“It would be well to consider this verse [ Malachi 4:1; see also 3 Nephi 25:1] carefully to see what Malachi wrote under inspiration from the Lord. He meant that if we do not do things in the Lord’s way, we act wickedly and hence would be destroyed. What is meant by the word root? I could well ask, What are my roots? Why, my roots are where I came from. My roots are my parents, my progenitors or ancestors in a direct bloodline. The blood that runs in my veins came to me through my father and my mother, through my grandmothers and my grandfathers, and so on back through the direct lineage of my father and mother. What then is meant by the wordbranch? If I consider myself as the trunk of the tree, nourished and supported by my roots, then the branches constitute that which comes from me. My branches are my children and my grandchildren, etc. In other words, my branches are the posterity that comes from me as branches spring from the trunk of a tree”
(Theodore M. Burton, God’s Greatest Gift, pp. 194–95).
If men are to have both their roots and branches after resurrection and judgment, important ordinances must be tended to which serve to guarantee such blessings. These are the higher ordinances of exaltation taught within the temples of the Lord.
Referring to Malachi’s prophesy of the sending of Elijah (see 3 Nephi 25:5), Joseph Smith taught: “Why send Elijah? Because he holds the keys of the authority to administer in all the ordinances of the Priesthood; and without the authority is given, the ordinances could not be administered in righteousness” (Teachings, p. 172).
Elijah appeared to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery on 3 April 1836 in the Kirtland Temple. There he restored the keys of the sealing power. This authority binds on earth and in heaven all who enter into the new and everlasting covenant of priesthood and of marriage and who receive all other ordinances necessary for salvation. In this sense, for those who accept and are faithful to the ordinances of God’s house, families are forever.
“The higher ordinances, the greater blessings which are essential to exaltation in the kingdom of God, and which can only be obtained in certain places, no man has a right to perform except as he receives the authority to do it from the one who holds the keys. It makes no difference how great an office you have, what position in the Church you hold, you cannot officiate unless the keys, the sealing power, is there back of it. That is the thing that counts, and that is why Elijah came… .
“Elijah restored to this Church and, if they would receive it, to the world, the keys of the sealing power; and that sealing power puts the stamp of approval upon every ordinance that is done in this Church and more particularly those that are performed in the temples of the Lord. Through that restoration, each of you, my brethren, has the privilege of going into this house or one of the other temples (I believe most of you have done so) to have your wife sealed to you for time and for all eternity, and your children sealed to you also, or better, have them born under that covenant.
“What a glorious privilege it is to know that the family organization will remain intact. It is not destroyed. It does not come to an end when we have complied with the divine law, by virtue of the keys which are held by the President of the Church”
(Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, 3:129–30).