“And now, my dearly beloved brethren and sisters, let me assure you that these are principles in relation to the dead and the living that cannot be lightly passed over, as pertaining to our salvation. For their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation, as Paul says concerning the fathers—that they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect.” (D&C 128:15). There was a phrase that was introduced during the Cold War - Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea was that any World power with nuclear weapons wouldn’t dare to engage with another nation that also had nuclear weapons because once the first nukes were launched, there would be no stopping until both sides had completely annihilated each other. This can be very scary and depressing to think about, but I wanted to bring it up because just as Mutually Assured Destruction is perhaps the ultimate endgame for Satan and his minions, Mutually Assured Salvation, on the other hand, is the whole point of our Heavenly Father’s plan for His children. As Joseph Smith says in the scripture I quoted above, our ancestors cannot be made perfect without us, and we cannot be made perfect without them. The dead need the living to perform vicarious ordinances for them because the dead no longer have bodies. The living need the spirits of their ancestors to watch over and protect them from spiritual dangers because the living cannot perceive or protect themselves from all of the spiritual attacks that are launched at them. It is in the best interests of our ancestors to dedicate all of their time, talents and energies to providing strength and protection and comfort to us so that we may keep ourselves unspotted from the world and worthy to enter into the temple and do the work for them. It is in our best interest as the living to dedicate all of our time, talents and energies to finding and setting at liberty as many of our captive dead as possible, because trying to stay on the Covenant path and worthy of a temple recommend is getting harder every day, and we need all of the spiritual protection and guidance of as many ancestors as we can possibly win over to our cause. I know that Mutually Assured Salvation between the living and the dead is an essential element to our Heavenly Father’s plan, and we are only helping ourselves by making sure that we are saving as many of our ancestors as we can, just as our ancestors are, in their own way, saving as many descendants as they can.
