If you’ve ever taken on some small project–going to the temple, ticking off a list of chores, reducing your food budget for the month– and seen it through despite friction and your own fatigue, one thing will be obvious: agency is awesome.  It feels great to set your mind to something and then do it.

The bigger choices of life are the same in proportion.  Except that their glory is too big for us to take in, so we only revel in them in eternity, when we can see them whole.

Satan, having rejected the flesh, has mostly rejected agency also.  There is not much he can do, except try to strip us of ours.  Partly through tyranny, but mostly by trying to remove the consequences and meaning of what we do.

Of course agency without love soon loses its charm.  There is no use affecting things and people if you don’t care for things and people.  Hate is no substitute.   Hate ultimately can only be a reflection of love.  We can only hate the threats against what we love.

Without agency or love, Satan comes to nothing.  Inert mass, not acting, not even acted upon.

In the other direction, full agency and full love ultimately results in trying to create more agency in those you love.  “This is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of Man.”

The gospel is not a decision God made.  It is just the way things have to be.