From Footstool to Throne

The question under the trilogy

The trilogy ended with three location commands — stand in holy places, be steadfast and immovable, abide in him — and a one-sentence conclusion: you're home; stay. But a question waits underneath those commands, and it deserves its own essay: what makes a place holy in the first place? Holiness is not a zoning designation; the temple lot was ordinary ground the day before the dedication. And what is the standing soul actually doing in the holy place — is standing an activity, or just an address?

One answer resolves both questions, and it has been hiding in plain sight since the first essay of this set. Recall the first commandment given to the human family after Eden: "that they should worship the Lord their God" (Moses 5:5) — worship, before sacrifice, before everything: the founding instruction of mortal religion. And recall the commandment Jesus ranked above all others: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment" (Mark 12:30). Those two commandments are one commandment — for worship, at its root, is not a meeting or a genre of music; it is love, aimed — the whole self (heart, soul, mind, strength: the affections, the life, the thoughts, the labor) gathered up and directed at God. And this essay's claim is that worship so defined is not what we do in holy places. It is how holy places come to be — the mechanism by which a footstool is being turned, square foot by square foot, into a throne.

Worship: the whole self, aimed

Watch worship work in the two men this set of essays has followed. Adam's altar was worship in its plainest form: obedience offered before understanding, "I know not, save the Lord commanded me" — love expressed as trust, with a lamb on the stones — and heaven's response was the angel, the explanation, and the fire. And Nephi's psalm — the passage the second essay walked as the route from the valley to the rock — is, read again, a complete worship service conducted by one man over his own soul. Count its movements: remembrance ("he hath filled me with his love... he hath heard my cry... upon the wings of his Spirit hath my body been carried away") — worship's memory, rehearsing what God has done; praise breaking out mid-struggle ("blessed be the name of my God"); self-exhortation ("Awake, my soul!... Rejoice, O my heart") — the will commanding the affections toward God; petition ("O Lord, wilt thou encircle me around in the robe of thy righteousness"); and covenant vow ("my voice shall forever ascend up unto thee, my rock and mine everlasting God"). Remembrance, praise, awakening, petition, vow: that is the anatomy of worship — and mark what it accomplished: a man who entered the chapter wretched exited it standing on the rock. The worship was not commentary on the climb. The worship was the climb — each movement of aimed love a step of the ascent — which is the first half of this essay's claim demonstrated: worship is how the soul takes and keeps its footing. The standing soul in the holy place is not idle at an address. It is doing the most consequential work a creature can do: loving God with everything, on purpose, out loud.

And the Book of Mormon states the yield of that whole-self aiming in a verse that deserves to be famous: "love God with all your might, mind and strength, then... his grace is sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ" (Moroni 10:32). The all-clause and the sufficiency-clause, welded: worship at full aim opens grace at full flow — because love aimed with everything is the aperture at its widest, and grace was only ever waiting for the opening.

Presence follows praise

Now the second half — how worship makes places holy — and it begins with one of the most startling sentences in the Psalms: "But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel" (Psalm 22:3). Inhabitest — God dwells in praise: the worship of his people is described as his habitation, the structure he moves into. Read literally, the verse teaches that praise is architecture — every act of worship lays up dwelling for the Presence — and the whole history of holy places confirms it. What made Bethel holy? Nothing about the real estate: it was a stony wilderness campsite until a traveler named Jacob met God there in the night and worshipped — anointed the stone, vowed the vow — and woke to say the sentence that defines the category: "this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven" (Genesis 28:17). One worship encounter converted anonymous ground into a gate of heaven, permanently — Bethel means house of God to this day. What made the ground at the bush holy? "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5) — holy because the Presence was in the bush: holiness is what presence does to places, and presence, by the psalm's own physics, inhabits praise. And when Solomon's temple was dedicated, the record preserves the exact moment the building became the House: the singers and trumpeters "were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord... that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord... for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of God" (2 Chronicles 5:13–14). Unified praise; then the cloud. Worship first; glory answering; holiness resulting — the sequence, in the founding case, on the record.

Which is why, to this day, what turns a building into a house of the Lord is not the last coat of paint but a dedication: a prayer of consecration and the united hosanna of the saints — worship, formally offered — after which the same rooms are holy that the day before were construction. The mechanism has never changed, and it scales all the way down: the family that prays over its table every night is running a small dedication daily; the pew where you have wept and covenanted is holier to you than unworshipped acres of cathedral; the closet Jesus assigned for secret prayer becomes, by use, a gate of heaven with a coat rod in it. Holy places are not found. They are made — by worship, which invites the Presence, which constitutes the holiness — and this is the trilogy's standing command with its engine finally exposed: stand ye in holy places means, at full depth, stand where worship has built habitation for God — and keep building it by worshipping there.

From footstool to throne

And now lift the mechanism to its full scale, because the scriptures do — and the destination is breathtaking. Ask where the earth itself stands in heaven's furniture, and Isaiah records God's own answer: "The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me?" (Isaiah 66:1). A footstool — the furniture under the feet: touched by God, supporting his rest, but not where he sits; and the verse's question — where is the house? — is almost a challenge thrown down to the worshippers: the footstool has no house on it yet; who will build me one? The revelations repeat the title tenderly — "I have made the earth rich... yea, it is my footstool" (D&C 38:17) — a beloved footstool, a rich one, but a footstool.

Now read the earth's destiny, because the revelations announce a promotion in the furniture. "The earth abideth the law of a celestial kingdom... Wherefore, it shall be sanctified; yea, notwithstanding it shall die, it shall be quickened again... and the righteous shall inherit it... for after it hath filled the measure of its creation, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father" (D&C 88:17–26, gathered). Crowned — the coronation word, spoken over the footstool — crowned with the presence: the very thing that makes places holy, promised to the whole planet as its final condition. And the Bible's last chapters stage the promotion visibly: the holy city descends "from God out of heaven," and the announcement rings, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them" (Revelation 21:2–3) — heaven relocating downward — until the final chapter fixes the address of the universe's most important object: "the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: and they shall see his face" (22:3–4). Read the furniture across the whole canon and the arc is explicit: in Isaiah, the earth is the footstool and the throne is in heaven; in Revelation, the throne is on the earth. The footstool has become the throne room. The planet under your feet is scheduled to be the seat of God.

And the mechanism of the promotion is the mechanism of this whole essay, demonstrated once already at full scale: Enoch's city. "The Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness" — and what happened to a whole society unified in worship and love? "the Lord came and dwelt with his people" (Moses 7:16–18, 69) — the Presence, taking up habitation in a city-sized structure of praise — and the city was taken up whole: the pilot program of the footstool's conversion, run successfully once, filed in the record as proof of concept. That is what worship is for, at the scale of history: every altar since Adam's, every psalm since Nephi's, every dedicated temple and prayed-over table and secretly consecrated closet is a square foot of the footstool converted — habitation laid up for the Presence, the planet prepared, place by worshipped place, for the day the crowning happens and the King, at long last, sits.

The family business

So the supplemental closes by naming the family business between now and then. Worship is not the decoration on discipleship — it is the construction project of the ages: the whole-souled love of God, offered aloud and in secret, at altars and tables and in a psalmist's midnight wrestle, each act inviting the Presence a little further into the world, each dedicated place another room finished in a house being built on a footstool. The trilogy said stand in holy places; this essay adds: and know that your standing there, worshipping, is what holy places are made of — you are not merely occupying sanctity; you are generating it, the way Jacob did with a stone and a vow, the way the singers did when the cloud came, the way Enoch's people did until the Lord moved in. And the end of the project is written in the last book: a throne where the footstool was, a face where the veil was, and the servants — the worshippers, the place-makers, the long generations of the family who loved him with heart, soul, mind, and strength — standing in the holiest place there has ever been, which is the whole earth, crowned.

Love him with everything. That was always the first commandment, and now you know what it builds.

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The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me?... And the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it... and they shall see his face.