The Atonement: Let No Man Divide Asunder

The divisions

Atonement is the one great theological word that English built for itself, and it wears its meaning openly: at-one-ment — the making of one. Which means the doctrine begins with an inventory of what was divided.

The Fall divided man from God: exile from the presence, cherubim at the gate. Death divides spirit from body: the grave's own definition. Sin divides soul from God — "your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you" (Isaiah 59:2) — and it divides brother from brother, nation from nation, the human family into fragments. Behind every one of these divisions stands a personality whose entire method is division and whose native language the Lord identified in a single sentence: "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it" (John 8:44). The divider is the Liar. The instruments of division are lies. And the Atonement, whatever else it is, is the answer of Truth to the sum of all lies — the reunion, purchased at cost, of everything falsehood ever split apart.

To see how, begin where sin begins.

The anatomy of sin

Sin is not raw appetite. Appetite is innocent — hunger, desire, ambition, the body's wants — until a falsehood licenses its misdirection. Trace any sin in scripture to its root and you find, every time, a believed lie doing the licensing.

Eden's transgression runs on one: "God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods" — the insinuation that God is withholding, that the command is not love. "Being deceived," Paul says of the woman, she "was in the transgression" (1 Timothy 2:14). Caiaphas condemns the Lord of life on a plausible-sounding falsehood: "it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people" (John 11:50). The rich fool's barns rise on "thou hast much goods laid up for many years" — a lie about time. The withholder at the gate recites "the man has brought upon himself his misery" — a lie about grace. Every atrocity in history was licensed by a justifying sentence its perpetrators believed, and every private sin by a quieter one: this will satisfy; no one is harmed; you deserve it; there is no other way; God does not see; you are not His.

So a working definition, held carefully: sin is acting on a believed lie. Not the belief alone — a lie can land in the mind uninvited, be felt at full strength, and be refused; the Lord himself was "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15), which proves that feeling a falsehood's pull is not yet consenting to it. Sin is the consent and the enactment: the moment a soul waters the seed, believes the sentence, and moves.

And on this definition, separation from God is not a punishment appended to sin from outside. Separation is the lie's own content, executing. Every falsehood the Liar sows has the same telos — distance: distance from God ("he is withholding"), from neighbor ("he deserves it"), from self ("you cannot change"). "Your iniquities have separated" is a statement of mechanism, not of sentence. The heavens withdraw from unrighteousness not as offended royalty but as grieved presence — "the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen" (D&C 121:37) — and damnation, at the end of the process, is simply the lie fully grown: a soul so invested in falsehoods that Truth's unveiled presence would feel like fire. The same glory is warmth to the honest and burning to the invested; judgment is less a verdict than an assay.

Which sets the terms of the Atonement's problem with terrible clarity. If sin is believed falsehood, and separation is falsehood's harvest, then redemption requires Truth to do something almost unspeakable: to take the entire harvest of lies — every consequence, every pain, every distance falsehood ever produced — into himself, comprehend each one from the inside, and exhaust them. Not to believe them. To bear them.

The Word made sin

That is precisely what the scriptures say occurred, in language that has startled readers for two thousand years: "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13). "The LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6).

Made sin — who knew no sin. Both clauses at once, and the doctrine lives in holding them together. He who is called the Word, the Truth in person, was made the bearer of every lie's full weight and consequence — their pain, their shame, their distance — while assenting to none of them. Truth passed through every falsehood the way a refiner enters the ore: tasting each lie from underneath, at full compression, and remaining true. The restored revelation states the mechanism in one breathtaking verse: "He that ascended up on high, as also he descended below all things, in that he comprehended all things, that he might be in all and through all things, the light of truth" (D&C 88:6). Truth became the light in and through all things by going below all things — below every deception, every despair, every dark sentence ever whispered in a human heart — and comprehending each from inside.

And the reason is stated with equal plainness, in the tenderest logic in scripture: "he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind... that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities" (Alma 7:11–12). You cannot succor a soul trapped inside a lie you have only observed from outside. The Physician went in.

He went in twice — through two presses — and the two pressings are the two phases of the Atonement.

The first press: Gethsemane

It is one of the open secrets of the Gospels that the garden's name is not poetry. Gethsemane is Gat Shemanim — "oil press." The first phase of the Atonement took place inside a press, named as one, at the foot of the Mount of Olives, among the very trees whose fruit that press existed to crush.

An olive press works by weight: the stone descends, gradually, pressure from above, and the fruit yields its oil under accumulating load. Now read the garden with the mechanism in view. He kneels; a weight settles — "my soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" (Matthew 26:38) — and the load increases until the body itself behaves like fruit under the stone: "being in an agony... his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground" (Luke 22:44). The prophets describe it in press-language exact to the physics: "blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish" (Mosiah 3:7); "which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit" (D&C 19:18). Extraction under pressure — the whole vessel yielding through its skin.

What was pressed into him there, by the weight? Alma's inventory answers: the pains, the afflictions, the sicknesses, the infirmities — the mortal load, the flesh's whole inheritance from Eden: disease and weakness, grief and loneliness, every suffering that comes upon souls not because they chose wrongly but because they were born into a fallen world. The garden is where he took what happens to us.

And what did the press yield? Consider what first-pressed olive oil was for in Israel: the purest first pressing was reserved for the temple lamps and for anointing. Messiah means Anointed One — and in the oil press, the Anointed was pressed into the anointing itself: the oil brought to the sick with the elders' hands (James 5:14), the oil in the wise virgins' lamps, the healing and the light. It is no accident that when the church ministers to the body, it reaches for oil. That bottle was filled in a garden, drop by crimson drop.

Two more details of the first press must be kept. He did not suffer it stoically; he recoiled — "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" — and in his own later telling: "[I] would that I might not partake" (D&C 19:18). The recoil was not weakness. It was the most accurate perception ever taken of what that cup contained; a perfect soul, registering perfectly the full weight of a world's darkness, shrank — as Truth should shrink from the concentrated harvest of every lie — and then, over the accurate reading, gave the freely chosen answer: "nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt." The offering was made with eyes open, which is the only way an offering counts. And he was not yet wholly alone: "there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him" (Luke 22:43). Heaven still attended the first press. The second would be different.

The second press: the treading

For the second phase, prophecy supplies the image seven centuries in advance, in the most haunting question-and-answer in Isaiah: "Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat? I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me" (Isaiah 63:2–3).

A winepress works by the opposite mechanics from an oil press: not weight from above but treading — the fruit trampled underfoot, walked on, crushed by the feet of men. And that is the cross. "He is despised and rejected of men... we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not" (Isaiah 53:3) — trampled by the very race he had knelt to wash. The soldiers, mocking, dressed him in a scarlet robe — costuming him, without knowing it, in the treader's stained uniform of Isaiah 63, red in his apparel, and thinking it was a joke. Even the treader's origin in the prophecy carries a hidden tenderness: he comes "from Bozrah" — and Bozrah means sheepfold. The figure emerging blood-stained from the press is the Shepherd emerging from the fold, wearing the cost of keeping it.

And whose grapes filled that press? Revelation names the vintage: the angel of the harvest gathers "the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe," and casts them into the great winepress (Revelation 14:18–19). The ripened growth of the world — the compounded lies, the full dark harvest of every seed the enemy ever sowed in every human heart. We grew the grapes. He drank the pressing: "the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" (John 18:11). And then — this is the exchange at the center of everything — having drunk to the dregs the cup pressed from our vineyard, he turned around at a table and served back a different cup entirely: "this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matthew 26:28). Two cups. He took the one we pressed; he hands us the one he pressed. The whole Atonement can be stated as that exchange — and the revelations state the alternative with the only severity mercy ever uses: "I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent; but if they would not repent they must suffer even as I" (D&C 19:16–17). Refuse the exchanged cup, and a soul drinks its own vintage. That is not a threat; it is viticulture.

The wine's jurisdiction, then, is the second family of wounds: not what happened to us but what happened through us — sin and its wages, the believed lies and the death they carry. When the church addresses the body, it anoints with oil; when it addresses sin and death, it lifts a cup. The garden filled the first vessel; the cross filled the second. And the Lord's own parable quietly shows both being used: the Samaritan, finding the traveler broken on the Jericho road, "bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine" (Luke 10:34) — the two pressings, poured together into the same wound, by the Neighbor the road was waiting for — who then carries the man to an inn, pays in advance, and promises to settle any remainder "when I come again." Every wounded traveler since has been convalescing at that inn, between the payment and the return, with both bottles on the shelf.

The cry: the master lie

But the second press had a floor below its floor, and the Atonement could not be finished without reaching it.

If sin is believed falsehood, and every falsehood's telos is distance, then beneath all the particular lies lies a master lie — the one at the bottom of every other, the accuser's final argument in every heart he has ever worked: you are alone. God has left. You are forsaken, and you were never really His. Every sinner has heard it in the silence after the sin; every sufferer in the third week of the affliction; every mourner at the graveside. It is the lie the other lies are for.

And it could not remain untasted. To comprehend all things from below, Truth had to feel that — the compounded terminus of every separation every lie ever produced — at full and undiluted strength. So on the cross, the sustaining Presence that had attended every hour of his life, that had opened heavens at his baptism and sent an angel to the first press, was withdrawn; sin's structural consequence — the distance — closed over the one Man who had never earned an inch of it; and out of the darkness at the ninth hour came the cry that has never stopped echoing: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).

The feeling was total. And here is the deepest thing in the doctrine: the feeling was total, and it still was not true. Watch what he does inside the experience. He addresses the God who feels absent — "My God, my God" — the possessive held with both pierced hands. And he is doing something more: he is quoting. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me" is the first line of the twenty-second Psalm, and in his tradition, to speak a psalm's first line was to invoke the whole psalm — a psalm that begins in dereliction and drives through it to vindication, containing, twelve verses past the cry, the direct verdict on the master lie itself: "For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard" (Psalm 22:24). At the point of maximum felt abandonment, the Truth answered the lie of abandonment the only way lies are ever finally answered — with the word: testifying, through the felt absence, to the Father who had not, in fact, hidden his face.

He proved, at the one place in eternity it could be proven, that the feeling of God's absence and the fact of it can diverge absolutely — that forsakenness can be experienced at infinite depth by a soul God has not forsaken for an instant. Which means the master lie is broken as evidence, forever. No soul who has ever felt abandoned is in territory he has not held from inside; the feeling, however total, testifies to nothing except that he has been there first. The accuser's ultimate exhibit was carried into court by the Defendant himself, examined under maximum compression — and thrown out.

And mark the timing of what happened next, because heaven marked it: "Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27:50–51). At the hour he absorbed maximal separation, separation itself was structurally abolished — the curtain between God and man opened, and opened from the top: not torn by human reform from below, but parted by the Father's own hand over his Son's finished offering. He drank the distance so the curtain could open. That is the transaction of the ninth hour.

The third day: the falsification

If the Atonement's descent was Truth passing under every lie, then the resurrection is what it appears to be and infinitely more: it is the falsification — the standing, embodied, empirical disproof of every falsehood that was ever pressed into him.

The lie said: you are alone. The tomb answered: the Father received him. The lie said: death ends it; the grave keeps what it takes; the body is lost. The stone rolled back on a Man with a body — "handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (Luke 24:39) — and the deepest division of all, spirit from body, was rejoined, first in him, then by his power in everyone: "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). The lie said: you cannot be made new; what you are is what you stay. He rose glorified — the crushed fruit of two presses, standing in a garden again, mistaken for the gardener — which is either the resurrection's one joke or its plainest statement: the Man coming out of the tomb at dawn, taken for the one who tends the plants. Mary was not entirely wrong.

Every phase reversed at the rising. The One who was pressed under all things ascended above all things. The One who trod the press alone came up in company — "the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose" (Matthew 27:52). The soul that had contracted under the weight of the world's whole darkness expanded past death's capacity to hold it. And the wounds — this detail is the tenderest in the record — the wounds stayed. Of all things a glorified body might shed, he kept the marks of the treading: showed them to Thomas, invited a whole gathered nation on another shore to come forth "one by one" and feel them (3 Nephi 11:14–15), and will show them once more at the last, for prophecy places the final scene at the exact site of the first press. His feet will stand again "upon the mount of Olives" (Zechariah 14:4) — back at the oil garden — and there the question of Zechariah will finally be asked to his face by his own long-scattered kin: "What are these wounds in thine hands and in thy feet? Then shall they know that I am the Lord; for I will say unto them: These wounds are the wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends... I am he who was lifted up" (D&C 45:51–52; Zechariah 13:6). The press-marks, presented at the press. And the weeping that follows — "then shall they weep because of their iniquities" — is not the weeping of the condemned. It is the last family reunion in the book: the wounds doing what the wounds were always for, turning hearts.

Let no man divide asunder

Now the title of this study can be paid.

There is a verse in the Gospels about marriage that is really a verse about everything: "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Mark 10:9). And there is a verse about the word of God that seems its opposite — the word "quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit" (Hebrews 4:12). One verse forbids dividing; the other celebrates it. Held together, they are the Atonement's two edges — because the whole work of redemption is one great surgery of joining and dividing, and everything turns on what gets divided and what gets joined.

The Liar divides what God joined: man from God, spirit from body, brother from brother, the soul from its own true name. The Word divides what the Liar joined: the lie from the soul that believed it, the sin from the sinner, the tare from the heart it grew in — a division so precise it can pass between joint and marrow, severing the falsehood from the child of God without harming the child, because the Blade has been inside every lie personally and knows exactly where each one ends and the soul begins. He cut himself on all of them first. The word divides asunder the believed lie so that nothing else need ever be divided again — surgery in the service of union, the sickle's work done by a scalpel that loves.

And what is joined, when the dividing is done, is joined with the permanence of the verse's own register — for the covenant between God and his people has been, from Sinai to the prophets to the Lamb's supper, a marriage: "thy Maker is thine husband" (Isaiah 54:5); "I am married unto you" (Jeremiah 3:14); "the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready" (Revelation 19:7). The Atonement is the bride-price of that marriage — paid in two presses, oil and wine, the anointing and the covenant cup — and the union it purchases is subject to the marriage verse in full: what God hath joined, let no man put asunder. Not the accuser, whose every instrument of division has been individually carried, comprehended, and broken. Not death, which was divided from its own victory. Not the feeling of forsakenness, which was proven a liar at the ninth hour by the only Witness competent to testify.

Paul stood at the end of this whole doctrine and asked the question it exists to answer, and his answer is where this study, and every study, comes to rest:

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 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 8:35–39).

Nothing can divide it, because Someone already absorbed every dividing thing — descended below the last of them, felt the very bottom of the last lie, and rose. The pressing is finished. The oil and the wine are on the shelf at the inn. The veil hangs open, torn from the top. And the union the two presses purchased is now the most protected thing in existence — joined by God, sealed in blood twice pressed, and placed forever beyond the reach of the only power that ever divided anything:

a lie, believed.

Let no man — let nothing — divide it asunder. Nothing can.

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For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life... nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.