The War in Heaven Is Taking Place Right Now on Earth?
In a recent blog post G.azelem made the following statement
Two nights ago I began praying very fervently for Donald J. Trump, which was almost a surprise to me. I’ve never prayed for anyone in government before, ever.
I have also begun praying for Donald Trump.
The polarization that is taking place right now in America specifically, and the world generally, is astounding.
Despite the many many divisions of people that have always been in existences pertaining to personal philosophy, political beliefs and religious beliefs, the current political environment is creating a great divide resulting in two general groups, with regard to the current political environment in America. Certainly during my lifetime I don’t think there has been such a distinct and global polarization, the tension of which that just seems to keep growing.
There is a concerted and concentrated effort by the liberal media and many other liberal organizations in America to fight Donald Trump on everything he does, every step of the way.
Every single thing the Trump administration does is reported with a negative, accusatory spin on it in the liberal media. It is having an incredibly depressing and divisive effect on people. One has to wonder if this is the beginning of the “division” spoken of in prophecy that results in the dividing up of families with father being divided against son and son against father, and mother against daughter, etc.
Although there has always been a spiritual dimension to all secular things, the spiritual warfare that is currently taking place is becoming less subtle.
Recently there was a global unified effort by witches, occultists and satanists to cast a spell on Donald Trump and his supporters to block their efforts and remove Trump from office.
Contrast that with the fact that the First Lady recently publicly led a cheering crowd of Trump supporters in the Lord’s Prayer.
A friend of mine says the Lord is using Trump as a “wrecking ball”. His perception kind of coincides with the post I did about “The Deadly Wound“
I recently saw a comment made by someone speculating that Trump is more representative of a latter day Sampson, than Cyrus.
Interesting possibility, on multiple levels..
Encompassed Round About
In Section 76 Joseph and Sidney were shown in vision that Satan had been in a position of authority in heaven and was cast down. It then speaks of the saints being encompassed round about by Satan and his minions.
A surface reading of those passages might lead one to assume that the war against the saints wherein they were encompassed about by Satan and his minions had taken place in the past in the pre-existence or at least prior to the vision that Joseph and Sidney had.. however in a clarifying poem later written by Joseph Smith, it is made clear that the event was to be a future one.
[22]
And the heavens all wept, and the tears dropp’d like dew,
That Lucifer, son of the morning, had fell!
Yea, is fallen! is fallen and become, oh, alas!
The son of perdition, the devil of hell!
[23]
And while I was yet in the spirit of truth,
The commandment was–“Write ye the vision all out,
For Satan, old serpent, the devil’s for war,
And yet will encompass the Saints round about.“
It really feels to me like the war in heaven is being acted out or at least reenacted right here on earth and that those who want to stop the flow of terrorists coming into our land and desire nationalism and a nation of Christian values are being besieged by those desiring globalism and every form of liberalism, atheism and Satanism.
It is possible that the reign of Trump could abruptly end and the United Nations come in to try and restore order.. the new world order?
At this present time, the polarization has created two general groups of people in America and this fight and philosophical division extends beyond America’s borders.
Once the light breaks forth and the servants return, a third group will emerge and be gathered out.
At that point, the souls of men on earth, (and possibly in heaven) will be generally divided into three parts.
This third group will separate itself from the two existing polarized groups that are waring against each other and Zion will be established.
Is this not a type of the three divisions mentioned in prophecy?
And his tail drew the third part of the stars of for, behold, the devil was before Adam, for he rebelled against me, saying, Give me thine honor, which is my power; and also a third part of the hosts of heaven turned he away from me because of their agencyand did cast them to the earth D&C 29:36
And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth JST Revelation 12:4
The Lord warns in the Book of Micah that at the appointed time, he will cut off the strong holds of Satan that have been established in America and will at that time cut off the witchcrafts that have insidiously overcome this nation:
11 And I will cut off the cities of thy land, and throw down all thy strong holds:
12 And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers:
13 Thy graven images also will I cut off, and thy standing images out of the midst of thee; and thou shalt no more worship the work of thine hands.
14 And I will pluck up thy groves out of the midst of thee: so will I destroy thy cities.
15 And I will execute vengeance in anger and fury upon the heathen, such as they have not heard.
A Shocking Experience at Seagull Book
BTW speaking of the graven images that the Lord will one day destroy, I walked into Seagull book the other day and thought I had walked into a Catholic monastery gift shop or book store.
There were only a few shelves with books on them and the entire remaining inventory of goods for sale was composed of pictures of Christ, replicas of Mormon Masonic Temples and religious trinkets of every sort.
Seagull Book was once the cutting edge supplier of LDS related books. Books were the main emphasis. They had rows and rows and rows of books for sale.
They were a thorn in the side of the LDS church and the Church owned Deseret Book because they discounted prices and were willing to carry some of the controversial, thought provoking books that Deseret Book refused to carry.
Once the LDS Church purchased that book chain, they neutered it and de-emphasized the role of books in their inventory.
They got rid of the more thought provoking books and have made a glorified religious trinket and gift store out of it.
Their website says this
Seagull Book is a discount bookstore that caters quality religious and family value centered products to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the general Christian community.
I fully expect Seagull Book to sell rosary beads within the next ten years. After all, they cater to the general Christian community and the modern corporate LDS is just a rebellious subsidiary of the Catholic Church.
Nevertheless, we should probably follow the example of Dan Peterson and speak reverently about our mother Church. In a recent article he made the following comments:
On a beautiful sunny day many years ago, I found myself standing in the Piazza of St. Peter in Vatican City with Elder V. Dallas Merrill and two or three others. We had just emerged from a relatively lengthy meeting with Edward Idris Cardinal Cassidy, the genial Australian who was then serving as president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and whom some regarded as, after the Vatican Secretary of State and Pope John Paul II himself, the third most powerful person in the Roman Catholic Church.
Among other things, Cardinal Cassidy had invited us to meet with the newly named cardinal Walter Kasper, until recently archbishop of Stuttgart, who had been appointed to succeed him after his impending retirement as president of the Pontifical Council. He had also arranged for us to attend a gathering at the Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (the Basilica Papale di San Paolo fuori le Mura). Pope John Paul II joined with representatives of the eastern churches in an effort to bridge the longstanding gap between the bishopric of Rome and the other ancient episcopal sees of the first centuries of Mediterranean Christianity.1
[Page viii]Elder V. Dallas Merrill, an emeritus member of the Seventy, had been a pioneer in building a relationship between leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and high-ranking Catholic leaders, and specifically with Cardinal Cassidy. He had brought us to visit with the cardinal.
As we stood there talking, Elder Merrill turned to me and, referring to the high-ranking prelates with whom we had been meeting, asked, “Well, what are we as Latter-day Saints to make of these men?”
The answer came clearly and immediately into my mind, and I responded that I felt that we should honor and respect them as true successors, in a very real sense, to the leaders of the earliest Christian community in Rome. While, from the Latter-day Saint perspective, genuine priesthood authority had long since been lost, and many doctrines had become garbled, they had kept the flame of basic Christianity alive, often through great tribulation and at great cost. They had preserved and disseminated the scriptures. They had sent missionaries throughout the world. They had served and sought to imitate the Savior.
The State vs. Religion
I recently listened to a video done by a very popular libertarian thought leader named Stefan Molyneux. I found his logic and reasoning in that particular presentation to be presented in a very compelling way. He is not even Christian. He might even be an atheist even though you would not know it to watch the video.
He spoke about how the evils of organized religion pale in comparison to the evils of the state.
About half way through his presentation it occurred to me that Stefan was mirroring many of the concepts presented by H. Verlan Andersen in his book, The Great and Abominable Church of the Devil.
The premise in the book by Andersen is that the Great and Abominable Church of the Devil that is mentioned in the Book of Mormon, is referring to GOVERNMENT, and that Satan, the god of this world, controls it through the state by getting the world to blindly support government. He characterizes government as a religion, as does Stefan.
Being the simple-minded literalist that I tend to be, I was offended when I first entertained the proposition because I felt that the church described in the Book of Mormon clearly identified the Catholic Church and all of her subsidiaries.
It would be some time later that I would realize that the Mother Church and her Jesuits do in fact control the banking system and virtually all governments in the world and hence, there was not conflict is what Andersen was saying and what I believed.
The Record of John the Baptist?
For decades LDS students of the gospel have debated back and forth over the “record of John” that is spoken of in Section 93 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Is it speaking of the “record of John the Baptist” or the “Record of John the Beloved (Revelator)”.
Both Johns seem to have been given a responsibility to testify of Christ, but only one was tasked with the responsibility to bear RECORD that Christ recieved the fulness of the father at his baptism.
I found the following comment on a Snufferite Blog quite interesting
John is one of my favorite books of scripture. I studied the Greek New Testament in college and later on studied John 1 extensively and came to the conclusion that most of John 1 was taken from the record of John the Baptist, that John the Beloved was originally a disciple of John the Baptist, that John the Beloved included a portion of the record of John the Baptist as the preface to his testimony, that the record of John referred to in D&C 93 refers to the record of John the Baptist, not John the Beloved and that the fullness of the record of John would be scripture written by John the Baptist and an expansion of John 1. For this reason I don’t see TSJ as the fullness of the record of John.
Also TSJ mentions Mary cutting Jesus’ hair which had not been cut because of the vow. I assume this refers to the Nazarite vow. This vow has three main restrictions, not to cut your hair, not to drink wine and not to have contact with unclean things including corpses. Jesus was a Nazarene (from Nazareth) but it is doubtful he was a Nazarite. I find this section of TSJ problematic.
Needless to say, if the above commentor is correct, it throws a huge wrench in the belief that Denver has brought forth the long awaited record of John the Beloved.
I’ll be blogging on this topic in the near future.
Three Degrees of Gospel Understanding
Dan Peterson posted an interesting article at the MormonInterpreter titled “Three Degrees of Gospel Understanding“. It would have been a better, more convincing post if he had provided some compelling examples of what the third degree of gospel understanding was.
He began his post by reminiscing a talk he heard LDS Historian Stanley Kimball give back in the 1980’s.
More than three decades ago — I was still in graduate school, so it must have been in the first half of the 1980s — my wife and I attended a gathering in southern California where the late Stanley Kimball, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University and a former president of the Mormon History Association, was the speaker. His remarks have stayed in my mind ever since…
Professor Kimball explained what he called the “three levels” of Mormon history, which he termed Levels A, B, and C. (Given my own background in philosophy, I might have chosen G. W. F. Hegel’s terminology, instead: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.)
Level A is the Sunday school version of the Church and of its history. It’s the kind of simple story that we tell in missionary lessons and in the Church’s visitors’ centers. Virtually everything connected with the Church on Level A is obviously good, beautiful, true, and harmonious. Ordinary members may occasionally make mistakes, but leaders seldom, if ever, do.
It’s difficult for somebody with a Level A understanding to imagine why everyone else doesn’t immediately recognize the obvious truth of the gospel, and opposition to the Church seems flatly Satanic.
Level B — what I call the antithesis to Level A’s thesis — is perhaps most clearly seen in anti-Mormon versions of Church history. In its purest and most extreme form, everything (or virtually everything) that Level A declares to be good, beautiful, true, and harmonious turns out actually to be evil, ugly, false, and chaotic. Latter-day Saint leaders at the general and sometimes even the local levels are viewed as deceitful and evil. They consider the Church’s account of its own story a complete fabrication, and some exceptionally antagonistic anti-Mormons even claim the general membership often misbehaves very badly.
It’s difficult for somebody solidly embedded in Level B to understand how anybody can fail to see the manifest evil and transparent falsehood of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and of the claims of the Restoration. Disagreement with them is the result either of some combination of ignorance and stupidity or, if that explanation can’t be made to work, of flat-out dishonesty.
In my view, the inadequacy of both Level A and Level B for any reasonable and realistic adult ought to be immediately obvious. Nothing involving humans is purely good and without flaw, just as, so far as I can tell, nothing involving humans is entirely evil and without some trace of good…
But one needn’t read anti-Mormon propaganda to be exposed to elements of Level B that seem to be true and that can’t quite be squared with an idealized, Level A portrait of the Restoration. In other words, it rapidly becomes obvious to people who read Mormon history or who experience it directly in the congregations of the Saints that Level A isn’t entirely accurate and that Level B isn’t entirely false. Some claims on Level B are true, at least to some extent, although many are wholly or largely false or are so taken out of context that they are effectively false.
Whether newly converted or born in the covenant, maturing members of the Church will inevitably discover, sooner or later, that other Saints, including Church leaders, are fallible and sometimes even disappointing mortals. There are areas of ambiguity, even unresolved problems, in Church history; there have been disagreements about certain doctrines; the archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon doesn’t yield decisive proof of its authenticity; and some questions don’t have immediately satisfying answers….
Of course the obvious problem with the above characterizations of Level A and B is that it simplifies A as being taught by the church, depicting church leaders in a positive light, suggesting that they make few errors and B has anti-Mormons characterizing church leaders as being evil and generally being the root cause of historical problems.
Brother Peterson then goes on to characterize Level C as the official and deeper version that provides broader context. He refers to it as the “’warts and all’ version of Restoration history” that reveals the reality of human fallibility of the saints, including their leaders without demonizing the saints and leaders.
Peterson recalls Kimballs explanation as to why the church taught church members the A version of church history-
“Professor Kimball’s remarks in southern California, decades ago: He observed that the Church isn’t eager to expose its members to the problems and ambiguities of its history. Why? Because souls can be lost and are lost on Level B.”
Peterson recalls Professor Kimball justifying the church in not teaching the deeper version of church history that shows the “warts and all version of Restoration history” because:
“Its mission isn’t primarily to teach history; it’s to preach the gospel. That humans are fallible and flawed goes without saying..”
On the other hand, Peterson recalls Kimball being somewhat torn about the decision to teach the sanitized version of church history instead of providing a balanced version of history with its warts, because doing so fails to “inoculate” the members who come in contact with the raw history of the church from having their faith destroyed.
Thus, in failing to “inoculate” its membership against the follies and questions and problems of its history, the Church can sometimes leave them vulnerable to faith-destroying disease.
Personally, I love the analogy of the three levels of understanding church history that Professor Kimball spoke about. However, I see a few problems with how he characterizes them as primarily having to do with human fallibility.
I believe Level C should be faith promoting and edifying but it should also answer the tough questions. In short, it should tell the truth while providing the prophetic narrative behind the historic narrative. Simply acknowledging human fallibility hardly inoculates anyone with serious historical questions.
Secondly, implying that all or most of the difficult historical issues can be classified as human fallibility is an egregiously false characterization.
The truth is that MOST of the problematic issues having to do with church history have to do with what appear to be legitimate discrepancies in doctrine, protocol, events and the general narrative which are not necessarily related to human fallibility.
In some instances where human mistakes appear to be the problem, there is a deeper doctrinal and prophetic reason as to why God’s servants did some of the bizarre things they did. It is an industrial strength oversimplification to classify the third category as generally relating to human fallibility.
I think the reason that apologists like to make that simplification when attempting to alleviate the concerns of the members of the church who are just beginning to be confronted with the problems of church history and experiencing a crisis of faith, is because it lets them off the hook in providing serious answers to the truly difficult questions.
I believe the true Level C of church history that actually answers many of the difficult questions and strengthens faith, is the secret prophetic narrative behind the 15 year ministry of Joseph Smith that to my knowledge, has never been publicly taught in the past. Certainly not by the church. I provide this narrative in my youtube series titled The Secret History of Mormonism.
Frankly, as I have read books by faithful LDS historians and listened to the arguments of LDS apologists I have not found their Level C version of history to be very edifying or faith promoting, nor do they provide real answers to serious questions. That is probably why Peterson’s article did not provide any compelling examples of how Level C is really significantly better than Level B or how it increases faith in the restoration.
Allow me to provide one brief example of a difficult historical topic and how it might be characterized in levels A, B, and C.
Example: History of the Changes Made in Modern Revelation
Level A- Members are taught or allowed to assume that the revelations in our current Doctrine and Covenants are presented exactly how Joseph Smith originally received them from God.
This simplified but inaccurate historical narrative provides comfort and stability in believing that the revelatory doctrinal development of the church was consistent, orderly, inspired and reliable.
Level B- Members find out, (sometimes from anti-Mormons) that many of the original revelations were canonized into the Book of Commandments in 1833. Then, in 1835 most of those revelations were re-canonized into the Doctrine and Covenants with some very significant passages being deleted or altered to say something different than they originally said. In some cases, altered to say just the opposite. This creates confusion and anxiety in members to find out that the original revelations were changed.
This information leaves them wondering if the original revelations were uninspired or if changes made were uninspired. In either case, it causes doubt in the divine calling of Joseph Smith.
Level C- Members are introduced to the true prophetic narrative behind the history of the church and find out that the original revelations were true and that they pertained to the “Church of Christ” as it existed in 1833. They also learn what the fulness of the Gospel is and that is was rejected by the saints of the restored church within a very short period of time.
They learn that after the fulness of the gospel was rejected by the early Kirtland Saints in 1834, the restored church fell under condemnation. They learn that the name of Christ was taken out of the name of the church, and the gospel of Abraham was secretly ushered in, causing a second wave of missionary work wherein this preparatory gospel was taken to converts across the great waters, changing the demographics of the church .
In short, they learn that the D&C and the modified revelations in it were also inspired and accurate and that the are corrected to contextually pertain to the “Church of the Latter day Saints” in 1835.
They learn that the prophetic trajectory of the church had changed by 1835 and the previous scriptures needed to be modified under the direction of the Holy Spirit to be consistent with the new historical context that the members of the church found themselves in.
Once people understand this, their faith crisis on this issue is replaced by a much greater and more accurate understanding of church history and the gospel resulting in stronger faith in the LDS restoration.
I could probably provide another 30 or 40 examples just like that of the A, B, and C, level of understanding pertaining to other controversial historical and doctrinal issues such as the historicity of Section 110, three orders of priesthood, spiritual wife doctrine, etc., etc., etc.
The article went on to say:
There are no easy, black and white solutions to this problem. Interestingly, although he was a professional academic historian, Dr. Kimball remarked that, were he in a high leadership position, he would himself probably make the same decision. He would not, that is, seek to expose Church members to a “disease” that would make them stronger if they survived it but that, in fact, more than a few would find fatal.
Once members of the Church have been exposed to Level B, though, Professor Kimball argued, their best hope is to press on to what he believed (and I believe) to be the richer but more complicated version of history (or to the more realistic view of humanity) that is to be found on Level C. Here’s a crucial point, however: He contended (and, again, I agree) that Level C — what I call the “synthesis” level — turns out to be essentially, and profoundly, like Level A. Level B is substantially and essentially wrong. Level A is correct but only as far as it goes.
This is vital to understand. For one thing, it undercuts the claim that by giving little or no attention to a “warts and all” version of Restoration history in its Sunday school classrooms, the Church is lying to the Saints. From the standpoint of a believer such as I am (and such as Professor Kimball evidently was), Level A is a simpler version of the truth and not in any significant sense a lie.
Do you buy what he is selling?
Everything is Rigged
Prior to the Presidential election I skimmed through an article titled “Everything is Rigged : Medicine, science, elections, the media, money, education, search engines, social media… you are living in a fabricated fairy tail”
How is that for a depressing declaration?
Here is the intro to the article
After witnessing how Reuters just blatantly cooked the presidential election polls this week to favor Clinton and how the mainstream media is so terrifyingly biased in favor of Clinton that the very foundation of democracy is now in crisis, it’s time to tell you something that perhaps a lot more people are finally ready to hear:
Everything is rigged.
Every institution in America is sold out, corrupted and politically rigged to favor Big Government and Big Business. “America is a lost country,” explains Paul Craig Roberts. “The total corruption of every public and the private institution is complete. Nothing remains but tyranny. And lies. Endless lies.”
The most depressing thing about the article is that it is, in my humble opinion, true.
Everything is rigged.
However there are those who do not think that tyranny and rigged elections is sustainable nor can it withstand the strain of social blow-back and protest. Another article that may reflect the crossroads that America finds itself in is titled “Chaos will erupt across America in less than 100 days… no matter who wins the election”
There are over 40 saints of the restoration who have testified that Joseph Smith prophesied that the America we know it would end in a Civil War. There are numerous prophecy scholars including Jonathan Kahn who believe that 2016-17 is the time of the last big Jubilee and that our currency will either collapse or experience a huge hair cut in this time period.
Whether we experience such a major change in the near future or not, I think it is safe to say that we are in unchartered waters and on the brink of major prophetic events taking place.
How did America and the world arrive at this dire situation where there is so much deception and everything is rigged against the common man?
The above article on how everything is rigged reminded me of a chastisement that I got from my older sister about 30 years ago.
She had been quizzing my wife and I about why we were considering doing home school for our children and we shared with her our distrust in the “system”.
In our conversation we shared our distrust in government run education and also in modern science in General. We shared our distrust in traditional medicine and the AMA and why we thought that using alternative health methodologies was a better way to go.
We shared our concern about some of the things being taught in the corporate LDS church and we even mentioned our distrust of the legal system and how it was ultimately governed by the “Crown” and the “Vatican”.
After getting an earful of why the whole system was corrupted and rigged, my sister exclaimed in disdain, “you guys seem to see a conspiracy under every rock you look under!”
She was right. We did see a conspiracy under every rock that we overturned. I made no apologies for it then and I make no apologies for it now.
Her reaction is understandable because she, like most Mormons, did not believe that Satan is the god of this world and that this world represents his kingdom. (2nd Cor 4:4)
The Four Crafts
Brigham Young made the following statement.
“When God spoke from heaven to Joseph Smith, the people were bound down by priestcraft, doctorcraft, kingcraft, and lawyercraft, the four grand crafts that uphold Satan’s kingdom.” Brigham Young (Des. News, July 12, 1863)
CRAFT, noun
2. Cunning, art or skill, in a bad sense, or applied to bad purposes; artifice; guile; skill or dexterity employed to effect purposes by deceit. 1828 Websters
In my opinion, the above four crafts are responsible for the destruction of America, the deception that is taking place and the dilemma our world is in. Satan has worked his magic primarily through those four crafts. They have permeated and completely taken over government and religion. Both the President of the United States and the President of the LDS Church along with their inner circles are practicing kingcraft with virtually no accountability to the people they rule over.
Those that administer the directives of our kingly government and kingly Church leaders, are largely composed of career doctors, lawyers and priests. I believe that Teachercraft can be added to the above list because the educational system is the primary purveyor of all this nonsense to our children.
It is amazing that Brigham Young warned the Saints against being educated by the worldly schools of Babylon and as an alternative he created a church sponsored university that has grown into BYU!
Yet BYU has become exactly what it was created to be a Godly alternative to. There is virtually no difference between the education that one gets from BYU and any other worldly institution. Indeed BYU aspires to be more like the Jesuit controlled Ivy League schools.
The Law of Common Consent and Leadership Accountability
I have blogged numerous times about the fact that the Lord initially gave the Saints of the restoration the Law of Common Consent as a checks and balances instrument to prevent priestcraft from entering into the church and prevent leaders from making uninspired decisions. The Law of Consecration is an essential law that makes everyone temporally equal in their temporal opportunities and prevents church leaders from practicing priestcraft.
That law of common consent has been perverted by church leaders into a tool for identifying those that are loyal to the faith and those that are not loyal to the faith. When someone votes to the contrary, they are called in to determine their worthiness and whether or not they should face a tribunal, the issue they are voting against is never objectively and sincerely questioned by the authorities.
In a recent podcast about the law of common consent I heard a scripture that I had never noticed before in the Book of Mormon. It blew my mind-
“..choose you by the voice of this people, judges, that ye may be judged according to the laws which have been given you by our fathers, which are correct, and which were given them by the hand of the Lord.
Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people.
And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you (Mosiah 29:25-27)
Wow.
Allow me to paraphrase what the above passage is saying to me.
The voice of the God’s people as a collective, commonly (generally) desires that which is right, which is why everyone needs to have an equal voice in the voting of all major decisions in the Church.
Smaller special interest groups, including special quorums that take it upon themselves to make decisions in behalf of the collective body of Christ, commonly (generally) desire that which is not right for the people.
Holly-freakin-molly.
Smaller groups within the collective group commonly want that which is not right!!!!!
No wonder the Lord commanded the saints thusly in governing the church-
“And all things shall be done by common consent in the church, by much prayer and faith, for all things you shall receive by faith. Amen.” D&C 26:2
Imagine what would have happened if Joseph Smith would have publicly put the law of Celestial Polygamy up for a vote of the total membership of the church which contradicts the previous revelation on the higher marital law of monogamy in Section 42.
I believe it would have been voted down emphatically and decisively. He would have probably been excommunicated from the church.
That is the express reason he had to practice it in secrecy and why God commands that things of this nation not be done in secret. He knew the united voice of the saints would have voted against it based on previous revelations and commandments as well as innate conscience. A vote would have prevented the practice of celestial polygamy from entering into the church.
Imagine what would have happened if Brigham Young would have put it up to a vote (without retribution) when he decided to start withholding the priesthood from the blacks after they had enjoyed the privilege of holding the priesthood from the beginning of the restoration under the direction of Joseph Smith.
Imagine what would have happened if President Monson would have openly presented the desires of the governing quorum of the church to spend Billions of dollars on a real estate project that featured a large shopping mall instead of focusing on investing additional resources of the church on the poor and needy.
Do you think that would have been accepted by the voice of the people? How would members of the church who are practically starving and making huge sacrifices to pay tithing feel about that decision?
If it had been accepted by the majority of the people, according to the above scripture, it would have been a sure sign for the judgments of God to fall upon the people.
What would have happened last year if the leaders of the Church would have explained to the saints the legal reasons why they had been instructed by the law firm of the Church to withhold the saving ordinances of the Gospel from innocent children because of the family circumstances they were in?
Do you think the majority of the saints, (if they did not feel the threat of church discipline for voting their conscience) would have sustained such an abomination if asked to vote on it?
I think not.
Miscellaneous Musings #19- Was Eliza R. Snow gang-raped by Eight Missouri ruffians?
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Miscellaneous Musings #18 Catholic Theologian Accepts Joseph Smith as a Prophet
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Miscellaneous Musings #17 “For it was the woman that sinned not the man”
Miscellaneous Musings #16 The Link between Prophet Worship and Breaking the LAW of the Gospel
Miscellaneous Musings #13 Peter was a High Priest
Miscellaneous Musings #12 Are the Nauvoo Discourses True?
Miscellaneous Musings #11 Six Year Anniversary of OneWhoIsWatching
Miscellaneous Musings #10 Ferguson is Close to the “Center Place”
Miscellaneous Musings #9 The Mystery of the Shemitah
Miscellaneous Musings #8 Sunstone Symposium 2014
Miscellaneous Musings # 7 The Kinderhook Plates were Authentic
Miscellaneous Musings # 6 Jeremy Runnells
Miscellaneous Musings # 5 Phineas Young
Miscellaneous Musings #3 Kingdom of the Jews (3/7/2014)
Because I am Watching 