The Cosmic Web and RBCs
- stephenstrent7
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
Where Science Meets the Doctrine and Covenants, for the Come Follow Me lesson Oct 20-26; Doctrine and Covenants 121-123
By March 20, 1839, Joseph Smith and his companions had already been in the Liberty Jail for nearly four months, while the Saints, who had been driven from Missouri, were trying to find refuge in Illinois. It is recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 121:1 that Joseph pled, “O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?”
After a comforting revelation to the prophet, we are then given the astonishing promises in verses 26-33. Verses 26-27 state, “God shall give unto you knowledge by his Holy Spirit, yea, by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost, that has not been revealed since the world was until now; Which our forefathers have awaited with anxious expectation to be revealed in the last times, which their minds were pointed to by the angels, as held in reserve for the fulness of their glory…”
For example, the Kirtland Temple had been dedicated March 27, 1836. However, Karl Anderson has pointed out, “The Kirtland endowment was indeed a powerful fulfillment of the Lord’s promise in gathering His Saints there; however, it should not be confused with the expanded endowment given in Nauvoo. Orson Pratt explained:
‘The Lord begins little by little; he does not reveal everything all at once. He gave the pattern of these things in Kirtland, Ohio, as the beginning; but there were not rooms for the washings, no rooms such as we have now, and such as were prepared in the Nauvoo Temple (built between 1841 and 1846); and in other respects, there was something added to the Nauvoo Temple. Why; Because we had greater experience, and were prepared for greater things. There was no font in the basement story of the Kirtland Temple, for baptismal purposes in behalf of the dead? Why not! Because that principle was not revealed.’”1
Doctrine and Covenants 121:28 and 32 states, “A time to come in the which nothing shall be withheld, whether there be one God or many gods, they shall be manifest…According to that which was ordained in the midst of the Council of the Eternal God of all other gods before this world was, that should be reserved unto the finishing and the end thereof, when every man shall enter into his eternal presence and into his immortal rest.”
The book of Abraham was inspired by the Church’s acquisition of some mummies and papyri scrolls in 1835. The French army, under Napoleon Bonaparte, had invaded Egypt in 1798–1801. Along with military operations, large numbers of “archaeologists” came to Egypt with the army, evaluating the ruins there and confiscating anything small enough to be hauled away. Antonio Lebolo, a former cavalryman in the Italian army, oversaw some excavations for the consul general of France, and his crew pulled 11 mummies from a tomb not far from the ancient city of Thebes. Lebolo shipped the mummies, along with a number of accompanying scrolls, to Italy. After his death, the mummies and scrolls ended up in New York, and at some point, came into the possession of an antiquities dealer, Michael Chandler.2
Chandler traveled around the eastern US, exhibiting the mummies, for a fee, and selling them off. He arrived in Kirtland, in the summer of 1835, with his last four mummies and several papyrus scrolls. According to the Church History Study Manual, “A group of Latter-day Saints in Kirtland purchased the remaining artifacts for the Church. After Joseph Smith examined the papyri and commenced ‘the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics,’ his history recounts, ‘much to our joy [we] found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham.’”3
The Church History Study Manual states, “Joseph Smith worked on the translation of the book of Abraham during the summer and fall of 1835, by which time he completed at least the first chapter and part of the second chapter. His journal next speaks of translating the papyri in the spring of 1842, after the Saints had relocated to Nauvoo, Illinois. All five chapters of the book of Abraham, along with three illustrations (now known as facsimiles 1, 2, and 3), were published in the Times and Seasons, the Church’s newspaper in Nauvoo, between March and May 1842.”4 This publication was three years after Doctrine and Covenants 121 was received.
We are told in Abraham 3:22-24 and Abraham 4:1, concerning the issue of “whether there be one God or many gods”: “Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones; And God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers; for he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born. And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell…And then the Lord said: Let us go down. And they went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth.” So, among the “Gods” who created the earth were “many of the noble and great ones”, which we are told in Doctrine and Covenants 138:53-55 were, “…choice spirits who were reserved to come forth in the fulness of times to take part in laying the foundations of the great latter-day work, Including the building of the temples and the performance of ordinances therein for the redemption of the dead, were also in the spirit world. I observed that they were also among the noble and great ones who were chosen in the beginning to be rulers in the Church of God.”
Then we are told in Doctrine and Covenants 121:30-31, “And also, if there be bounds set to the heavens or to the seas, or to the dry land, or to the sun, moon, or stars—All the times of their revolutions, all the appointed days, months, and years, and all the days of their days, months, and years, and all their glories, laws, and set times, shall be revealed in the days of the dispensation of the fulness of times…”
We are told in Abraham 3:2-10, “And I [Abraham] saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it; And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest. And the Lord said unto me, by the Urim and Thummim, that Kolob was after the manner of the Lord, according to its times and seasons in the revolutions thereof; that one revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest. This is the reckoning of the Lord’s time, according to the reckoning of Kolob. And the Lord said unto me: The planet which is the lesser light, lesser than that which is to rule the day, even the night, is above or greater than that upon which thou standest in point of reckoning, for it moveth in order more slow; this is in order because it standeth above the earth upon which thou standest, therefore the reckoning of its time is not so many as to its number of days, and of months, and of years. And the Lord said unto me: Now, Abraham, these two facts exist, behold thine eyes see it; it is given unto thee to know the times of reckoning, and the set time, yea, the set time of the earth upon which thou standest, and the set time of the greater light which is set to rule the day, and the set time of the lesser light which is set to rule the night. Now the set time of the lesser light is a longer time as to its reckoning than the reckoning of the time of the earth upon which thou standest. And where these two facts exist, there shall be another fact above them, that is, there shall be another planet whose reckoning of time shall be longer still; And thus there shall be the reckoning of the time of one planet above another, until thou come nigh unto Kolob, which Kolob is after the reckoning of the Lord’s time; which Kolob is set nigh unto the throne of God, to govern all those planets which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest. And it is given unto thee to know the set time of all the stars that are set to give light, until thou come near unto the throne of God.”
I do not know what most of this means. We are told in the Explanation to Facsimile 2, “Fig. 1. Kolob, signifying the first creation, nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth, which is called by the Egyptians Jah-oh-eh…Fig. 5. Is called in Egyptian Enish-go-on-dosh; this is one of the governing planets also, and is said by the Egyptians to be the Sun, and to borrow its light from Kolob through the medium of Kae-e-vanrash, which is the grand Key, or, in other words, the governing power, which governs fifteen other fixed planets or stars, as also Floeese or the Moon, the Earth and the Sun in their annual revolutions. This planet receives its power through the medium of Kli-flos-is-es, or Hah-ko-kau-beam, the stars represented by numbers 22 and 23, receiving light from the revolutions of Kolob.”
Again, I don’t know what all of this means. I remember thinking, even as a young boy that the phrase, “the Sun…to borrow its light from Kolob through the medium of Kae-e-vanrash” was very strange, because the Sun makes its own light via nuclear fusion. I remember thinking: Why would the Sun need to borrow light from Kolob if it’s making its own light?
Here’s what the NASA website has to say about the “Cosmic Web”: “Computer models that scientists have made to understand galaxy formation indicate that galaxies are created when dark matter merges and clumps together. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter whose total mass in the universe is roughly five times that of ‘normal’ matter (i.e., atoms). It can be thought of as the scaffolding of the universe. The visible matter we see collects inside this scaffolding in the form of stars and galaxies. The way dark matter ‘clumps’ together is that small objects form first, and are drawn together to form larger ones…This build-up of large systems is accompanied by the formation of luminous stars from gas and dust.”5 In other words, this dark matter “scaffolding” holds the stars and galaxies together and ignites them to start burning.
The word “galaxy” has been around for a long time. The English word was first coined around 1374 and 1385, by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poem, House of Fame, wherein he stated, “See yonder, lo, the Galaxy, Which men call the Milky Way, Since it is white…” The English word “galaxy” is derived from the Greek word galaxias (γαλαξίας), which means “milky”. The Milky Way was thought to be the entire universe until 1924, when the astronomer Edwin Hubble, proved that the Andromeda Nebula (cloud) was actually a distant galaxy (M31) outside of our own Milky Way galaxy.6
So, when Doctrine and Covenants 121 and Abraham were published, no one knew about any galaxies outside of ours—everything people saw in the night sky were simply stars—and no one, but God, had any idea how vast the universe actually was.
That brings me to one of my very favorite verses in all of scripture: Doctrine and Covenants 121:33, which states, “How long can rolling waters remain impure? What power shall stay the heavens? As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints.”
Some of that knowledge being poured down from heaven involves galaxies. The first Deep Field images taken through the Hubble Space Telescope, released on January 15, 1996, revealed over 265,000 galaxies. As a result of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched Christmas morning, 2021, the number of identified galaxies is constantly growing. In June 2025, a single image released from the Webb Telescope, which covered only 0.00165% of the sky, revealed 780,000 galaxies.7 That amazing number suggests that there may be 500 million galaxies in the universe, and some estimates put the number into the trillions—and the universe is expanding, and presumably making new stars and galaxies, faster than we can see it.8
Then, on the other end of the number scale, the typical adult human body consists of about 30 trillion human cells and about 38 trillion bacteria.9 There are as many cells in your hand (300 billion) as there are stars in the Milkey Way galaxy (100 to 400 billion). Each human cell contains thousands of different enzymes, some estimates suggest around 75,000 different types, with up to some one million copies of each type per cell.
Roughly eighty four percent of the cells in the human body are red blood “cells” (RBCs), actually red blood corpuscles, because mature RBCs have no nucleus—that means there are around 25 trillion RBCs in a human (approximately 4 to 6 million in a single drop of blood). About 2 to 2.4 million RBCs are produced every second to replace “old, worn-out RBCs” (each one “lives” around four months). There are approximately one million copies of the carbonic anhydrase II (CAII) enzyme, which I described last week, per RBC—and each CA II converts carbon dioxide and water into carbonic acid and a proton (H+), at the rate of around 600,000 reactions per second.10
The knowledge God has poured down “from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints”, and everyone else in the past century, since Hubble proved that the Andromeda Nebula was actually a distant galaxy, is truly mind-blowing.
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. Anderson, Karl Ricks, What we know about the first endowment in the Kirtland Temple and how the endowment changed over time, LDS Living, March 27, 2023; ldsliving.com/what-we-know-about-the-first-endowment-in-the-kirtland-temple-and-how-the-endowment-changed-over-time/s/88812; see also Pratt, Orson, Journal of Discourses, 19:19
2. Church History Study Manual, Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham; churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham?lang=eng
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. NASA, James Webb Telescope, Galaxies Over Time; science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/galaxies-over-time
9. Sender R, Fuchs S, Milo R. Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body. PLoS Biol. 2016 Aug 19;14(8):e1002533
10. Lindskog, S, Structure and mechanism of carbonic anhydrase, Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 74: 1–20, 1997
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