Question
Dear Gramps, I’ve heard and read various things about the 1st and 2nd resurrection. To my understanding the 1st will go in affect when the Savior comes again. When will the 2nd happen?
Stetson
Answer
Dear Stetson,
The second resurrection comes at the end of the millennium and is reserved for those—
who are liars, and sorcerers, and adulterers, and whoremongers, and whosoever loves and makes a lie.
These are they who suffer the wrath of God on earth.
These are they who suffer the vengeance of eternal fire.
These are they who are cast down to hell and suffer the wrath of Almighty God, until the fulness of times, when Christ shall have subdued all enemies under his feet, and shall have perfected his work (D&C 76:103-106).
They are remanded to the custody of Satan, to pay to the demands of justice the full price for all the sins that they have committed, as though there had been no Savior, because they live in their unrepentant sins. Of them it is written in the Doctrine and Covenants, recounting the sounding of the various trumpets that are sounded when Christ comes to initiate his millennial reign—
And again, another trump shall sound, which is the third trump; and then come the spirits of men who are to be judged, and are found under condemnation;
And these are the rest of the dead; and they live not again until the thousand years are ended, neither again, until the end of the earth (D&C 88:100-101).
These are they who shall not be redeemed from the devil until the last resurrection, until the Lord, even Christ the Lamb, shall have finished his work (D&C 76:85).
When these, the wicked people of the earth, are resurrected at the end of the millennium, as stated above, they will inherit the glory of a telestial kingdom, which is the lowest of the three degrees of glory. The earth in its present state is a telestial kingdom. So they will inherit a globe that obeys the same natural laws as does this earth in its present state. There will be enmity between the members of the animal kingdom; briars, thistles and noxious weeds will grow spontaneously; there will be the seasons of the year and weather patterns; and gravity will obtain as a forceful restraint to physical action. Nevertheless, it will be a kingdom of GLORY, of which the scriptures state—
And thus we saw, in the heavenly vision, the glory of the telestial, which surpasses all understanding (D&C 76:89).
This is a manifestation of the infinite loving kindness of our Heavenly Father, who gives an eternal reward even to those that hate him. But that promise and reward has even now been forthcoming. The glory of the telestial kingdom in which we live today surpasses all understanding of those who lived only 100 years ago. Automobiles and airplanes had just been invented. The SR71, for instance, was an unimaginable concept of air travel, and to travel to the moon would have been an unbelievable fantasy. In the field of electronics it would be completely unbelievable that a person could sit on a mountain top and with no electrical connections to anything, but with a cell phone and a lap top computer he could communicate in real time with others anywhere on the planet and have at his fingertips essentially all the knowledge in the world. He could snap a camera and instantly have available for viewing exact color replicas of whatever he pointed the camera at, and he could store on a little component in the camera less than an inch square literally hundreds of full-color pictures that could be viewed in the camera and printed out with exact color in any size he desired. The list is endless.
Gramps
