Where we are
Here is the single most important thing about Moses 4, and it's the first thing: it does not start in the garden. Genesis 3 opens with the serpent already coiled in the branches, and you never learn where he came from. Moses 4 rolls the camera back and shows you the scene behind that scene — a council in heaven, before the world, where two plans were offered and one being was cast out. Only then does the serpent appear. The chapter restores the prologue that Genesis 3 lost, and it changes how you read everything after. The temptation in the garden isn't the beginning of the conflict. It's a later chapter in a war that started before the earth was made.
Four things land in this chapter that no other passage in scripture holds together. The council, where the Father chooses the Only Begotten over Lucifer (vv. 1–4). The flat statement of what the adversary is actually after — "to destroy the agency of man" (v. 3) — which is the clearest sentence on the devil anywhere in our canon. The first promise of Christ, hidden in a curse on a snake (v. 21). And a reading of Eve that runs almost exactly opposite to the one most of Christendom inherited.
Four movements: the council and the rebellion (vv. 1–4); Satan in the serpent and the Fall (vv. 5–13); the hiding and the questioning (vv. 14–19); the consequences, the first promise, and the expulsion (vv. 20–32).
(The guardrail from Moses 1 holds here, and it carries the most weight in this chapter, because the apocrypha is richest here. When I bring in the Life of Adam and Eve or the Apocalypse of Moses, I mean them as old witnesses, not as scripture — read by D&C 91, kept by the Spirit. The Church takes no position on them. I'll flag every time, especially, where an old book and the restored doctrine actually disagree.)
The council, and the two plans (verses 1–4)
Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor. — Moses 4:1
The Lord tells Moses that the Satan he just faced down on the mountain (Moses 1) is "the same which was from the beginning" — and then plays back what that being said in the council before the world. Listen to the pitch. It even sounds righteous at first: I'll save everyone, not one soul lost. But watch where it lands: give me thine honor. That's the tell. The plan ends in a demand for the glory that belongs to the Father.
And then the other voice:
Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever. — Moses 4:2
Set the two side by side, because the whole choice is right there. Lucifer's plan is full of "I" — I will redeem, I will do it, give me thine honor. The Only Begotten's plan has no "I" in it at all: thy will, thine glory. One being demanded the honor; the other handed it back. And the Father chose — not the one who promised the most impressive results, but the one who wanted nothing for himself. That's worth sitting with, because it's the same posture that shows up in Gethsemane: "not my will, but thine, be done" (Lk. 22:42). The submission in the garden of olive trees was not a new thing Jesus learned that night. It was who he had been from the beginning. The prayer in Gethsemane was the eternal prayer, said one more time in a body.
Then the verse that the whole Latter-day Saint understanding of evil rests on:
Satan… sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him… by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down. — Moses 4:3
Notice exactly what the adversary is after. Not just to make people miserable, not just to rack up sins — to destroy agency itself. To take away the power to choose. That reframes every temptation you'll ever face: underneath the particular bait, the real aim is always to compromise your ability to decide for yourself. And notice the limit the Lord puts on him in the next breath — he can deceive and blind and lead captive, but only "as many as would not hearken unto my voice." The adversary's power runs exactly as far as our refusal to listen, and no farther. God doesn't protect you by removing the choice. He protects you by speaking — and your hearkening is what switches the protection on.
Here the oldest of the old books says something that stops you cold.
That's the kind of convergence the whole project is built to notice. Joseph restored, in 1830, a council where a being refused to give God honor and was cast out — and an ancient Adam book, locked in Latin manuscripts no English reader could touch until decades after Joseph died, tells the same story from the devil's own mouth, even down to the refusal of honor and the grab for God's throne. He didn't assemble it from sources. He restored it, and the sources surfaced later and agreed.
Satan in the serpent, and the Fall (verses 5–13)
Genesis just says "the serpent." Moses 4 names what's underneath: "Satan put it into the heart of the serpent… and he spake by the mouth of the serpent." The snake is a puppet; the hand inside it is the adversary from the council. And the chapter drops in a line that's almost dizzying — "he knew not the mind of God." The deceiver is himself deceived. He's trying to wreck the world, not realizing that the very Fall he's engineering is the door God will use to bring his children into mortality and growth. He thinks he's winning. He's an instrument of the thing he's trying to stop. Paul caught the same irony: had the powers of this world understood, "they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor. 2:8). Evil keeps overreaching into God's purposes without knowing it.
The temptation itself runs on a strategy worth memorizing, because it never changes. It opens with a question — "hath God said?" — not a proposal to disobey, just a little doubt about what God actually said. Then the half-truth: "ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." And here's the unsettling part — that's not entirely false. Becoming like God, knowing good and evil, is where the Lord was taking them ("Adam became as one of us," v. 28; "we shall be like him," 1 Jn. 3:2). The serpent isn't selling a destination God opposes. He's selling a shortcut to a real destination by a forbidden road. That's his cleverest trick: take something true and good, and corrupt the route to it.
Then the Fall itself, and a phrase most readings skate right past:
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it became pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make her wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and also gave unto her husband with her, and he did eat. — Moses 4:12
"With her." Adam was there. Not off somewhere, tricked later by a seductive wife — the old picture so much of Christianity inherited from Augustine. He was standing right beside her, and he ate knowingly. Paul is careful about this in a way people forget: "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived" (1 Tim. 2:14). Eve was deceived; Adam was not. He made a clear-eyed choice to go where his wife had gone, into mortality. And the Restoration reads Eve's part not as the great seduction but as a courageous step toward a necessary threshold — because innocence in the garden was a dead end. "Adam fell that men might be," Lehi says, "and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Ne. 2:25). In Moses 5, Eve herself will call the whole thing a cause for gladness: without it, "we never should have had seed" (Moses 5:11). That is a very different Eve than the villain of the traditional story.
And here I have to be honest about the apocrypha, because the honesty is the point.
The hiding, and the question that wasn't asking (verses 14–19)
After the fruit, the first new thing in the world is shame — and shame's first act is to hide. "Adam and his wife went to hide themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees." One chapter ago they were "naked… and were not ashamed" (Moses 3:25); now they're sewing fig leaves and ducking behind trunks. That's what the Fall does — it turns the open face toward God into a flinch.
And the Lord comes "walking in the garden, in the cool of the day," which tells you something tender: this was apparently normal. God and Adam were on walking-together terms. That's what gets forfeited. Then the question — "Where goest thou?" — and of course he knows. The question isn't for information; it's an invitation to come out and say it. It's the same kind of question Jesus asks the man at the pool, "Wilt thou be made whole?" (Jn. 5:6) — asked by someone who already knows, to give the other person room to answer. But Adam, instead of confessing, points: "The woman thou gavest me… she gave me." The first blame in human history, and notice it aims two directions at once — at Eve, and quietly at God who gave her. That reflex, deflecting instead of confessing, is one of the surest fingerprints of the fallen heart. The whole road back, from David to the prodigal, is the road to "against thee, thee only, have I sinned" (Ps. 51:4) — confession that finally stops pointing.
The first promise of Christ, and the coats of skins (verses 20–32)
The consequences come, but buried in the curse on the serpent is the most important sentence in the chapter:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed; and he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. — Moses 4:21
The old name for this verse is the protoevangelium — the "first gospel" — because it's the first promise of Christ in all of scripture, and it shows up before Adam and Eve have even left the garden. Before there's a single law, a single sacrifice, a single prophet, there is already a promise that the woman's seed will crush the serpent's head.
The pronouncements on the woman and the man, by the way, read better as descriptions of the fallen world than as God's blueprint for it. "He shall rule over thee" (v. 22) is a symptom of the Fall, not the design from Moses 3, where the woman was an ezer kenegdo, a strong equal. The gospel's work is to recover that first equality, not to enshrine the fallen version — "there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28). And the curse on the ground comes with a strange mercy folded in — "cursed shall be the ground for thy sake." For your sake. The hard ground is, somehow, a gift; the difficulty is for our good. "All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good" (D&C 122:7).
Then one of the gentlest verses in all of scripture, easy to read past:
Unto Adam, and also unto his wife, did I, the Lord God, make coats of skins, and clothed them. — Moses 4:27
Stop and see what God does. His children are ashamed and exposed, and he doesn't lecture them — he clothes them. And a coat of skins costs an animal its life. So the very first death in the story, the first blood, is a sacrifice God himself performs, with his own hands, to cover his children. Substitution — one life given so another can be covered — is established in Eden, before Cain's altar, before the law, before the temple. The whole sacrificial system is just a long unfolding of what God did at the garden's edge with his own hands. "White robes washed in the blood of the Lamb" (Rev. 7:14); the "robe of righteousness" (Isa. 61:10) — every later image of being clothed by Christ's sacrifice goes back to this. And there's an old book that remembered the garment, too.
And the chapter ends not with punishment but with protection. The expulsion from Eden — the cherubim, the flaming sword — looks like the harshest moment, and it's actually a mercy. If Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of life in their fallen state, the Fall would have become permanent; they'd have been frozen forever in that condition with no road back. Sending them out keeps the door to redemption open. Alma understood it exactly: the expulsion gave them "a time to repent" (Alma 12:24). The flaming sword isn't God slamming a door on his children. It's God refusing to let the worst moment become the final one.
How this chapter changes the reader
Moses 4 hands you a map of the conflict you're actually in, and it's bigger and stranger than your private struggles feel.
Your temptations aren't a small personal weakness; they're the local front of a war that started in a council before the world. The being behind them is old, and what he's really after, under every particular bait, is your power to choose — which means every time you keep your agency under pressure, you're defeating him at the exact thing he wanted. The two plans in that council are still the two options in front of you every day: thy will be done or give me thine honor, deferred glory or grabbed glory — and discipleship is just choosing the first one again and again, in small rooms, when no one's watching. And under all of it runs the promise from verse 21, older than the rebellion it answers: the seed of the woman will crush the serpent's head. Your faith isn't anchored in your own strength against the adversary. It's anchored in a victory that was promised before Adam ever left the garden, and clothed, that same day, in coats God made with his own hands.