Wide as Eternity

The geography of revelation

The greatest chapter in the Pearl of Great Price opens with a hiking itinerary, and the itinerary is a doctrine. "As I was journeying, and stood upon the place Mahujah, and cried unto the Lord, there came a voice out of heaven, saying — Turn ye, and get ye upon the mount Simeon" (Moses 7:2).

Decode the names. Simeon is transparent Hebrew — from shama, "to hear"; Leah named her son with the etymology attached: "Because the LORD hath heard" (Genesis 29:33). Enoch is sent up the Mount of Hearing. Mahujah is less certain, and we hold it loosely — but its first element is almost surely mah, the Hebrew interrogative: "what?" — the asking-word. (And a wonder worth marking plainly: a figure named MHWY — Mahawai — appears in the Aramaic Book of Giants found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, where his role is to carry questions to Enoch; a name-convergence between Joseph Smith's 1830 dictation and a text that lay buried at Qumran until 1947, noted by scholars precisely because in both texts the name belongs to the inquiry scene. Make of the etymology what you will; the convergence is on the record.) So the itinerary reads: Enoch stands at the place of asking, cries unto the Lord, and is directed to the mountain of hearing — and there, "as I stood upon the mount, I beheld the heavens open, and I was clothed upon with glory; and I saw the Lord; and he stood before my face, and he talked with me, even as a man talketh one with another, face to face" (7:3–4). Ask, then hear, then behold — the whole grammar of revelation, walked as terrain. Zion's founding vision begins as geography because that is how every approach to God begins: you stand where the question is honest, you climb to where you can hear, and the beholding is given on the height.

And remember who is walking it: the young man who protested his call with "all the people hate me; for I am slow of speech" (6:31) — the Moses-mouth, the self-declared weak thing. It is to him that God gives such power of language that "he spake the word of the Lord, and the earth trembled, and the mountains fled... and the rivers of water were turned out of their course" (7:13). The asker at Mahujah becomes the voice that moves mountains — weakness brought to the asking-place, made strong on the hearing-mount, which is the standing offer of the whole gospel and the first lesson of the chapter: Zion's founder qualified by inquiry, not eloquence.

How the city was actually built

Now the passage that should govern every Zion project ever attempted — because Moses 7 records the construction sequence, and we habitually run it backwards.

Watch the order of operations. First, the word. Enoch preaches repentance, and the word itself is the people's entire defense — no army is mentioned anywhere in the account; enemies come against them and are answered by speech: "so great was the power of the language which God had given him" (7:13) that geography rearranged itself and "all nations feared greatly" (7:17). The city's whole military was a sanctified vocabulary. Second, righteousness. The world around them burns — "there were wars and bloodshed among them" (7:16), the nations grinding on — but among Enoch's people something else accrues, and then verse 16 records the decisive arrival: "the Lord came and dwelt with his people, and they dwelt in righteousness." Mark the verse number: presence arrives at 16. Third, the naming. Verse 18: "And the Lord called his people ZION, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them" — the fourfold definition: cardiac, mental, relational, economic; one condition, described at four depths; the name conferred by God on an achieved state. And fourth — only fourth — construction. Verse 19: "And Enoch... built a city, even the City of Holiness, ZION."

Read the sequence aloud, because it is the clarification everything else depends on: word → righteousness → presence → name → real estate. The Lord dwelt with them before any city existed. The people were named Zion before a wall went up. The city was the residence of an achieved condition — never its cause, never its catalyst, never its hope. Every failed Zion in our history ran the arrow backwards: acquire the land, raise the structures, trust the condition to follow — and the Lord's autopsy of the great failure said exactly this ("they have not learned to be obedient... are not united according to the union required," D&C 105:3–4). Moses 7 is the construction manual, and its first three steps use no lumber.

Note the tempo, too: "in process of time" (7:21). Enoch's ministry ran three hundred and sixty-five years; the city's translation was a ripening, not a rapture. And even after Zion was taken, the door stayed open: "the Holy Ghost fell on many, and they were caught up by the powers of heaven into Zion" (7:27) — the city kept receiving new citizens, one prepared soul at a time, for generations. Zion's membership was never gated on being present at the founding. It still is not.

The laugh and the tears

Then the chapter turns Enoch around and shows him the residue — and delivers, in two facing images, the entire theology of the two masters.

First image: "he beheld Satan; and he had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced" (7:26). Weigh each element. The chain: the adversary has his own welding — links that imprison where Elijah's links join; a counterfeit sealing, binding captives instead of families. The veil of darkness: the anti-temple — a veil that blinds, where the true veil graduates. And the laugh — the only laughter attributed to the devil anywhere in scripture, and the text positions it with terrible care, because two verses later comes the facing image: "And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept" (7:28).

There they are, side by side above the same darkness: the false god laughing at the family's misery, and the true God weeping over it. Fix that diptych in your memory, because it is a diagnostic that never fails: you can identify which spirit is operating in any room, any ideology, any voice, any heart — including your own — by a single test: what does it do when someone falls? Amusement at ruin is the adversary's signature emotion. Grief is the Father's.

Wide as eternity

And the weeping breaks Enoch open, because it breaks his theology. His question comes three times, ascending: "How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?" (7:29, 31) — how can the Being of the millions of earths ("and thy curtains are stretched out still," 7:30), the God whose peace and justice are the habitation of his throne, be touched? Enoch has the transcendence half of God memorized. He is about to receive the other half from the source.

"Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands... and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency; 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... wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?" (7:32–37).

Parse the answer, clause by clause, because it is the plan of salvation explaining its own cost structure. The weeping is not a crack in omnipotence — it is the price of agency, paid by its Giver: love commanded but choosable ("that they should choose me their Father"), which necessarily means refusable; and the diagnosis of the refusal — "without affection" — is unrighteousness in its primary sense, the cords not held, hearts hard toward their own blood. God's grief is simply what un-coerced love does when its object self-destructs. The Father's tears are the receipt for our freedom. He knew the invoice before the foundation of the world, and signed.

And then the chapter performs its miracle: the weeping transfers. "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" (7:41). The man who asked "how canst thou weep?" is now weeping — and attend to the anatomy of the sentence: his heart swelled wide as eternity — the aperture, dilated to God's own gauge; the capacity of the vessel, stretched to the capacity of the Owner. This is deification by compassion — theosis, not as ascent beyond feeling but as enlargement into God's feeling: Enoch becomes like God in the moment he grieves what God grieves at the width God grieves it. And the grief is honest to the end: he "refused to be comforted" (7:44) — cheap comfort declined, as it should be — until shown the one thing in existence that can hold such sorrow: "the Son of Man lifted up on the cross... and the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world" — "wherefore, and for this cause, his soul rejoiced" (7:45–47). There is the pastoral law for every grieving saint, in Enoch's own sequence: the sorrow is legitimate; refusal of shallow comfort is not faithlessness; and the place the weeping finally rests is not an explanation but an atonement. Only the slain Lamb is wide enough to comfort a heart that has swelled wide as eternity.

The mother's question and the baby named Rest

Then a voice no other chapter of scripture records: the planet's. "Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest?" (7:48). The earth, personified as a mother — the same living earth the revelations say "abideth the law" and will one day be sanctified into a crystalline sea of glass — heard here mid-story, defiled by her children, asking for her sabbath.

And the covenant answers her with a name. For whose birth does this very vision announce? Noah — Hebrew Noach: "rest" — named with the etymology attached, as Simeon was: "this same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil" (Genesis 5:29). The mother cries when shall I rest? and the lineage's reply is a baby named Rest — the ark-builder through whom she receives her first cleansing bath. Even the genealogy keeps time with mercy: the old tradition (marked plainly as tradition) reads Methuselah as "his death shall send it" — the man with the longest lifespan in scripture, whose years ran out the very year the flood came: the longest life ever lived, doubling as the longest stay of execution ever granted. And the final answer to the mother's question closes the chapter's horizon: "for the space of a thousand years the earth shall rest" (7:64). Her question brackets the rest of the vision — the flood her bath, the millennium her sabbath — and every verse between is the story of how her children come home in time for it.

The flood in reverse, and the embrace

The finale opens with the King of the city speaking his own gate-doctrine: "I am Messiah, the King of Zion, the Rock of Heaven, which is broad as eternity; whoso cometh in at the gate and climbeth up by me shall never fall" (7:53). Every clause load-bearing: the gate, one Person wide; the ascent made on him — climbing by the Rock, who is thus both door and ladder; and the warranty — shall never fall — issued by the only foundation broad as eternity, which is the exact width, note, to which Enoch's heart was just stretched. The city and its King share a gauge.

Then the last-days promise, and hear the inversion it performs: "righteousness will I send down out of heaven; and truth will I send forth out of the earth, to bear testimony of mine Only Begotten... and righteousness and truth will I cause to sweep the earth as with a flood, to gather out mine elect from the four quarters of the earth" (7:62). Psalm 85 fulfilled to the letter — "truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven" (85:11) — righteousness descending as revelation restored from above, truth erupting from the ground itself (and a book did come out of a hill). And the flood re-run with its polarity reversed: Noah's waters swept the earth to destroy the wicked; the last flood sweeps to gather the elect — same verb, same totality, opposite cargo. Judgment, recomposed as collection. That is this dispensation's whole signature, and Enoch saw it from the far side of the first flood.

The gathered are brought to "an Holy City... a New Jerusalem" (7:62) — and even that name cooperates, for Yerushalayim in Hebrew carries a dual ending: grammatically a city that comes in a pair — which is precisely what happens next, in the sentence the entire chapter, and arguably the entire plan of salvation, exists to deliver:

"Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other" (7:63).

Two cities: Enoch's, descending, having waited in heaven's escrow through every age since; and ours, ascending, built by the same sequence he pioneered — word, righteousness, presence, name — meeting in the air in scripture's own reconciliation-signature, the gesture the record reserves for its greatest homecomings: Esau running to fall on Jacob's neck, Joseph on Benjamin's, the father on the prodigal's, the two Zions on each other's. The arc of all sacred history resolves into family members falling on one another's necks. And the chapter's final line hangs the collateral for that promise in the sky where every generation can see it: "and it came to pass that Zion was not, for God received it up into his own bosom; and from thence went forth the saying, ZION IS FLED" (7:69). Fled — like a bird — not disbanded, not dissolved: the city intact, airborne, scheduled. The down payment of the embrace has been held in escrow ever since, and the whole work of the last dispensation is the raising of the party that goes up to meet it.

The manual, restated

So here is the building of Zion, clarified from its founding text, in one paragraph you can build with: Zion is built by word, not weapons — its whole defense a sanctified language; in wartime, not peacetime — the wars raged all around while the city ripened; as a people before a place — presence at verse 16, name at 18, real estate at 19; named by God before framed by men; grown in process of time, one caught-up soul at a time, with the rolls open long after the founding; founded by a slow-of-speech asker who stood at the place of the question and climbed the mountain of hearing; ruled by a King who is gate and ladder both, broad as eternity, whose warranty is never-fall; populated by hearts that have learned to weep at what God weeps at — and swelled, in the weeping, wide as eternity, refusing every comfort smaller than the Lamb; awaited by a mother asking for her rest and promised her thousand-year sabbath; and aimed, from the first preached word, at a flood that gathers and a mid-air embrace that has been on the calendar since before the rain.

That is the chapter. The city is real, it is fled and not gone, and the sequence that built it is published and unrevoked — word, righteousness, presence, name — beginning, as it began for Enoch, wherever one slow-of-speech soul stands at the asking-place and cries unto the Lord.

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And his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.