"Verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither any man, nor the children of men; neither Adam, your father, whom I created. Behold, I gave unto him that he should be an agent unto himself; and I gave unto him commandment, but no temporal commandment gave I unto him, for my commandments are spiritual; they are not natural nor temporal, neither carnal nor sensual."
1. You can eat anything here, except that. Don't eat that.
Does that sound like a spiritual law to you? From the outside, it appears arbitrary, actually. With no other context, it's possible to see the command as a flex. It's disconnected from any clear benefit. It could be merely an ego-stroking exercise of control.
When you understand it's a loving father speaking to his son, the context forces a new interpretation. Now the rule is an expression of love and higher wisdom. The child doesn't know himself yet, and can't tell the consequences of his actions. He has no way to predict the outcomes, and it could be dangerous for him to put some things in his mouth, so the father communicates the guiderails that will ensure that the alimentary needs get met under conditions of safety. The father prevents needless suffering by communicating healthy boundaries to behavior.
But is that a spiritual commandment yet? Certainly all expressions of love and sharing of care and intelligence have spiritual causes and effects. But unless you're willing to entertain a deeper level of context to inform a deeper level of analysis, you might miss that this isn't just about avoiding suffering and isn't just about the safety of the body. It's about teaching us that natural appetites must be subject to higher purposes and that moral agents must proactively choose the right (sometimes otherwise neutral choices like what to eat rise to the level of a question of morality, if the ingested substance is morally dangerous). It teaches us who we can trust, listen to, obey, and grow in understanding toward.
A commandment from a loving God about what not to eat is no mere health code, and is no mere safety regulation--it's a design element in His plan to teach our spirits to properly act through the bodies we are given and on the other matter surrounding us. It's a principle of faith, power, enlightenment, peace, and joy. It enables a widening circle of ability to act, and brings us closer to the Source of all righteousness.
The concept that all commandments are spiritual should expand our conception of all of the 10 commandments, maybe the last 6 most expressly. The spiritual context for understanding the Word of Wisdom, the laws of sacrifice, obedience, and even chastity can be circumscribed into one great whole: that "fear" (although the Hebrew word translators deployed as "fear" here, is really more like humility, awe and reverence, and not terror or dread--it's awareness of God's goodness, and our smallness in comparison) of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom, faith, power, and honor. God's laws teach us His nature, and through obedience, we approach both it and Him, we align with the principles that frame His nature and "know Him" in the way the great intercessory prayer calling for the oneness of the believers with the Father and the Son expresses: "this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."
God doesn't demand honor and obedience because He's petty and enjoys controlling us. He is pleased when we are humble before Him, but His commandments aren't for His benefit. He doesn't demand honor and obedience merely because they benefit us in mortality. Societies that do implement His prescriptions live freer, more prosperously, and more stably than others, and minimize harm. But they aren't primarily self-help recommendations or social harmony suggestions. God demands honor and obedience because eternal individual and social conditions depend on implementing and growing through the principles He Himself is eternally bound by. Taking seriously the idea that we really are His children and heirs means we are under obligation to prepare to shoulder the awesome creative power of His Word and His spirit in some far-off eternity, accepting competently whatever eternal crowns or responsibility He has in store for us. We have to learn to live like Father. And understanding how His spirit made the physical world means understanding that the physical laws He prescribes are also spiritual in nature. As we learn to act as He acts, with spiritual purpose through material means, we simultaneously learn to act and not be acted upon, as He--the Prime Mover--acts and is not acted upon.
2. As all master pedagogues do, the Lord teaches Smith and the others to whom this Section is addressed what His key terms are, sometimes by opposition. He has built up an argument to blow their minds: that commandments are spiritual, not temporal. But the binary between spirit and time is not sufficiently clear by itself to give the proper contours of the concept. It is immediately suggestive that the opposite of temporal--meaning time-bound, or understood by chronological means--would logically be something like eternal, endless, or achronological, and that therefore putting spiritual opposite temporal equates the spiritual with the eternal.
But the Lord also provides three other opposites for our triangulation of how he understands the term "spiritual." Spiritual is not only non-temporal, it is also the opposite of natural (or not bound by what we can understand as the cause-and-effect world of the material that we understand by the sciences), of carnal (or not limited to the appetites, needs, and decays of biological flesh), and of sensual (or not apprehended by what inputs our mortal minds can process, or what appeals to our senses). We have to conceptualize the spiritual not only as that which lasts into the eternities (and is therefore of most value), but as that which transcends our senses, our bodies, and our mortal conditions. We have to think of the spiritual as not subject to what understanding of our bodies, senses and mortal conditions we can derive from senses, from matter, and from human rational thought. Our spirits are supernatural, disembodied, and eternal, and cannot be comprehended without new eyes, new tools beyond our abilities.
The fact that mortality consists of a pairing of these agential forces of spirit with physical bodies, bound in time, flesh, and nature, and bound by senses as they are, is not only a miraculous wonder in and of itself, but a huge impetus to get our preparation time right. Now is the time to prepare to meet God--He too is an embodied spirit, but glorified through obedience to eternal principles of joy, peace, love, and justice.
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