Deuteronomy 6-8; 15; 18; 29-30; 34

 Please go to this link for my previous post on Deuteronomy.

Numbers 11-14; 20-25; 27

When reading the Old Testament, I find it very helpful to remember that this book is a whole different style of scripture than any of our other standard works. 

Painting by Matthew Larson, used with permission

The New Testament is a history and testament of Jesus Christ's mission on the earth and the beginnings of the early Christian church. It includes the literal words of Christ, written by first-person or once-removed witnesses. It contains sermons given by Christ and letters written by His apostles that contain true doctrine that will lead to unity and happiness. Only one book in the New Testament is different than this: the Book of Revelation, which is totally symbolic and teaches of God's eternal plan for His children and Christ's role in saving the world from evil in a dream-like or story-like manner.

"Alma Baptizes in the Waters of Mormon," by Arnold Friberg, 

from Church Media Library

The Book of Mormon is a similar testament. It contains literal history and accurate doctrine taught by Jesus Christ and His prophets to this group of ancient Hebrews who migrated to the American continent during the time of Jeremiah. Many different authors contributed to the Book of Mormon over hundreds of years, each testifying of God's dealings in their lives from their own perspective. There are long, detailed stories of battles written by an army captain, sprinkled with truths of the gospel (Book of Alma). There are very short entries written by keepers of the records as they passed them on to the next keeper (Book of Omni). There are histories within histories, such as the adventures of a group who left the main body with false hope of a reconciliation with their enemies in their home land (Book of Alma). There is a translation of the long past history of a previous civilization that failed (Book of Ether). And there is an editor of much of the book (from Words of Mormon through the end). The Book of Mormon can be trusted as truth, historically and doctrinally. Whenever some anacronism (thing out of place with the time) appears and critics taut it as proof the book is fake, it is eventually proven to be correct (such as horses existing in ancient America). It does contain some chapters full of symbolism (Lehi's vision or passages quoted directly from Isaiah), but they are not the norm.

The Nauvoo Temple, my own photo

 The Doctrine and Covenants is mostly the words of Jesus Christ directly to the latter-day prophet, Joseph Smith, written by a scribe but without any other middle man. There are only a couple of chapters from other prophets' times at the end of the book. Most of the sections are words from Christ through Joseph Smith to specific people about specific circumstances involving the restoration of His Church and its management. There are sections that are direct answers to questions from individual saints. The whole thing is very literal, very straight-forward, very true.

Joseph Smith Statue at the Joseph Smith Building in Salt Lake City,

my photo (and my nieces)

The Pearl of Great Price is a collection of several different works. There are re-tellings of Old Testament stories with added material revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith as he studied the Bible in depth and through his lens as a seer (Books of Moses and Abraham). There is a copy of one chapter of the New Testament that has particular application to the latter days with President Smith's revelatory changes. There is an autobiographical account of Joseph Smith's call as a prophet, including his vision of God the Father and Jesus Christ. And there are the Articles of Faith, written by Joseph Smith.

Noah's Ark, by Edward Hicks, from Wikipedia

And then there's the Old Testament. It's a whole different type of scripture. The origin, writing and compilation of the Old Testament is hugely different than that of any other scripture book (with exceptions of those chapters of other scriptures that came from the Old Testament). 

• The Old Testament stories were not ever intended to tell an accurate, detailed history of a people. They were crafted, honed, and stylized not to be true, but to teach truths and to provide religious memory for a specific group of people, the Hebrews. If changing the literal numbers of things to highly symbolic numbers will carry the meaning better, the symbolic numbers will be chosen. (Think of 40 as "the necessary time for the trial" or 7 as "a godly, perfect, or complete amount." Think of 12 as a priesthood number, a quorum. Think of 4 as relating to earthy, temporal things.) Great events are exaggerated for effect. The number of Israelites who came out of Egypt, for example, is pretty wild and hard to imagine. As we know from our temple teachings, the story of Adam and Eve is allegorical (although Adam and Eve were real people) and we are to consider what it tells us about ourselves.
• The telling and subsequent recording of the Old Testament took place in a culture vastly different from most 21st century cultures on the earth today. To view the Old Testament as absolutely accurate would be to impose our culture upon theirs. Many of us today place a high value on telling the truth, but there are still cultures of the world where accuracy is not that important; conveying the value of something, the importance of a person, the moral of a story is way more important than accurate details. Today, a western political figure dealing with a leader from a vastly different cultural background will encounter problems if they assume that the two have the same understanding of truth or of contracts. A reader of the Old Testament can fall under a misunderstanding of religion and the nature of God Himself if they think of the Old Testament as factual.
• The Old Testament books were written long after the stories within them actually occurred. Very little of the Old Testament was written by a person who was alive and experienced the story. Maybe some of the prophetic writings would fall under this category, but not many. Mostly the stories were told and modified over many generations of illiterate but faithful people. 
• Religions were regional in the ancient world. Gods were connected to specific lands. If you moved, you left them behind and took on the gods of the place you moved to. But Jehovah was greater than that. He led the Israelites as they moved through the land. His goal was to help the people rather than rule over the land.
• The oral stories and instructions were written down by scribes when the Jews were forced out of Jerusalem by Babylon so that they could carry their religion with them. They were modified to fit the current state of the Hebrews, scattered all around the area with no centralized locus of religion. There is a lot of detail about sacrifices, which could be made on an altar anywhere, and very little detail about exactly what the temple ceremonies and practices entailed, once the temple was destroyed. Jehovah was (is) a God you could worship anywhere, if you knew about Him. The written stories provided the knowledge.
• The listener is to put himself or herself in the place of the characters of the story in order to apply them to their own lives. It doesn't matter whether Job was a real person who really experienced the losses listed in his book. It matters that you consider, "Would I be like Job? Would I handle the loss of everything I love and still be faithful to God?" That's the hope that the story is meant to convey.
• The Old Testament came from a people who had worshipped idols and whose neighbors all had multiple gods of their own creation. These gods were created in order for the people to understand their world and have hope for better things. All natural phenomena were viewed as acts of the gods. Every disease was viewed as a curse from a god. Every victory in a war was because of the support of a god. These gods were not understood to be all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful or even filled with love for their constituents. They were much more like the men who created them: angry, vindictive, petty. This environment influenced the way the Hebrews and their storytellers understood  Jehovah, the One True God. They expected that Jehovah took charge over every detail of life: every disease was a punishment, every victory was a reward. They could easily view Him as angry or jealous.
• Paul's statement that "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, but when I became [an adult] I put away childish things" (I Cor. 13:11 NKJV) applies to civilizations as well. They begin as children and collectively mature and develop if they learn from their experience and from the teachings of the more enlightened individuals in their group.The storytellers of the Old Testament were definitely more evolved in their relationship to God the Father and Jehovah than their neighbors were, but civilizations continued to evolve and understand God better through Book of Mormon times in America, through the New Testament with the physical presence and teachings of Jesus Christ, and now with the ongoing Restoration of All Things. 
• I like to think of the Old Testament as art. If you want to show exactly what someone or something looks like, you can come relatively close by taking a photograph or by painting a realistic portrait on sight. But if you want to express a feeling about a scene or an event, you might want to do an unrealistic painting.This is a heart-to-heart way to communicate and that is why so many people love the Impressionist artists such as Monet and Van Gogh. Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" does not accurately depict the night sky but it very accurately conveys a mood of glory and joy that one might experience in viewing a beautiful starry night. As another example, the first time I turned a corner in the Church History Museum and came face-to-face with the painting "For Us," by Walter Rane, I felt the Atonement in a way I never had before. That painting with its jagged, harsh stripes of red felt like pain, agony, suffering. I felt emotionally stabbed! (Here is a link to the painting, but without the texture of the brush strokes, it is not nearly as moving.)

The Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh, from Wikipedia

Let's apply these ideas to the story of the Balaam and the talking donkey, one of the weirdest stories in the Old Testament. It is found in Numbers 22. And it is surprisingly relevant to all of us today.

BALAAM AND HIS DONKEY

As the host of Israel passed through various already-inhabited lands, the local tribal leaders became very alarmed. They were afraid the Israelites would consume everything and force them out. When they reached the lands of Moab, the Moabite king Balak was terrified! He sent emissaries to a non-Hebrew "prophet" who was from Mesopotamia and who knew Jehovah. He asked Balaam to come and see him and put a curse upon the Israelites. Apparently, Balaam asked God if it was okay to go (he was offered a lot of riches, after all!) and was answered that he could go to see the Moabites, but he should not be influenced by their entreaties or bribes. He should only say what Jehovah told him to say.

Balaam said no to the messengers and sent them home, but when more powerful and impressive emissaries were sent, he really wanted to go. He was probably afraid to refuse such an entourage. He asked the Lord what he should do. Was the answer still the same? God still didn't want him to go, but He said, "Fine! If you want to do it so badly, then go!" (I remember my mom reacting this way once when I begged and begged her to let me go to a carnival and she thought it was a bad idea. I learned a lesson about how wise she was when I threw up all over the Tilt-a-Whirl ride, and later all over my friend's mom's car. All my money was wasted. Sometimes experience is the only effective teacher.) 

As Balaam journeyed along the way, Jehovah tried to discourage him from getting himself into an alliance with a powerful pagan leader. Balaam's donkey got spooked several times, refusing to go forward and even crushing Balaam's foot against a wall. Balaam got frustrated with the animal and beat her. Then he remembered the donkey's normal obedience and this communicated the message to him, "What have I done to you that you have struck me these three times?" Balaam responded, "You have embarrassed me with your insolence! If I had a sword, I'd kill you!" Then the donkey seemed to say, "I don't usually act like this, do I? Have you considered there might be something unusual influencing me?"

Now let me interrupt the story right here and remind you of President Hugh B. Brown's very famous story about his conversation with a currant bush. It was part of a talk given at BYU in 1968 and has been repeated many times in General Conference and other venues, President Brown had been passed over for promotion in the military unfairly, just because he was a member of the Church. He was angry at God. But later, as he pruned a currant bush that was wildly overgrown in his own garden, a powerful connection was made in his mind. He felt the currant bush speak to him as he had spoken to God, angrily asking why it was being cut down. He felt God speaking to him as a gardener, telling him that he was being shaped for a different purpose. 

Now the talking donkey makes sense, doesn't it?

Balaam's eyes were opened after he considered this and he saw the purpose in the animal's behavior. He understood it as a warning from God, and he may have even seen an angel with a sword. The important part is that his imagination of the donkey's speech (or simply her braying) communicated God's message to him that this journey was wrong. And also that beating the messenger was wrong. God, through the angel, said to Balaam, "You can still go if you really want to, but you had better not say anything I don't tell you to say. That should be really, really clear in your mind right now."

When Balaam reached Moab, Balak, the tribal king, attempted to bribe and coerce him multiple times from multiple situations to curse the Israelites. Each time, not only was the answer the same from Jehovah, but the blessing he pronounced upon His people, the Israelites, became even greater. Each time, Balaam seemed to hope that this time, in this location, Jehovah would be willing to curse the Israelites and he would receive all the riches from the Moabite king. But each time, Jehovah remained the same: a loving, supportive God who always desired to bless His people. 

Finally, Balak panicked and said, "Okay, okay! Stop! It's fine if you don't want to curse them, but just don't say anything at all. I don't want them having any more blessings!"

Balaam said, "Remember how I told you that I would come, but I would only say what Jehovah told me to say? It's nothing personal, and it's not me being obstinate. I have to say what He tells me to say. He doesn't change." And he gave another, greater blessing.

Reading these blessings, especially in a version of the Bible that sets them apart from the story text (I like the English Standard Version), is a beautiful experience. It would have been wonderful to hear these blessings recited over and over by storytellers, just as it is wonderful to hear Elder Brown's story of the currant bush told over and over by many other storytellers. Each time our vision of God's plan for our individual lives is reinforced and our faith in Him grows.

This story is also a good one for those of us who ask God a question and are already hoping for a certain answer. If we remember that we "cannot go beyond the word of the Lord," we can more quickly accept that answer. If we try again and again, we may get a "Fine! Go ahead and do it!" answer and then have to suffer figurative bruises from our donkey along our path and not get the riches and glory we wanted from that answer anyway. Ultimately we may reach a dead end.

Remember the donkey and trust the first answer you receive from the Lord!

Donkey photo from Wikipedia

Exodus 35-40, Leviticus 1, 4, 16, 19

Here is a link to my Google slideshow on this lesson. Click the View tab and then select slideshow to put it in full screen. Click your mouse, your touchscreen or your keyboard space bar to advance the slides or play the videos. Enjoy!

Exodus

Please follow this link to my previous post on Exodus 1-13.

Please follow this link to learn more about the importance of 40 in the Bible

Please follow this link to my previous post on Exodus 14-18.

Easter Story For Children and Youth

A LONG STORY ABOUT EASTER AND TEMPLES

For Children, Youth and Adults

Nancy W. Jensen

Long before Jesus was born, God told His people in Jerusalem to build him a house where they could worship Him and He could visit them. God told them how to build this temple and they wrote down every single instruction and put it in their scriptures. It would be a place where heaven and earth would meet. The people would give God gifts at the House of God and God would give them gifts as well. You can read about all of them in The Book of Leviticus in the Bible.

The House of God was amazing! It had a big courtyard around it for people to gather. It was very, very tall–10 stories tall or more, like a small skyscraper. It had gold on the front of it and beautiful carvings. It had colors of the sunset, like blue and purple and red, to remind people that this was where heaven and earth meet. And it had a very small room with golden things to remind them of how God had helped them in the past and what Jesus Christ would someday do to save them. This small but tall room had a heavy veil or curtain instead of a door. This was the Holy of Holies where God could come. Only the high priest could go in there, and he could only go in on one day of the year, The Day of Atonement. For ten days before that day, the people would repent of all the things they did wrong. They would bring their gifts to the temple. Then the high priest would pray to God for them to be forgiven. They would make covenants with God. A covenant is a special promise that brings you close together.

God told the people that coming to the temple would make them rejoice! And it did! It was a place of happiness!

 

But after a while the people began to get lazy and selfish and they weren’t obeying God’s commandments. So God sent prophets to tell them what they were doing wrong so they could change. These people got very angry! They didn’t want to change! So God told one of the prophets, named Lehi, to take his family and get away from Jerusalem because the people were doing so many bad things that God wasn’t going to protect Jerusalem anymore.

We can read their story in The Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is a collection of stories written by different people in ancient America over hundreds of years. They were all put together by a prophet named Mormon and that’s why it’s called The Book of Mormon. It’s really “The Books Collected by Mormon.”

The first book in the Book of Mormon tells about what God told Lehi in visions and how he had to buy tents and leave Jerusalem with his family and go camping in the wilderness and then go back to get the Brass Plates (which were the scriptures) and get another family to come with them and then travel to the beach and live there for a while and then build a ship and sail across the huge ocean to America. In America they got married and had a bunch of kids and grandkids and they were farmers and they also had fights. This book was written by Lehi’s son Nephi. After writing the story of their travels, he copied down all his favorite scriptures.

He still had more to write but he didn’t write it here. He started a Second Book of Nephi. Why a whole new book?

The first thing that Nephi wrote in his second book was that God showed Lehi that Jerusalem actually was destroyed (2 Nephi 1:1-4). Another country, Babylon, sent their armies and all the people who lived in Jerusalem were killed or pushed out and forced to live in all different places so the people who won the war could live in Jerusalem instead. The temple, the House of God, was completely destroyed.

Everything was different now. There was no House of God on the whole earth. There was no church of God in Jerusalem. The biggest group of God’s people was in America.

Remember: Lehi’s family had brought their scriptures with them, the Brass Plates. The scriptures had all the instructions for building a temple and worshipping God in the temple. So they built a new House of God in their land. The second book of Nephi is about how these people enter a closer relationship with God and learn more about Jesus Christ because they have a temple where heaven and earth meet. Now, Nephi wrote, “[They] lived after the manner of happiness” (2 Nephi 5:27) because of their covenants.

 

Back in Jerusalem, there was another war because the King of Persia wanted Jerusalem. But as he moved to Jerusalem, the king found a copy of the scriptures. He read what God told the prophets to write in the scriptures and he read a prophecy about himself there, taking over Jerusalem! And he also read a prophecy that God’s people will come back to Jerusalem. This makes him decide to let any of those people  move back if they want to and he decides to rebuild their temple. It sounds pretty cool to him.

 

Hundreds of years later, Mary and Joseph took Baby Jesus to this temple to give gifts to God for their baby. They had to travel to get there because they didn’t live in Jerusalem. Joseph and Mary worshipped at the temple as often as they could, probably every time they had a new baby, for example. (They had at least seven other kids.) On one of these trips, when Jesus was 12 years old, he sat in the courtyard teaching the priests! He didn’t even notice that all his relatives had gone home. They had to come back and find him.

When Jesus grew up, he started teaching everyone God’s commandments: how they should be baptized and they should love each other and that God should be the most important thing in their lives so that they could be happy.

He told the temple priests he was God’s Son! It was the best news in the world!

But the temple priests did not want to believe he was God’s Son. They did not want to change. They liked being in charge, being rich, being important.

They finally convinced the leaders of the city to kill Jesus. They found Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, just outside the city. He was praying and crying and he was feeling more sad than anyone in the world had ever been, because He loved everyone so much, even the people who did bad things! And they took him and put him on a cross on a small hill behind Jerusalem. As Jesus hung on the cross, he could turn his head and see the back wall of the beautiful temple.

Because Jesus was the Son of God, no one could kill him, but he could choose to die.  It was the most painful thing in the world to be hung on a cross, but somehow his pain on the cross and before that in the Garden of Gethsemane made it possible for him to bring anyone who died back to life some day. And it also gave him the power to help people when they had troubles or made mistakes. Even us.

Then Jesus told Heavenly Father that he was done, and he let his spirit leave his body and go up to heaven.

As he left the earth, the earth began to shake, and because of the earthquake, the thick, heavy veil of the temple holy place ripped into two pieces, from the top to the bottom. It was as if to show everyone that because of what Jesus Christ did, they could now walk right through the veil and be with God!

 

There were also earthquakes in America. The people there had been getting selfish and wicked, too. They hated each other and they fought and they stole things. They said that Jesus wasn’t real and he wasn’t going to come to earth and they didn’t need him anyway. They said anybody can do whatever they want. They hated the people who still believed in Jesus. They didn’t care about the House of God. Their prophet, Nephi the 3rd, tried to teach them to repent, but only a few people listened.

With the earthquake, buildings crashed down. Lots of people were killed. Everyone who was still alive was crying. The air was black with some kind of volcanic smoke and they couldn't even see.

But the temple was not destroyed and the people gathered there. And while they were there, at the place where heaven meets earth, the sky opened up and Jesus Christ came down to visit them! He didn’t just visit the high priest on the other side of a heavy veil, but He met all of them out in the courtyard, even the little children! He taught them his gospel just as he taught it in Jerusalem. He told them he had finished his sad and painful work, the Atonement, and he had saved the world. He brought angels with him and they blessed the children. He changed their temple worship to help them remember Him and what He did. And he said this was the greatest joy he had ever felt. Nephi the 3rd wrote down everything he taught them except for the very sacred heavenly parts. And then he told his future readers, us, to not do bad things and not hate people, but to repent and get baptized and receive the Holy Ghost and join the covenant people. And that’s the end of that story.

Then he started a new book called the 4th Book of Nephi. This book was the story of how people who made new temple covenants with Jesus Christ Himself at the House of God lived. Nephi the 3rd wrote, “And they were blessed [with the many, many promises] which the Lord had made unto them [in the temple]” (4 Nephi 1:11). “And there was no [fighting] in the land, because of the love of God which did [live] in the hearts of the people” (4 Nephi 1:15). “And surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God..[and] they were in one [like one loving family], the children of Christ, and [were promised] the kingdom of God” (4 Nephi 1:16,17). The covenant people loved everyone, even the weird ones. And they shared all their stuff so no one was poor. And they watched over each other so no one was left out.

It was the one time on earth that life was fair! And it lasted for 200 years!

 

Today we have Houses of God all over the world with many of the same things the temple in Jerusalem had, but they are used differently since Jesus did His mighty work. We no longer wait outside while the temple priest makes the covenants for all the people. If we keep our baptismal covenants, we can each go in and make more covenants ourselves. As we do, we get pulled closer and closer to Jesus Christ, as Elder Bradley Wilcox taught us in October 2024 General Conference. Our temples have veils, but now they are plain and white and lightweight and they are made in two pieces! They are made for walking through!

Sometimes hard things will happen in our lives. We might feel like we are suddenly on the other side of the world in a brand new place where everything is different, like Lehi’s family. We might even feel like we’ve been through an earthquake. Some things in our lives will break in ways that we can’t fix. But if we become covenant people with Christ, we can start new stories, better ones. We can feel more of His love and receive more of His help as we come closer to Him in our temples, where heaven meets earth. We can promise to share our money and our time and our stuff to bring others to him. And as we share his love with others, we will get it all over ourselves. And then we also will live “after the manner of happiness.”

Genesis 42-50

Follow this link to my previous post on this section of scripture.

Genesis 37-41 -- Joseph

Latter-day Saint Donny Osmond as Joseph in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," which played on Broadway in New York City beginning in 1982. Image from Latter-day Saint Musicians.

A neighbor of mine shared some very interesting research she had done with our scripture study group that has application to this week's lesson on Joseph, so I will share that here and then I will link my post on Joseph.

When Adam and Eve realized that they were naked (inadequate, vulnerable), they hid from God. When He asked them why they hid and who told them they were naked, they told Him they had learned this from Satan. God's response to them was not to shame them or punish them. Instead, He clothed them in garments of skin (Genesis 3:21). The Hebrew word translated here as "garment" is kethoneth or ketonet.

Bible Hub describes kethoneth or ketonet as "a long, shirt–like garment that served as the basic article of clothing for both men and women in ancient Israel. It was normally woven from wool or linen, extending to the knees or ankles, with or without sleeves. While an ordinary tunic was common apparel, Scripture records several specialized ketonot whose design, fabrication, or use conveyed covenantal and theological truths."

The word kethoneth is used in the Old Testament in this specialized context very few times. This is the first and it refers to a tunic or inner garment worn next to the skin. 

“Yahweh [Jehovah] made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). The first mention of ketonet follows mankind’s fall and sheds light on God’s initiative in providing a covering secured through the shedding of blood. This act foreshadows substitutionary atonement and establishes the biblical pattern that sin requires a divinely provided covering" (Bible Hub).

The second is to describe Joseph's coat of many colors (Gen. 37:3). In this case it is an outer robe, a long tunic. It signified a person of authority, priestly or royal, because it was a garment not practical for manual labor. It was made of finer cloth: wool, linen, cotton, or silk. 

"Jacob’s preferential love for Joseph is displayed through “a richly ornamented robe” (Genesis 37:3). The ketonet here is distinguished by length and embroidery, marking Joseph for blessing and leadership. Its blood-stained presentation to Jacob (Genesis 37:31–33) dramatizes deception and anticipated deliverance. Later, Joseph’s divinely orchestrated exaltation confirms that God’s purposes overcome human malice" (ibid.).

The third time is in reference to the temple priesthood clothing made for Aaron and his sons to wear in the tabernacle (Exodus 28:4). 

The New International Version reads, 

"These are the garments they are to make: a breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a woven tunic, a turban and a sash. They are to make these sacred garments for your brother Aaron and his sons, so they may serve me as priests."

The New Testament was written in Greek. The Greek equivalent of kethoneth (chiton) is used to describe the specialized luxury clothing item that Jesus Christ wore to the cross, the seamless garment for which the Roman soldiers cast lots (John 19:24). (See also Psalm 22:18.) 

"In the Septuagint [the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament], ketonet is rendered chitōn, the very word John uses when recording that soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ seamless tunic (John 19:23–24). The High Priest’s linen ketonet, the favored son’s multi-colored ketonet, and the sin-covering ketonet of Eden all converge in the crucified Messiah whose unseamed garment affirms His perfect righteousness and singular priesthood" (ibid.).

The New International Version translates John 19:23 as follows: 

"When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom."

The significance of innner and outer priestly clothing should not be lost to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As covenant temple worshipers, we have the opportunity to receive and wear our own version of kethoneth, temple clothing next to our skin, as well as kethoneth passim, outer clothing worn during temple worship. As Adam and Eve, Aaron and his sons, and Joseph, we are covered by Christ's mercy and that covering is symbolized in our temple garments. Jesus Christ wore His inner garment to the very end of His life, and so should we. (See https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/temple-garment-faq?lang=eng.)

And now here is the link to my previous post on Joseph.