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I believe we have been looking beyond the mark in the defining of atonement. In Alma 33:16 Alma quotes Zenock from the scriptures; "Thou art angry , O Lord, with this people, because they will not understand thy mercies which thou hast bestowed upon them because of thy Son." The sacrifice of the Lord's lifeblood and the death of his body was an offering for sin. That offering was part of a bargain. The bargain is not complete until we give up our sins. We must give Jesus every sinful practice and desire for the bargain to result in atonement. Even if Jesus performed something like a Volcan mind meld in order to weigh each of our sins, that would not be atonement. Atonement is not complete until we give up the sins which the Lord paid for on the cross and He only pays for those sins which we repent of and give up if we give up all of them, it is all or nothing.

In Jacob 4:14 we learn that the problems experienced by the Jews came upon them because they looked beyond the mark and sought for things that they could not understand. The Jews eventually paid a horrific price for the blindness they earned. We have paid a price also in that we lost our commission to establish the Zion of God and inhabit the New Jerusalem. In D&C 84:55-59 we learn that we brought the whole church under condemnation because of our vanity and unbelief and we would remain under this condemnation until we repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon and the former commandments which I have given them,. We were told that the children of the kingdom would not be allowed to pollute my holy land. In section D&C 63:31 the saints had already been warned that the price of failure to settle in Missouri was that they would be scourged from city to city. Though the saints were not to be allowed to build the New Jerusalem, Joseph Smith gave them some consolation in telling them that the whole of America was Zion. Thus, as prophesied by Ether in the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Ether, the building of the New Jerusalem would be left to the descendants of the Biblical Joseph.
                   
Though the saints did not get to build the temple in Independence, Missouri, They did obtain the commission to build a temple in Nauvoo where they would learn about Patriarchal authority. See History of the Church, vol.5, p.555. On page 555 Joseph explained that the Melchizedek Priesthood was the highest order of the priesthood and comes directly from God and not by descent from father and mother. Patriarchal authority was shown by Joseph to have less power and authority than the Melchizedek Priesthood. When God wanted to populate the earth, He gave Adam one wife. When He wanted to repopulate the earth after the flood he gave Noah one wife. When He wanted to raise up a righteous branch in the New World He commanded them, Jacob 2:25-27, to have only one wife. Although Abraham was allowed to have more than one wife, only the offspring of Sarah were to be part of the covenant God made with him. When the Latter-Day Saints failed to become a pure people, they were given the opportunity to remain among the unrighteous as was Abraham when Melchizedek purified his people and took them in search of the City of Enoch. Ignoring the above makes it easier to look beyond the mark and imagine that desiring and having many wives during mortality is one of the keys to exaltation.

Some of those who are not willing to wait for the hereafter to discover how spirit children come to be, love to imagine that God must have had many wives in order to produce His spirit children. Thus they excuse themselves from the Book of Mormon prohibition against having and/or desiring many wives.