Category: #LightTheWorld

Scripture note: To be “destroyed” is not what we tend to think

When in scripture God promises that people will be “destroyed,” that can be controversial. Is it a threat? Coercion?

In my personal BoM reading this year, I’ve been struck by Alma the younger’s use of that word. When Mormon is telling Alma the younger’s conversion story in Mosiah 27, Mormon expresses the angel’s message using the term “cast off”:

And now I say unto thee, Alma, go thy way, and seek to destroy the church no more, that their prayers may be answered, and this even if thou wilt of thyself be cast off. (Mosiah 27:16)

But in Alma the younger’s own retelling of his story, he uses a different phrase to express what the angel told him:

And he said unto me: If thou wilt of thyself be destroyed, seek no more to destroy the church of God. (Alma 36:9)

Was Alma to be “Cast off” or “desroyed?” Are these two different concepts being expressed? I suggest no. In scripture, God’s influence is described in terms of sustaining, preserving and protecting. The influence of Satan is entropy, which is disorder and chaos.

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Jesus was Jewish, and that is extremely important to understand

I’ve been having an online conversation that relates to a book I’m writing. 

Why is it important to understand that in mortality, Jesus was devoutly Jewish?

When we study the Old Testament in Come Follow Me next year, think about that question. In the Old Testament, we are reading the story of Jesus’ personal religion, which was Second Temple Judaism. The OT has a reputation for being confusing and sometimes shocking. The Law of Moses (the legal system that Jesus adhered to) has elements that we in modern times would find very upsetting. Jesus’ religion was full of irony, contradictions, paradoxes, awful historical events, and all of the other things that we sometimes find difficult to process. When we look at our faith as Latter-day Saints, we can look at literally all of the things about our faith that we find difficult, and recognize that they were also part of Jesus’ personal religion.

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On Church History and Testimony

Why do some people have their faith shattered by church history? And why are other people resilient in the face of difficult information about church history?

What does it mean to “have a testimony?”

Is church history the proper basis for a personal testimony?

What choices can we make in our gospel questioning to develop a testimony that is strong and resilient?

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Joseph Smith was neither authoritarian, nor a relativist

In the church, we now have a lot of Joseph-idolatry. People who have lost any convictions about the current prophetic mantle in the church tend to go back to Joseph Smith and cut out the things he taught that don’t fit their paradigm, in an effort to create a Joseph in their own image. And they call this figment of their imagination “Mormonism.” So we have narratives that Joseph was not polygamous, that he had an “expansive” vision that didn’t care what people actually believed, and so forth.

This isn’t new. The ages-old conflict has always been between living prophets and idolaters who say If I had lived in times of old, I would have followed those “true prophets” of the past. After all, prophets of the past can’t explain themselves in the present. So why not make them into idols that do our bidding?

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