Question
Gramps,
People can hear about the Gospel and refuse to accept it and may not believe it to be true. They can also decide that they are just not interested. I was curious – will this be the case in the Spirit World? Can people still accept or deny the Gospel there? Is there a bigger effect to refusing the Gospel in the Spirit World than here on Earth?
Kami
Answer
Dear Kami,
Read through Doctrine and Covenants, Section 138, and you will learn that the gospel will be preached to both the wicked and the righteous. The principles of the gospel do not change, nor is man’s free agency abrogated. The change we undergo at death is not all that great a change. A very apt analogy would be to taking off a coat. When we remove a coat we do not change who we are; we do not alter our values or our judgments or our way of thinking. These only change by our interpretation of continued experience. When we die, we take off the cloak of mortality. We step out of our bodies much the same as if we were to take off a coat. When we enter the spirit world there will be no change in our mentality. As we gain new experiences and learn new truths we will respond to them much as we would have if we had heard them in mortality. We will have the opportunity to change our minds, to repent of evil doings or not, depending on our disposition. However, one difference we will experience–if we are chained by physical habits, if our intellects are controlled by our physical selves, such as being under the compulsion to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol or take drugs, those physically generated demands will still be with us, but without a physical body we will have no way to satisfy them. So it may be much more difficult to get over an addiction there than here.
Gramps
