The Prophet Joseph Smith's final years in Navu, Illinois constituted a season of rich theological and ritual convergence.

It was a time when various threads of biblical and revealed theology

gave birth to the latter day temple rituals

that would enable us to enact that very theology.

It was in Nauvoo that the picture became clear.

Every revealed ordinance builds with deep meaning to the next, until finally reaching the pinnacle ordinance of sealing wife

and husband together for eternity. All theological and ritual threads come

together at this point. In today's episode of Church History Matters, we dig

into win and wear the ritual of marriage ceilings first began in the church and

explore the tight weave between this ordinance and the theological threads of God's true nature. the I'm Scott Woodward and my co-host is Casey Griffiths and today Casey and I dive into our fifth

episode in this series about the development of Latter-day Saint Temple Worship.

Now let's get into it. Casey Griffiths, how we doing sir? Good, how are you doing Scott?

Lovely. Boy, we may have bitten off more than we can chew this time.

And it was funny because after like speeding to get through all the Masonic stuff last time, I was thinking,

oh, this will be a breeze. We've already sort of covered this when we talked about plural marriage,

but boy, was there a lot happening in Navu,

round about the spring of 1842 into the fall of 1843, there's just a lot going on.

It is theologically and ritualistically dense. Yeah. It's a very

dense time period and a lot of really important things are coming together really

it's the convergence of like everything. It's all converging right?

Like there's there's some cool stories about Joseph's life being spared because he

said his work was not yet done and then in 1844 he'll say that he's now is liable to die as any man because his work is finished

...