Lessons on the Plan of Salvation
Lesson No. Seventeen

Our Common Family Tree

Mankind did not evolve from a lower form of life – Even though many people are taught to believe in evolution we know through revelation that we are children of Heavenly Parents.

Many people believe that we are all spirit children of God.  What is not understood is that the physical bodies of Adam and Eve were also begotten by Heavenly Parents. Everything else was created.  That we are natural heirs of God, body and spirit, is what is unique and precious about mankind.  It is what gives us a conscience and sets us apart from all other creations.

“The original man, the first of our race, began life as…the human germ or embryo that becomes a man.” (The Origin of Man, Official Statement of the First Presidency, November 1909).  President Joseph F. Smith taught that “Adam, our earthly parent, was also born of woman, the same as Jesus and you and I” (Deseret News, Dec 27, 1913).  Joseph Smith clarified the description of Adam’s genealogy in Luke.  Instead of “Adam, which was the son of God,” he clarified it to read: “Adam who was formed [born] of God, and the first man upon the earth” (JST Luke 3:45). That Adam and Eve had a mother and a father is in conformity with the observable laws of nature associated with the re-production of all life.  “Where was there ever a son without a father?  Wherever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor?  And everything comes in this way” (Joseph Smith, Words, p.380).

Elder Bruce R. McConkie gave us an inspired insight on the parentage of Adam:  “The Lord Jesus Christ is both the Creator and Redeemer of this earth and all that on it is, save only man.  Regarding man, the Lord God himself, the Father of us all, came down and created man, male and female, in his own image and likeness…. Christ is universally attested in the scriptures to be the Only Begotten.  At this point, as we consider the “creation” of Adam, and lest there be any misunderstanding, we must remember that Adam was created in immortality, but that Christ came to earth as a mortal; thus our Lord is the Only Begotten in the flesh, meaning into this mortal sphere of existence.  Adam came to earth to dwell in immortality until the Fall changed his status to that of mortality.  (Doctrines of the Restoration, p. 189, 199).

The scriptures describe the physical creation of Adam and Eve symbolically – When the scriptures say, “God formed man from the dust of the ground” (Moses 3:7, see also Abraham 5:7), they are describing the physical birth of both Adam and Eve.  So that we would understand that “forming man from the dust” means a physical birth process the Lord told Moses:  “Ye were born into the world by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul” (Moses 6:59).  B. H. Roberts wrote:  “We are all “formed” of the dust of the ground, though instead of being molded as a brick we are brought forth by the natural laws of procreation; so also was Adam and his wife in some older world.”  We do not literally believe God made Eve from Adam’s rib.  Rather, we are being taught symbolically that a husband and wife are to be united as one.  (See Genesis 2:21-24)

Testimony - President Joseph F. Smith taught “that only resurrected and glorified beings can become parents of spirit offspring” (Improvement Era, Vol. 19, p. 942).  Therefore, we are literally first generation spirit children of Heavenly Parents.  With regard to our physical bodies we are also children of Heavenly Parents genetically through Adam and Eve.  These fundamental truths answer the questions who we are and what our potential is.  It gives meaning to our lives in mortality, and all that we hope to be in the eternities.