The Lord knows all things
The Lord knows all things and, for him, it is as if all things in time are happening all at once:
The same which knoweth all things, for all things are present before mine eyes; (D&C 38:2)
...all things are present with me, for I know them all. (Moses 1:6)
13 The Lord looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men.
14 From the place of his habitation he looketh upon all the inhabitants of the earth.
15 He fashioneth their hearts alike; he considereth all their works. (Psalm 33)
2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. (Psalm 139)
Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:24)
Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. (Matthew 6:8)
12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
13 Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. (Hebrews 4)
For mine eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hid from my face, neither is their iniquity hid from mine eyes. (Jeremiah 16:17)
Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: (Isaiah 46:10)
And who, as I, shall call, and shall declare it, and set it in order for me, since I appointed the ancient people? and the things that are coming, and shall come, let them shew unto them. (Isaiah 44:7)
Because God knows all things and all things are present before him continually, he is constantly aware of all joy, all sorrow, all pleasure, and all pain. This tells us a lot about God and about positive and negative things. It tells us that God has a way to feel complete joy even when exposed to complete sorrow, to feel complete pleasure in spite of also feeling complete pain. It tells us that God possesses the tools to interpret these experiences in a way that does not prevent him from having not only a net positive experience, but greater joy and happiness than any of us have ever experienced. While other chapters discuss some of these ideas, here we will focus on the idea of having all things before you continually.
The Lord can show you all things
God is willing to show you any and everything he knows and experiences just as quickly as you are willing to receive it:
5 I have even from the beginning declared it to thee; before it came to pass I shewed it thee: lest thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done them, and my graven image, and my molten image, hath commanded them.
6 Thou hast heard, see all this; and will not ye declare it? I have shewed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them.
7 They are created now, and not from the beginning; even before the day when thou heardest them not; lest thou shouldest say, Behold, I knew them. (Isaiah 48)
In the resurrection, you will have a “perfect knowledge” of all things, or, in other words, a correct perspective of the experiences you had in mortality and the cause and effect relationship between your character in its present state and what brings happiness or misery:
13 O how great the plan of our God! For on the other hand, the paradise of God must deliver up the spirits of the righteous, and the grave deliver up the body of the righteous; and the spirit and the body is restored to itself again, and all men become incorruptible, and immortal, and they are living souls, having a perfect knowledge like unto us in the flesh, save it be that our knowledge shall be perfect.
14 Wherefore, we shall have a perfect knowledge of all our guilt, and our uncleanness, and our nakedness; and the righteous shall have a perfect knowledge of their enjoyment, and their righteousness, being clothed with purity, yea, even with the robe of righteousness. (2 Nephi 9)
In that day, you will not have a choice in whether or not to have this awareness. Those who have not prepared for this degree of awareness by living righteously will be filled with indescribable misery.
There is no reason that you can’t voluntarily acquire this degree of awareness while still in this life. This is, in fact, the very way to prepare for it in the life to come.
Knowledge consists not only of information but also confidence in its accuracy. God knows perfectly well what will happen with perfect confidence. This confidence is absolutely necessary to having all things before you. This confidence helps you experience far greater joy by enabling you to rest assured that even if positive things are intermittent, they will surely come again, just as a clock reads the same time twice every day.
All things are present before the Lord because he knows all the laws of cause and effect. You obtain this gift by increasing the knowledge you receive from God. He knows all things because he knows how all things work together. He can see the end from the beginning. To him, the universe is like a clock. He knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen due to his knowledge of every component, the laws of reality, and patterns of how things work. The more you learn from him, the more you will do the same.
When you begin learning about how reality works, you are sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect. As you learn more and more, while your understanding may still be incorrect or incomplete, you will have more and more moments where your predictions of the future become reality. As you learn more and more about reality, your confidence of the accuracy of your understanding will increase, and you will learn to have all things before you.
As you draw closer to God, he will show you more of what he knows. Through the Holy Ghost, he can tell you “the truth of all things.” (Moroni 10:5) The closer you draw to him, the more all things will be before you continually.
God not only knows the laws of cause and effect, but he believes them. He believes them so thoroughly that his confidence in them overpowers any perception of what is happening in the moment. Because of this, he can endure the most awful situations possible in this world, knowing exactly why they are necessary for the greatest benefit in the long term. As we have faith in him, his faith in himself (his trust in these laws of cause and effect) will provide us with the same strength.
Integrating all things
Positive and negative things both exist in this life. Sorrow and joy cooccur in equal proportions of intensity, but they do not co-occur in frequency. Sorrow and joy have a rhythm.
All positives are equally balanced by negatives, and vice-versa. By default, you will experience sorrow far more often than joy. Good things in life tend to be instantaneous flashes surrounded by long periods of toil and drawn out negatives. Even if positive things make up for it in total intensity, their infrequency can make life difficult, especially for those who subject themselves to all things the Lord sees fit to inflict upon them.
A more correct and detailed understanding of how your awareness is not time-limited can make life much more enjoyable. This understanding could be described as the integration of your experience.
To integrate your experience is to combine all your experiences, past, present, and future, and see your life as a composite whole.
As you approach an awareness of all things, you also come closer to constantly feeling as if every bad thing possible in this world is happening to you all at once. You see, you are not decreasing your awareness of the bad. On the contrary, you are actually increasing it from the normal state (sometimes really bad things happen) to a more accurate state (really, really bad things happen all the time). What changes is that you actually develop the tools you need to overcome the unpleasant things in your life. Normal people rely on fading memory, distraction, and ignorance to get around the bad things in life. These are inadequate to deal with the true depth and breadth of the bad things in life. When you experience maximal joy and maximal sorrow, all at once, all the time, you need a stronger set of tools.
As daunting as increasing your awareness of the bad may seem, the benefit that comes from the commensurate increase in awareness of the good is more than worth the cost. In spite of the pain this entails, it is not a relatively costly thing, because so much of the pain is not due to temporal separation but rather a lack of awareness. Most of the negative things are already present, you just aren’t aware of them. An awareness of them doesn’t change their ability to hurt you, only your perception of them, and there are tools for dealing with perception. Being able to saturate stretches of your life with the joy that comes from moments of good provides a much stronger positive outcome than the cost of increased awareness of bad.
When you integrate all things, you hack the typical arrangement where good things tend to be islands surrounded by seas of negatives. Instead, you dwell in a state of happiness that isn’t significantly altered even by the periodic occurrence of negatives. In a sense, you minimize the cost of the negatives by realizing they are temporary and you maximize the benefit of the positives by keeping them before you always.
The most beneficial thing about integrating the good things is that you can vastly multiply the net positives in life by genuinely savoring them long before and long after they actually occur.
The positive aspects of this gift are that you are able to rejoice in the present over all pleasant things in your life, even if they lie in the past or in the future. You can exercise godly patience in all things, because the passage of time no longer has power to diminish the value of your future blessings. You become resilient to shocks, because you are aware of what is to come and have substantial lead time to prepare your heart for even the hardest experiences.
Lead time comes from God revealing painful future events to you. We read the promise that “...the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.” (Amos 3:7) God desires to reveal everything he knows to all his children. Why is this promise only to prophets? It isn’t.
Prophets are not magical people to whom God reveals things, but rather people who seek and receive what he has to teach. In other words, a prophet is a description—one who receives what God gives—rather than a title—one to whom God gives things. See the difference?
What determines whether he will tell you future things before they happen is your degree of trust in him. Remember that he doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit you. He will only tell you the future if it will help you and others to do so. If your lack of trust in him would result in greater sorrow for you by knowing the future before it happens than it would to surprise you, he will just let it happen without telling you.
Does it seem far fetched that you could have greater pain by knowing the future than by not knowing? Suppose God told you that in ten years’ time, your spouse would die. Can you imagine how, if your trust in God was limited, this would cause much more pain than if you just didn’t know? Now, can you see how if you had great trust in God, this would help you treasure each day and give you more joy than if you hadn’t known?
Preparing for potential reality goes beyond knowing for certain what will happen, and includes everything that could happen. To the extent that you have faith in God, the line between what is and what is possible will blur. You will be able to act in the moment as if all positive things were already yours, as if every challenge were already conquered, as if you couldn’t fail, and as if every person were as perfect as God.
As a practical example of this gift, let us consider how we perceive and experience the death of loved ones. Death is ever-present. Every living thing is born with the eventuality of death. In spite of this eventuality, whenever we experience the death of a loved one, the typical response is one of painful surprise and shock. Why is this the case? First, it is important to realize that the source of our surprise is dishonesty. Everyone knows that everyone will die. Because normal people lack the tools to contend with this fact, they willfully ignore it. How we handle death is not so much about an event but about being confronted with an obvious piece of reality that we are normally really good at ignoring. Grief is not a coping experience, but the passive passage of sufficient time for us to once again regain our ability to ignore this aspect of reality. How do you prove it? Consider how many people, distraught by the loss of a loved one, are equally distraught by the death of their next loved one.
Should death be capable of robbing you of feeling the uninterrupted love of God? Paul thought not:
38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8)
A person who has all things before them continually does not see death as normal people do. They integrate the death of every living thing into the life of every living thing. When a person dies, they are not hit all at once with the reaction to their absence. Rather, they carry it every day of their lives. Like a mortgage, the pain is thereby amortized into smaller, manageable pieces that are constantly present. By the time the event occurs, it is much easier to contend with.
Importantly, this perspective carries with it not only reduced intensities of pain, but far greater joy. One who has integrated death into life not only experiences death as a much less intense event, but also rejoices in every single interaction with the person during their life. One for whom the absence of something is ever-present will rejoice in its presence as if it had returned from the dead. Every interaction becomes a singularly joyful and valuable experience.
Though this detailed example described how integrating all things works with death, it is equally applicable to the presence and loss of all things.
Affected vs. overcome
Having all things before you continually doesn’t mean that you always have uniform feelings or that experiences don’t affect you. It doesn’t mean you feel as sad as you can all the time, or as happy as you can all the time. The resurrected Lord felt a fullness of joy with the Nephites:
20 And they arose from the earth, and he said unto them: Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, my joy is full.
21 And when he had said these words, he wept, and the multitude bare record of it, and he took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and prayed unto the Father for them.
22 And when he had done this he wept again; (3 Nephi 17)
If having all things before you continually meant no variation in one’s feelings, the Lord would not have been able to say his joy was full, and he wouldn’t have wept.
The Lord was upset when he saw the wickedness of the people who rejected Enoch’s ministry:
28 And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains?
29 And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?
30 And were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea, millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning to the number of thy creations; and thy curtains are stretched out still; and yet thou art there, and thy bosom is there; and also thou art just; thou art merciful and kind forever;
31 And thou hast taken Zion to thine own bosom, from all thy creations, from all eternity to all eternity; and naught but peace, justice, and truth is the habitation of thy throne; and mercy shall go before thy face and have no end; how is it thou canst weep?
32 The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;
33 And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood;
34 And the fire of mine indignation is kindled against them; and in my hot displeasure will I send in the floods upon them, for my fierce anger is kindled against them.
35 Behold, I am God; Man of Holiness is my name; Man of Counsel is my name; and Endless and Eternal is my name, also. 36 Wherefore, I can stretch forth mine hands and hold all the creations which I have made; and mine eye can pierce them also, and among all the workmanship of mine hands there has not been so great wickedness as among thy brethren.
37 But behold, their sins shall be upon the heads of their fathers; Satan shall be their father, and misery shall be their doom; and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?
38 But behold, these which thine eyes are upon shall perish in the floods; and behold, I will shut them up; a prison have I prepared for them.
39 And That which I have chosen hath pled before my face. Wherefore, he suffereth for their sins; inasmuch as they will repent in the day that my Chosen shall return unto me, and until that day they shall be in torment;
40 Wherefore, for this shall the heavens weep, yea, and all the workmanship of mine hands.
41 And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.
42 And Enoch also saw Noah, and his family; that the posterity of all the sons of Noah should be saved with a temporal salvation;
43 Wherefore Enoch saw that Noah built an ark; and that the Lord smiled upon it, and held it in his own hand; but upon the residue of the wicked the floods came and swallowed them up.
44 And as Enoch saw this, he had bitterness of soul, and wept over his brethren, and said unto the heavens: I will refuse to be comforted; but the Lord said unto Enoch: Lift up your heart, and be glad; and look.
45 And it came to pass that Enoch looked; and from Noah, he beheld all the families of the earth; and he cried unto the Lord, saying: When shall the day of the Lord come? When shall the blood of the Righteous be shed, that all they that mourn may be sanctified and have eternal life?
46 And the Lord said: It shall be in the meridian of time, in the days of wickedness and vengeance.
47 And behold, Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, even in the flesh; and his soul rejoiced, saying: The Righteous is lifted up, and the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world; and through faith I am in the bosom of the Father, and behold, Zion is with me. (Moses 7)
Enoch was surprised to see that, in spite of God’s knowledge of all things, he wept in response to the behavior of others in a given moment. But, once God showed Enoch why he felt the way he did, Enoch felt the same way.
Interestingly, the way Enoch escaped from the sorrow of this exchange was through seeing (in the future) the coming of the Son of Man. The key way God helps us endure hard things is by showing us why they are worth it. This requires trust in God.
Having all things before you doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by present events. It simply provides you with tools to contend with them.
Being affected isn’t the same as being overcome. The Lord has overcome all things, but he is still affected by them. There are many things on this earth that cause great sorrow for the Lord, and there are many things that cause great joy. However, none of these things have power to overcome his character. Nothing will change what he does or why he does it.
The joy of the wicked is temporary, the joy of the righteous is forever
It isn’t always easy to discern between paths of enduring joy and paths of fleeting pleasure. Sometimes, those who are least interested in walking the path of enduring joy seem to have it better than those who do. The key to resolving the difference is taking a long-term perspective:
34 Wait on the Lord, and keep his way, and he shall exalt thee to inherit the land: when the wicked are cut off, thou shalt see it.
35 I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.
36 Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.
37 Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.
38 But the transgressors shall be destroyed together: the end of the wicked shall be cut off.
39 But the salvation of the righteous is of the Lord: he is their strength in the time of trouble.
40 And the Lord shall help them, and deliver them: he shall deliver them from the wicked, and save them, because they trust in him. (Psalm 37)
The joy of the wicked comes because they have not yet encountered the awareness of reality that would overcome their perspective. The righteous have learned principles that allow them to overcome everything that the world can throw at them. Their suffering brings continuous refinement. Therefore, they might suffer for a season, but will always have greater joy:
18 The Lord knoweth the days of the upright: and their inheritance shall be for ever.
19 They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied.
20 But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the Lord shall be as the fat of lambs: they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away. (Psalm 37)
The wicked are like a boat that isn’t really seaworthy, but hasn’t yet encountered bad weather:
19 Fret not thyself because of evil men, neither be thou envious at the wicked:
20 For there shall be no reward to the evil man; the candle of the wicked shall be put out. (Proverbs 24)
The righteous are a boat that regularly gets buried in mountainous waves, but always comes back up unscathed:
23 The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way.
24 Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand. (Psalm 37)
There is more than one reason to desire a ship that can withstand great waves. While waves will come whether you like it or not, it is the waves that carry you to greater joy:
And it came to pass that the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land; and thus they were tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind. (Ether 6:5)