IN THE BEGINNING, Chapter 3 of Kingdom of God Volume 1

IN THE BEGINNING, Chapter 3 of Kingdom of God Volume 1

By Ogden Kraut 

Pages 22-35

When you climb up a ladder, you must begin at the bottom, and ascend step by step, until you arrive at the top; and so it is with the principles of the Gospel–you must begin with the first, and go on until you learn all the principles of exaltation. (J. Smith, TPJS, p. 348)

In studying the Kingdom of God, we need to begin long before 1830 or 1843–which is what most Mormon authors have done. We will go back to the very beginning, as Joseph Smith suggested:

In the first place, I wish to go back to the beginning–to the morn of creation. There is the starting point for us to look to, in order to understand and be fully acquainted with the mind, purposes and decrees of the Great Elohim, who sits in yonder heavens as he did at the creation of this world. It is necessary for us to have an understanding of God himself in the beginning. If we start right, it is easy to go right all the time; but if we start wrong, we may go wrong, and it be a hard matter to get right. (TPJS, p. 343)

If we must go back to the beginning to learn about “the Great Elohim,” then we must go back to the same point to learn about His Kingdom. The first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible states: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1) When God did this, He was merely extending the boundaries and dominions of His Kingdom.