only,” and they refer to the gift, not the power. Why the gift was withheld in those years is, it says, “not fully explained in the scriptures.” We should not pretend to explain it either.

But look at the shape of the table. What was given in advance was what a person can receive by FAITH. What waited was what only the finished DEED could do. A conscience can be healed by a promise. A grave cannot. The faithful dead had hope and joy, and Hebrews still says “these all died in faith, not having received the promises” (Hebrews 11:13). When He did come, the saints “rejoiced in their redemption” (D&C 138:23).

Why did it have to be so great a price? Because of what you are.

A being who has no end does not outlive the consequences of what he does. For a mortal who ceases to exist, death would close the account. You will not cease to exist. So if nothing intervened, the Fall and your own sins would simply stand. Jacob says that without an infinite atonement “the first judgment which came upon man must needs have remained to an endless duration,” and that our spirits would become “like unto” the devil (2 Nephi 9:7, 2 Nephi 9:9). King Benjamin speaks of a man who dies an enemy to God awakening to his guilt in “his immortal soul” (Mosiah 2:38). Section 19 teaches that punishment is not automatically without end, and that is the point: left unanswered, these consequences have nothing in them that ends them. Something has to answer them. An eternal being’s choices do not wear off. That is what makes sin so serious, and it has nothing to do with God being harsh.

A finite remedy could not touch that, which is why Amulek insists “it must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice” (Alma 34:10). President Russell M. Nelson listed the ways the Atonement is infinite. He said it “was infinite in time, putting an end to the preceding prototype of animal sacrifice,” and that its mercy extends “to an infinite number of worlds created by Him.” He then called it infinite “beyond any human scale of measurement or mortal comprehension.” That is the sense scripture supports, because the worlds are not uncounted to God: “there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them” (Moses 1:35; see Moses 1:37). Innumerable to man, numbered to God.

The resurrection is the answer in kind. It is also a permanent fact, and it stands against the other permanent facts:

“They can die no more.” “Never to be divided.” Those are words without an expiration date. An eternal consequence of sin met an eternal consequence of the Atonement, and the second one is larger. It reaches “all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous” (Alma 11:44). “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). No one can undo it. No one can earn it.

The remission of sins runs on a condition. “I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent; but if they would not repent they must suffer even as I” (D&C 19:16–17). And here the Atonement does something physics never could. In spacetime, what happened happened. The record stands. Repentance does not go back and erase an event. It removes what that event holds over you: “he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more” (D&C 58:42). The past stays where it is, and it loses its claim on your future.

There is one more effect, and it brings us back to kingdoms. Where will you finally live?

Each kingdom has a law, and you can only abide the kingdom whose law you can live. “Your glory shall be that glory by which your bodies are quickened” (D&C 88:28). The Atonement is what makes a higher law livable. It is the means by which a fallen being on an appointed clock can come back to the Lord’s reckoning, where Adam began. The earth makes the same journey. It “abideth the law of a celestial kingdom,” and though it will die, it “shall be quickened again” (D&C 88:25–26) and crowned “with the presence of God the Father” (D&C 88:19).

Does that mean time will end? Scripture does say “there shall be time no longer” (D&C 88:110, Revelation 10:6). But read the rest of the verse in Section 88. Satan is bound, and “shall not be loosed for the space of a thousand years.” The same sentence that ends time goes on to measure a thousand years. So it cannot mean that sequence stops. What ends is the appointment, the probation, the time that was measured unto men. (Many modern Bibles render the Greek of Revelation 10:6 as “no more delay,” which points the same way.)

“You are forcing science onto scripture.”

That would be a fair charge if this article offered physics as proof of doctrine. It does not. The doctrine stands on the text, and every claim here says what kind of claim it is. The physics is here because it removes an old assumption, the single universal clock, that kept these texts from being read at full strength. Scripture does not need relativity. If physics changes, the doctrine does not.

“God is outside of time. Anything else makes Him a creature.”

This is the strongest objection, and it comes from a serious concern for God’s greatness. But a God bound by no kingdom’s clock, who sets the times and holds all things before Him, gives up nothing that concern was protecting. He is not surprised. He does not age. What this view adds is a God who can actually come: who walks in the garden, tarries with a servant through an hour, and bleeds in Gethsemane. The Bible’s God does those things, and “outside of time” has always struggled to say how.

“If all things are present to God, how can you be free?”

Knowing is not causing. If you watch a recording of a free choice, you do not force it. Beyond that, faithful Latter-day Saints differ on exactly how God’s foreknowledge works, and revelation has not settled it. What scripture does settle is that you were “free forever… to act for [yourselves]” (2 Nephi 2:26), and that God knew what was coming. Foreordination takes this further.

You have been told your whole life that time is running out. In one sense that is exactly backward. You are not running out of existence. You CANNOT. Whatever you are, at the root of you, was not made and will not be unmade.

What is running out is this appointment. That is why Amulek’s urgency has nothing to do with fear of ceasing to be: “this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God” (Alma 34:32). “Do not procrastinate the day of your repentance” (Alma 34:33). Why is this life so important, if you are eternal? Because it is the span God measured out for change, and it has a purpose, and you have not been given a second one like it. Time was never your supply. It is your CHANCE.

If you have buried someone, read Alma 40:8 again. Alma wrote it about the timing of the resurrection, to a son who was worried. “All is as one day with God.” Your child’s death, your husband’s, your mother’s, ended an appointment. It did not end THEM. The years of waiting you feel so heavily are measured unto you, and they do not bind the God who holds your loved one. “This mattereth not,” Alma says, about the very thing that hurts the most. He does not mean it is small. He means it is in hand.

If you are suffering, the same truth holds. Your pain has a measure. The Lord said of Joseph’s enemies, “their bounds are set, they cannot pass” (D&C 122:9). “Thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment” (D&C 121:7), the Lord told a prisoner in Liberty Jail, and Paul calls it “our light affliction, which is but for a moment” (2 Corinthians 4:17). That is not a small thing to say from a dungeon. Neither was it said by someone who does not know. He has been in the hour.

Why not skip all of this? Why not simply tell us what we need to know? Because some things cannot be TOLD. “All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good” (D&C 122:7). Even the Son, who knew all things by the Spirit, took on flesh to know them “according to the flesh.” You came here for the same reason. You were given a clock because a lesson would not have been enough.

And if you have done something you cannot undo, you are right. You cannot. Nothing in physics can reach back and change it. But the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, and Enos was forgiven five centuries early, and no hour of yours is outside the reach of what was done in that one hour. He is not waiting on the far side of time to see how it turns out. He has already come into it, for you.

You were never created, so your existence was never the question. You were given a body, a law, and a measured span. Which kingdom you can abide is the only question still open, and that is what today is for.