I found this amazing picture on Pinterest and fell in love with it. It is such a visual. The great and spacious building is not some distant building but rather the steps and the balconies are right there taunting us to leave the tree of life with its most white and sweet fruit. If we are not always on the top of our game with our faith, we might just try to set the fruit down real quick with full intent of coming back to the fruit. Sadly, that path back is not as simple or easy as it may seem at the time, and the danger of not returning at all is great. We MUST NOT HEED THEM. We need to use our faith in our Savior, Jesus Christ, to stay the course and always obey the promptings of the Spirit. Every day we need to get the spirit early through prayer and scripture study and then KEEP IT ALL DAY. We can’t afford to lower our guard or even “look” at the spacious building. Remember Lot’s wife who looked back either physically or in her heart and she turned to salt. We must keep our eyes and hearts set and focused on Christ and His teachings.
Craig
This is beautiful! Thanks for sharing.
We had a discussion about the fruit being representational of eternal life. That is is the symbol of eternal life. I believe it is in the sense that we maintain our partaking of the Fruit from the Tree of Life which is Jesus Christ. If we, as you stated, put the fruit down and partake no longer, obviously, eternal life is forfeited. Does this seem like a true interpretation of this beautiful parable?
The tree represents the love of God (1 Nephi 11:21-22). John 3:16 reads: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." So, the tree represents the love of God, and this love can only be obtained as a gift by and through his Only Begotten Son. The fruit is all the goodness, joy, gifts of the spirit, forgiveness, etc… that is given as we come unto Christ, and eternal life is only obtained or gifted as we continually partake of the fruit until our very nature's are changed and we become like unto Christ. Only through this path and name can we gain eternal life, we must be changed to become like him and thus becoming one with Christ and the Father.
This is the reason that after many partook of the fruit and looked at the great and spacious building, and for whatever reason heeded them, were lost.
Alma 24:30
And thus we can plainly discern, that after a people have been once enlightened by the Spirit of God, and have had great knowledge of things pertaining to righteousness, and then have fallen away into sin and transgression, they become more hardened, and thus their state becomes worse than though they had never known these things.
I hope this helps.