We first learn the temple’s teachings about marriage in the story of Adam and Eve—the primal story of the temple. A friend once asked me, “If Christ is at the center of the gospel and the temple, why doesn’t the temple endowment teach the story of Christ’s life? What’s all this about Adam and Eve?”
As I have thought about his question, I have come to believe that the life of Christ is the story of giving the Atonement. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of receiving the Atonement—because they were the first people to receive it—amid the sometimes formidable oppositions of mortality.
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We find a second significant implication for marriage in a later scene from the Adam and Eve story. When they left the garden, the Lord directed them to build an altar and offer animal sacrifices. After many days an angel asked Adam why he offered sacrifices.
He said, “I know not, save the Lord commanded me.”
So the angel told him, “This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten.”34 The lambs they sacrificed symbolized and pointed them toward the Father’s future redemptive sacrifice of His Son. The angel then taught Adam and Eve that Christ’s sacrifice and the plan of redemption gave meaning and purpose to all of their opposition—from leaving Eden to Eve’s lamentation over her sons.
Many of us go to the temple today the way Adam and Eve did at first—simply because we are commanded, without knowing why. And simple obedience is certainly better than not performing the ordinances at all. But the Lord, who sent that angel, must have wanted them to know why—and I believe He wants us to know why.
Are today’s temple ordinances also “a similitude . . . of the Only Begotten”? Think of how the temple’s altars are, like the altar of Adam and Eve, altars of prayer, sacrifice, and covenants. Think of the dimensions of sacrifice in all the covenants of the endowment. Since Christ completed His atoning mission, we no longer offer animal sacrifices, but we do covenant to sacrifice. In what way? Christ taught the Nephites, “Ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”35
Animal sacrifices symbolized the Father’s sacrifice of the Son, but the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit symbolizes the Son’s sacrifice of Himself. James E. Talmage wrote that Jesus “died of a broken heart.”36 In similitude, we now offer ourselves—our own broken hearts—as a personal sacrifice.37 As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, “Real, personal sacrifice never was placing an animal on the altar. Instead, it is a willingness to put the animal in us upon the altar and letting it be consumed!”38
With these ideas on my mind, some months ago I was about to seal a young couple in the St. George Temple. As I invited them to the altar, he took her by the hand, and I realized that they were about to place upon that altar of sacrifice their own broken hearts and contrite spirits—a selfless offering of themselves to each other and to God in emulation of Christ’s sacrifice for them. And for what purpose? So that through a lifetime of sacrificing for each other—that is, living as He did—they might become ever more as He is. By trying to live that way every day, they would each come closer to God, which would also bring them closer to each other. Thus, living the covenants of the sealing ordinance would sanctify not only their marriage but also their hearts and their very lives.
But when we offer in our marriage a broken heart and a contrite spirit in similitude of the Good Shepherd, we will give our lives for the sheep of our covenant, a day or even an hour at a time. That process invites us to take selflessly upon ourselves both the afflictions and the joys of our companion, emulating in our own limited way how the Savior takes upon Himself our afflictions. “Be you afflicted in all his afflictions,”40 said the Lord to Peter Whitmer about his missionary companion Oliver Cowdery. Isaiah echoed that phrase in describing Christ and those He redeems: “In all their affliction he was afflicted, . . . and he . . . carried them all the days of old.”41
Not long ago I asked some temple workers what they thought it would mean to live the life of a broken heart and a contrite spirit in marriage, to treat one’s spouse as Christ Himself would treat us.
One of them said, “It means choosing to be kind—all the time.”
Another said, “It is placing our own broken hearts on the altar as we sacrifice enough so the Savior can heal us.”
Another, “Trying to care more about someone else’s needs than you do your own.”
And another, “I will offer not only my heart but also my arms and my hands.”
And, “It’s the sacrifice of learning to give up the natural man within me.”
And finally, “It takes a broken heart and a contrite spirit for me to overcome my pride and forgive enough to receive the Atonement.”
Another temple worker lost his wife after she had suffered a debilitating illness for several years. After her funeral he told me, “I thought I knew what love was—we’d had over fifty blessed years together. But only in trying to care for her in these last few years did I discover what love is.” By going where he had to go, in being afflicted in her afflictions, this man discovered wellsprings of compassion deep in his own heart that a hireling will never know exist. The accumulation of such discoveries produces the sanctifying process of becoming like the Good Shepherd—by living and giving as He does. Not incidentally, that kind of living breathes irreplaceable strength into the social interests of our culture....
I bear witness that the order of marriage that God gave to Adam and Eve is worth whatever it takes—to find it, to build it, and to keep it in our lives. I also testify that husbands and wives who try to live like the Good Shepherd will discover and will give to each other the abundant life of authentic joy.
Marriage, Family Law, and the Temple, Bruce C. Hafen, Emeritus General Authority Seventy
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