A House of Order

The pattern implies a Designer

The last essay ended at a threshold: a knit requires a pattern, and a pattern implies a Designer — and it is time to meet the arrangement by its full and holy name. Because the pattern that Zion is knit after has a name in the revelations, and most of us use its nickname without ever reading the name itself.

"Why the first is called the Melchizedek Priesthood," the revelation explains, "is because Melchizedek was such a great high priest. Before his day it was called the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God. But out of respect or reverence to the name of the Supreme Being, to avoid the too frequent repetition of his name, they, the church, in ancient days, called that priesthood after Melchizedek" (D&C 107:2–4). Melchizedek is the reverent alias. The real name is a sentence — and every word in it is load-bearing.

Word for word

Holy — set apart, consecrated, whole: the arrangement belongs to God and partakes of his nature.

After — and this is not "later than." It is "according to the pattern of," the way a garment is cut after a pattern: the order is patterned on someone. Hebrews says it of Melchizedek himself — "made like unto the Son of God" (Hebrews 7:3): membership in this order is a likeness-project; to be in it is to be in the process of being made like its Pattern.

The Son of God — the Pattern in person. Not a code, not a constitution: a Person is the order's rule. What the order arranges everything toward is his likeness.

And Order — the word that repays the most digging. The Greek behind "after the order of Melchizedek" (Hebrews 5:6, quoting Psalm 110:4) is taxis: arrangement, sequence, rank — the ordinary word for troops in formation and things in their places. And the English word carries four living senses, all of which operate here at once: an order is a community bound by a rule (as in an order of monks — a fellowship living one pattern of life); an arrangement (things set in right relation); a command (a thing ordained by a word); and a kind (as in taxonomy — beings of the same class). A holy order is all four: a fellowship, arranged, by his word, becoming his kind.

Now the discovery that turns this from vocabulary into doctrine: order, ordain, and ordinance are one word. All three descend from a single Latin root — ordo, ordinare: to arrange, to set in rows. To ordain someone is, literally, to set them into the arrangement. An ordinance is, literally, an act of arranging — a moment when a person is set into new relation to God and the body: baptism arranges you into the fold; confirmation arranges the Spirit to you; sealing arranges families into the eternal structure. The entire priesthood vocabulary is one word, conjugated — one plan, declining through its grammatical forms. So the full name, rendered word for word, comes out something like this: the consecrated arrangement of persons, patterned on the Son, entered by his word, whose members are being made into his kind. Not a license. Not a rank. A fellowship of resemblance — the pattern the whole knit follows.

Ordained to be looked at

And Alma tells us what the visible arrangement is for, in a clause we usually quote around: priests were ordained after this order "in a manner that thereby the people might know in what manner to look forward to his Son for redemption" (Alma 13:2).

Read it slowly. The ordination itself is teaching: every priest of the order is installed as a living pointer — a walking diagram of Christ — so that a people watching their ordered servants are being trained, continuously, in how to watch for the Son. The order is pedagogy in personnel. Which is why Alma holds both registers in one breath without any tension: these priests were "called and prepared from the foundation of the world" — the calling eternal, the register of foreordination — and ordained visibly, "in a manner that the people might know." The heavenly call and the earthly setting-in-place are two halves of one thing, because the arrangement exists for the watchers' sake as much as the officers': the priesthood was never primarily about the priest. It is about what the congregation learns to look at — and, by the law of beholding, what the congregation becomes by looking.

The orders that built cities

Now the verse that turns this whole subject toward Zion — because the revelations stack the orders like nested arches, and each arch has a city under it.

The exalted, says the vision of the celestial world, "are priests of the Most High, after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son" (D&C 76:57). Three orders, nested: the Son's, Enoch's, Melchizedek's. And ask what each order did. Enoch's order built the only fully achieved Zion in the record — the city of one heart that was taken. Melchizedek's order, in the restored text of Genesis, is explicitly chartered on Enoch's: Melchizedek was "ordained... after the order of the covenant which God made with Enoch," an order "which came, not by man... but of God," whose members "should have power, by faith," over the elements — and the passage ends with the order's civic output: "his people wrought righteousness, and obtained heaven, and sought for the city of Enoch" (JST Genesis 14:27–34). The king of Salem — the king of Peace — ran Enoch's program again, and his people reached for Enoch's city. An order, in scripture's actual history, is a city-building technology: the arrangement of persons that, run to completion, produces a Zion.

And when the Lord restored Zion's economics in our own dispensation — consecration, the storehouse, the equal claims — listen to what he named the program: the United Order, "the order which I commanded" — called in the revelations the order of Enoch (D&C 78; 104). The Lord's own name for Zion's economy is a priesthood word. Consecration was never a program adjacent to the Holy Order; it is the Holy Order, applied to property — the arrangement of goods after the pattern of the Son, exactly as ordination is the arrangement of persons after him. Which finally lets us say what this series has been circling since its first verse: Zion is the Holy Order at civic scale. One heart, one mind, no poor — the three clauses of Moses 7:18 — are simply what a people looks like when everything about it has been set into the arrangement: every member, every heart, every table, every barn. Peter says it in one astonishing verse that fuses the images this series has been treating separately: "Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood" (1 Peter 2:5) — the temple of fitted living stones is the priesthood; the house and the order are the same structure — "a royal priesthood, an holy nation" (2:9): the order, at nation scale, which is Zion described from the other direction.

The wisdom of his sequence

If Zion is an arrangement, then it cannot be assembled in random order — no arrangement can, any more than a body can be gestated organs-first-in-any-sequence. And the Lord left us a complete demonstration of his assembly sequence, because at Bountiful he built a Zion people from a standing start, step by visible step. Watch the order of operations in Third Nephi:

First, the witness — the whole multitude, one by one, feeling the prints, before a single instruction is given. Then authority — Nephi called forward, power to baptize conferred. Then, immediately and before any doctrine, peace — contention expressly forbidden: "he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me" (3 Nephi 11:29); the ground cleared. Only then the doctrine — the sermon at the temple. Then ministering — the sick healed, the children encircled, one by one again. Then the table — the sacrament, the being filled. And nearly last, the Spirit's bestowal power — conferred by touch as the capstone. Witness, authority, peace, doctrine, ministering, table, Spirit. Now try rearranging it and feel every alternative fail: the table before peace is Corinth; doctrine before witness is argument; power before ministering is priestcraft. The sequence is not ceremony. The sequence is the wisdom — "mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion" (D&C 132:8); "establish a house... a house of order" (D&C 88:119); "let all things be done decently and in order" (1 Corinthians 14:40 — Paul's word there is taxis, the order-word of the priesthood itself); even the resurrection proceeds this way — "every man in his own order" (1 Corinthians 15:23): ranks, sequence, the general rising of the dead conducted like everything else in his house.

Two clarifications keep this doctrine honest. The first: the witness stands at both ends of the sequence, not one. The Bountiful multitude had heard his voice in the darkness long before they touched his hands — a witness at lower amplitude opened their road, and the touch crowned it — and our own order runs the same way: the First Comforter is given at the gate as Testator, the witness that opens every covenant journey, and the Second Comforter closes it. The Comforters are numbered; the sequence of witnesses was published in their titles all along. "No witness until after the trial of your faith" and "the seed swells at the first experiment" are both true because the road is a spiral, not a line — small witness, trial, larger witness, grace for grace, each rung's witness the provision for the next rung's trial, until the final turn where the trial is the whole mortal road and the witness has hands.

The second: order in his house structures service, never precedence — and the founding table proves it. At the first sacrament, the presiding authority of the ordinance took the cup, gave thanks, and "said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: for I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come" (Luke 22:17–18) — the Presider conspicuously deferring his own portion to the end of the age, serving everyone first; and when a dispute about precedence broke out at that very table, his ruling was total inversion: "he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger... I am among you as he that serveth" (22:26–27), with a towel and a basin for punctuation. In the Holy Order, position is answerability: the one identified first is the one responsible to serve, after the pattern of the One who blessed the bread, gave it all away, and saved his own cup for the day he drinks it new with the whole family. Any reading of order as rank has misread the Pattern the order is after.

And note the tempo written into the house rules, because the pacing is itself a mercy: "it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength... all things must be done in order" (Mosiah 4:27) — order as pace; line upon line as patience; the same tenderness our veil series found in the Bridegroom who thins the curtain only as fast as the bride can bear. Sequence is how love refuses to overwhelm. A house of order is a house where no one is crushed by receiving too much too soon — which is why the God whose glory would consume us runs a school instead of a floodgate.

What the arrangement is for

Last, the order's own charter states its terminal purpose — and it gathers this entire series, and the three series before it, into one passage:

"And this greater priesthood administereth the gospel and holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God. Therefore, in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest... for without this no man can see the face of God, even the Father, and live. Now this Moses plainly taught to the children of Israel in the wilderness, and sought diligently to sanctify his people that they might behold the face of God" (D&C 84:19–23).

There it is. The Holy Order exists to bring a people into the presence. Not to substitute for directness — to build the road to it: the arrangement whose entire design function is to sanctify a body of people, ordinance by ordinance, setting by setting, until they can abide the face — Moses' whole project, the very one Israel refused at the mountain. Every act of ordering in the house serves that end: the members set in the body so the body can live; the grains ordered into the loaf so the many can be fed as one; the hearts knit to the pattern so the fabric can bear glory without tearing; the goods arranged into the storehouse so no member arrives at the veil hungry. And at the far end of the road, the scaffolding graduates into the thing it built — the city where John "saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it." The order was never the destination. It is the ordering — the long, patient, merciful arrangement of a people after the pattern of the Son, until the Lord can look at them and call them what he called Enoch's city: Zion, of one heart and one mind — a people so thoroughly after his order that there is nothing left between the arrangement and the Arranger but a veil thinned to nothing, and a door he has been holding open the whole time.

But an arrangement of many members raises a musical question: how do many distinct voices become one sound without becoming one note? The answer is the difference between unison and harmony — and the tuning fork that makes a hundred instruments agree without ever consulting each other.

The tuning is where we go next.

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Mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion.