The Aaronic Priesthood is the preparatory Priesthood through which the first outward ordinances of salvation are administered and the Saints are trained in law, repentance, sacrifice, stewardship, and obedience. It is not merely an administrative youth office. It is the foundation upon which higher orders are built.
Foundational Ordinances of Salvation
The Aaronic Priesthood administers the preparatory Gospel: repentance, baptism, outward ordinances, and the ministering work that brings souls into the covenant path of Jesus Christ. It is therefore essential to the Gospel of the Son, even though it does not contain the fulness of the Father’s exaltation order by itself.
When read in the two-Gospel framework, the Aaronic Priesthood prepares. It brings men and women under law, teaches obedience, and opens the way for the higher ordinances administered through the Melchizedek and Patriarchal orders.
Higher Aaronic Stewardship
The higher Aaronic order is also connected with bishops, temporal stewardship, and the law of consecrated living. D&C 107 speaks of literal descendants of Aaron, the office of bishop, and authority to preside in Aaronic administration. D&C 42, 51, and related revelations then place consecration, stewardship, and care for the poor within an ordered Priesthood economy.1
This is why the Aaronic Priesthood is related to the Law of Consecration and United Order. Temporal order is not secondary in the sense of being unimportant. It prepares a people to live as one, become self-sufficient under God, and enter the higher Celestial Family Order without being enslaved to the world.
The Levitical Order and the Temple Pattern
Joseph Smith’s August 27, 1843 teaching on the three grand orders of Priesthood places the Levitical and Aaronic order in relation to the higher orders. Fred C. Collier’s fuller amalgamation thereof and notes explain that this is a preparatory order, part of the larger temple pattern, including the lower and higher Aaronic elements preserved in the Endowment.2
Aaronic law and stewardship prepare the Saints for Melchizedek administration, Patriarchal fullness, and the Father’s Family Kingdom. Repentance, baptism, consecrated temporal order, obedience, and care for the poor are not incidental preliminaries; they school the Saints in the law by which a people can become one and then receive higher Priesthood blessings without being divided by selfishness or dependence on the world.
Further Study
- Doctrinal Teachings of Fred C. Collier, Vol. 2
- Melchizedek Priesthood
- Patriarchal Priesthood
- Consecration & United Order
Notes
- D&C 42; 51; 72; 107:68–76. ↩
- Joseph Smith, discourse, August 27, 1843, in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 322–23; Fred C. Collier, Doctrinal Teachings of Fred C. Collier, Vol. 2, 256–66. ↩