Light and Truth

On July 2, 2016 an assembly gathered in Eden, Utah to discuss missionary work. At that gathering Denver offered some thoughts and insights which are shared here.

Transcript

Denver: I think everyone was making perfectly valid, true and wonderful points, and it may seem like there are contradictions but the souls of men are so differently situated that they have to be met wherever they are, in whatever circumstances you find them in, with regard to their unique view of the world.

What happened in the early church when the missionaries went out and aggressively pursued, and argued, and debated, and won over people who were persuaded by the power of the argument that brought them forth? 

Comment: You’ve got the Campbellites.

Denver: Yes. The book that is coming out next explains how… The book is based upon three monumental failures in the life of Joseph Smith. In each one of the failures Joseph responded, not by despairing or by throwing up his hands, he went to work on what he thought would fix the problem. 

From the time that John the Baptist promised that there would be some higher priesthood conferred upon them in May of 1829, until after the Church was organized and they were holding a conference in June of 1831, Joseph Smith was looking forward to getting this higher priesthood conferred upon him. He finally got the commandment by the voice of God just as the inspired version of Genesis 14 says: that this priesthood is conferred upon men by the voice of God. The voice of God came to Joseph in the conference, and he was told to ordain people to this higher priesthood. He ordained six – and the one of those six that he ordained, ordained the rest of the people. 23 total people were ordained to that high order of priesthood. The book documents what happened to every one of them. It was not simply a failure, it was a catastrophic failure. 

One of those who was ordained, Ezra Booth, went out and published of series of nine letters explaining what a fraud Joseph was. He had received by the voice of God the ordination to the higher priesthood in June. By October the Ohio newspaper was printing the scandalous retelling of Joseph’s hopeless failure that occurred in the ordinations in June. In the same month that the Ohio newspaper was printing it, they hold another conference and Joseph ordains people again – while you’re reading in the newspaper about what an abject failure this was. This was in October of 1831.

Joseph Smith did not accept the failure. He set about trying to conclude how it would be possible for people to get ‘power in the priesthood, upon them and their posterity, through all generations of time and into eternity,’ a phrase that shows up again at the end of his ministry, which utterly fails. What was the solution to the problem? It was Lectures on Faith. The Lectures on Faith addressed the crisis of the failure of the faith of the people. Joseph’s response was to say, “Okay, that didn’t work.” It’s not a defect in those people, it’s a defect in the ministry of Joseph. He simply assumed the responsibly and set about trying to fix the problem. That’s exactly the sort of response you would expect from someone who knows that they are about God’s work and they are not just freelancing.

The book tells the story, and invariably it doesn’t matter which crisis you look at, and the product that Joseph creates in response to the crisis. The villains are Latter-day Saints. Ultimately the villains that would be responsible for the murder of Joseph Smith would be Latter-day Saints. If it had not been for those who managed to get themselves into a position of trust and confidence, what happened in Illinois that resulted in the death of Joseph could not have occurred.

Joseph believed that you could take anyone and convert them, save their soul, and march forward to Zion. Time and time again it did not matter how bitter the betrayal was, time and time again he simply said, “Okay, that is a failure on my part, I can fix them by what I teach, therefore I need to be better, I need to explain more, I need to teach more.”

Juxtapose that with Abinadi, who comes he and delivers a message. He says, “This is the way it is. This is where the large burley animal is going to defecate in the woods, and that’s the way it is,” –and he leaves. He shuts down and he’s gone. He comes back two years later and he says, “Time’s up, it didn’t work. Now, your life now is going to be valued like a garment in a hot fire.” They kill him. He makes one convert. The one convert of Abinadi is the hinge point of the entire Book of Mormon. Everything that happens before and everything that happens thereafter goes through Abinadi. Abinadi and his one convert, they become custodians of the record. It is that convert’s posterity that goes all the way to Mormon and Moroni. He is the hinge-point of the story. One convert. And quite frankly, the priests of Noah, they didn’t get much of a sermon. He vindicated how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those that cry peace – in his own person, despite the fact that he was pronouncing judgements and wo upon them, which seems like an odd contradiction – by pointing them to the Ten Commandments and saying, “You don’t believe them, you don’t do them, you are not converted to them.” He didn’t get into anything other than an explanation of the prophecy of Isaiah in the context of the Ten Commandments, fairly rudimentary stuff.

He persuades one guy. And that one guy goes out to be re-baptized. Before he re-baptizes, apparently himself, he asked for authority from heaven to do that and the baptism takes place. And from there to the end of the Book of Mormon, that is the focus and the story line, that’s it.

If you are going to measure quantity, and you look to Joseph Smith, who had probably 30,000 in. Joseph probably had 100,000 people baptized while he was still alive but there were 30,000 that still held on. About 18,000-19,000 were in Nauvoo, others were in faithful congregations around England, New England and other places. But Abinadi had one. 

Both of them gave their lives up. If you take one step back from that and you say, whose ministry was more successful? The prophet of the restoration, whose own followers were responsible for the conspiracy to have him murdered, who created an absolutely completely vertically integrated structure that could be compromised by simply taking over the top seat. Or Abinadi, who preached the message of repentance and organized nothing. 

There are a lot dynamics that go into the success of the gospel; one of which is, if Joseph were here today and had in front of him the history of what occurred when he was here before, would he do the same thing again? It would be insane. It would be madness. You have a formula for failure; therefore you don’t invoke the formula for failure in order to achieve success. If you’re going to succeed, you must find the pattern other than the pattern which brought about the excommunication of people that believe in the Book of Mormon and choose follow Christ. You have to have something other than that.

The Book of Mormon’s religious structure – I’m not talking about the era of the judges, where there were governmental and church functions that were going on and you really don’t have a distinct separation of the two adequate in the records. What you have – the best description is the one that is given in Alma about how they functioned. The priests came and would teach them on Sunday. Everyone would drop what they were doing, they come, they would be taught, and then when they were done with their Sabbath observances, everyone would go back and they would work and they would labor. There was no professional clergy, there was no hierarchy. They had a high priest who was apparently an itinerant that traveled around.

The more you consolidate power and authority into an office, the more you tempt the adversary to gain control of the office. Because the one thing about salvation is, it is entirely other worldly. If you can get gain in saving the souls of men you will be unable to save the souls of men, because faith, and the first principle of faith, is obedience to God and sacrifice of everything. Without the willingness to sacrifice everything, it is impossible to gain the faith that will save your soul.

So what happens when you trade sacrifice for power? What happens when you trade it for wealth? What happens when you trade it for the ability to control the souls of men?

Joseph Smith sitting in Liberty Jail was not concerned about the governmental abuse that had confined him into a filthy dungeon. I cannot imagine the reek in the dungeon basement of Liberty Jail. Quite frankly the display and the “Temple Prison” does not communicate to you the wretchedness of the conditions in which they found themselves. There were two windows on either end of the building that had an opening less than a foot wide with one bar going through the middle of it, and there was no glass. So in winter when the wind blew there was no way to stay warm. If you lit a fire in the basement the jailers would make you put it out, but if they didn’t, they sat upstairs and laughed. By the time the straw generated heat, you were choking. 

In those direful circumstances what Joseph is concerned about is the power of the priesthood and the abuse of priestly authority. “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood but by persuasion.” Where does that come from in those circumstances? [It comes from] God. Because Joseph’s concern was not about, and his faith was not based upon, the salvation of his own soul. The salvation of others; his response to every crisis he went through was exactly the same.

So what can we learn about the value of numerosity by juxtaposing the tens of thousands that came aboard, many of whom were responsible for the death of Joseph Smith, and a structure that ultimately wound up utterly compromised on the one hand, and the ministry of Abinadi with the one convert on the other?

If we manage to bring someone aboard by persuasion and out-arguing them and beating them in a scripture bash, how long do they remain aboard when someone else with a better argument comes along to persuade them contrary-wise? If you make a convert because they felt the presence of God with them, you can beat them with a crowbar and they’re not going to give that up. 

Taking the message of the restoration to people and being rejected by 900,000 readers, and having one person show up, is a perfect model. If you had 30,000 people show up and you baptized them, my guess is that in short order the abuses and the mess you would have on your hands would be shameful. It’s the quality of the conversion process, and it’s the presence of the Spirit. 

Even in the caution that we were getting in Section 88, if you look at verse 72, the Lord says, “Behold and lo, I will take care of your flock and will raise up elders and send them unto them.” Well, how is that we gain jurisdiction over someone by bringing them aboard when the Lord said He’s going to be the one that takes care of them? I agree we need to nurture, we need to dung, we need to water. But ultimately, all we can really do is facilitate the Lord nurturing, and facilitate the Lord dunging, and facilitate the Lord ultimately giving the increase.

I was a newly baptized LDS zealot. I had more baptisms than the full-time missionaries. I was a baptizing machine. A couple of them went on to serve missions before leaving the Church. As I counted the track record of the numerous baptisms that I’ve made, with time I think there are two still left and I am not one of them. There are two of them that are still paying the Church, because what I did to get them converted was so in your face. 

I attended the local Jewish temple lectures on Judaism to mine Jews and I got some of them aboard. Jews don’t last long in Mormonism. I think that we have to be sensitive to a whole host of things. One of them is, when the conversion takes place, it can’t be us. 

I talked during those ten talks, and then I worked on the book and tried to be as quiet as I could be. I tried to be as nondescript as I could be, because what I don’t want… Every one of you that has talked about your conversion experience, it may have been facilitated by something I wrote, but she’s right, it doesn’t have anything to do with me. We can facilitate but it has to be between them and the Lord. 

I’ll tell you, someone who’s heart is inclined to the Lord and who has accepted Him is not going to turn around and conspire to murder Joseph Smith. They aren’t going to do that. They will not find it in their heart. 

I want to point out, that as Christ leads them to “this is my doctrine,” go back to verse 29 of 3rd Nephi 11 and it says, “Verily, verily I say unto you, he that has the spirit of contention is not of me.” Paul says “contend earnestly for the faith,” and I did that and I brought a bunch of people aboard the LDS Church by contending. But Christ is saying “contention is not of Him” and yet that was one of the primary conversion tools that I employed.

The difference between persuasion and contention: Persuasion largely does not happen because you overcome the resistance with argument and contention. Persuasion comes by opening up an idea and letting it enter into the heart of the man or the woman, and then letting God take over and get the growth inside them. “Contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, who stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another. Behold this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of men with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.”(3 Nephi 11:29-30) He is saying, don’t contend, don’t make people mad, don’t confront them, take a step back from that and I’ll tell you what my doctrine is. And then, “this is my doctrine, …I bear record of the Father, and the Father beareth record of me, and the Holy Ghost beareth record of the Father and me.” (3 Nephi 11:32)  Every bit of that is internal to the proselyte, every bit of that.

Preach, teach, exhort, expound, contend, bitch them into conversion; you’ve ignored what His doctrine is. It’s internal to them. It goes on with Him and them. We facilitate but He is the one who ultimately becomes the object of their worship, the object of their adoration. It’s like God lights a candle inside of you. You can hold the candle up and you can give people light but if they don’t get their own candle, get their own flame, they’re still dead. They aren’t alive.

There’s this description that’s given in 1st Nephi chapter 14 verse 12:

“And it came to pass that I beheld the church of the Lamb of God, and its numbers were few, because of the wickedness and abominations of the whore who sat upon many waters; nevertheless, I beheld that the church of the Lamb, who were the saints of God, were also upon all the face of the earth; and their dominions upon the face of the earth were small, because of the wickedness of the great whore whom I saw.”

We’re not going to get 15 million people, but it’s not necessary that we get 15 million people. It’s only necessary that the invitation be extended. If the invitation is extended and if the hearts of people respond, there is a resilience, there is a power, there is something inside of them that cannot be broken. We are not looking for anything other than the few. 

If you go back to… I want to remind you, D&C Section 88 was given in December of 1832. Three months earlier, in September of 1832, the Church was under condemnation. When the revelation was given to Hyrum Smith telling him, hold your peace, wait, you’re not ready to go out yet, that was given before the Book of Mormon had come into print. Without the Book of Mormon yet in print, without the formal Church organization, in 1829 – David Whitmer would write about it his address to all the leaders. They were baptizing people. In 1829, the Lord, by revelation, over and over said to people, if you have a desire to participate, “you are called to the work.” Everyone that wanted to was told “the field is white already to harvest.” (D&C 33:3). One of the interesting things about the harvest is the only sickle that you can throw in or thrust in in order to make the harvest actually work, is one that invites the grain to be harvested. If you are out there with a power mower and you’re just bringing them in by the dozens, that may not have that kind of satisfactory results we would like to have.

We do have the Book of Mormon. We do have the record of the fallen people who went before us, times two. 

I have become less and less curious over time about the future because every time I’m inquiring about that I wind up with more work to do. It got to the point that I said the only thing that I want to know about is the next step. I don’t want to hear about anything past that, because I didn’t like what I saw when I reached out a little ways into the future. I don’t want to go there and I don’t want to be there.

The book that just got completed and will be out shortly, is written with the objective of having something that can be handed to a believing Christian to introduce Joseph Smith as a significant Christian figure, and nothing else. It goes no further than that one step. The content of that book is a brilliant little layout and simple story. I can take no credit for it because everything about it was from above. But it is a brilliant little book. If a Christian reads that book, they may be ready for something more and they may be willing to talk to those who might be able to answer their questions.

My wife and I were talking this last week how happy I was that I finished that, and so far as I knew there was nothing else coming, and wouldn’t it be great to take some time off. She left me alone and I spent some time praying, and now there’s another project and I don’t like where it is headed. I had already started on another project and I hadn’t even gotten printer’s proof in the mail yet from the last one. But the next one will include within it, in the book, the websites where they can request baptism and where they can learn more.

The genius of the Lord in what happened with the restoration and then what He started over with again, is that literally anywhere in the world where there is a single soul who was one time baptized and one time ordained – it doesn’t matter if they are sitting in Japan and they’re inactive, it doesn’t matter if they’re in Slovakia and they haven’t had anything to do with Mormons – if they heard the message. If one time long ago they were baptized and one time long ago they were ordained, wherever they are in the world they can repent, they can call upon God and they can ask for God to give them authority to baptize again. They are immediately empowered to baptize within their own family. As soon as you have enough to call a conference and you are sustained by seven women, you have the ability right then to begin to baptize outside of your family anywhere in the world. 

Isaiah prophesied that in the last days “it would break forth on the right and it would break forth on the left.” (Isaiah 54:3). Well, how does it break forth, because no one is in control of running out there and saying, “You! You! You need to get busy!” It is them that is responding to God and God breaking it forth everywhere in the world. 

The website allows people to contact, wherever they are in the world, and someone nearby can then volunteer or someone will travel. Everything that is happening is happening in an order organized by someone other than man. And I know what the next step is after this step that’s rolling out at this moment. All of it is designed to appeal outside of Mormonism, to bring people aboard from anywhere, in any religious tradition, primarily the Christian tradition, to convince them that they need to look into this. 

I was remarking to Alan that I’m now going to manage to make enemies in the Christian world along with making enemies with the Mormon world, because this stuff will not be happy for ministers, because priestcraft is priestcraft, whether the practice is inside or outside the LDS Church. LDS priestcraft may make the typical priest look like a piker and a poverty-ridden amateur. I don’t know of many groups of ministers that can embark upon a trillion dollar cost of the development as Mormon leadership can, but priestcraft is wrong wherever you find it.

In the verses that we looked at in [D&C] 88, which is after the church has been brought into condemnation: 

“Tarry ye, tarry ye in this place, and call a solemn assembly, even of those who are the first laborers in this last kingdom.” (D&C 88:70)

They did call solemn assemblies and Joseph would write from Liberty Jail how poor, how meek, how mean the conferences of the church had been. Too low, too mean, too vulgar, to condescending for the characters of those who are called by God. So even though they are calling solemn assemblies there’s something more to the solemnities of God than merely getting together with long faces and pondering over scripture. There’s something about accepting the influence of the Spirit and proceeding, when if you have the desire, you’re called to the work. 

“And let those whom they have warned in their traveling call on the Lord, and ponder the warning in their hearts which they have received, for a little season.” (D&C 88:71)

See, the purpose to warn against the harvest and to harvest the wheat is so that they are gathered in to a place where they are protected against what is coming, because ultimately the field is going be burned. The only thing that’s going to be gathered in are the wheat that is harvested. The way to harvest is to warn, and the way to warn is not with a lot of words but with the sincerity of your heart, persuading people to open themselves up and to receive a message from God.

There was comment about the misapprehension that some people entertain about Jesus, but they came in the sincerity of their hearts to accept Him. I would suggest that when you talk to the typical Christian about Jesus, the Christian who is going to listen is going to you is going to have in his mind or her mind exactly the figure that Joseph Smith saw in the First Vision and not a triune, cosmic, incomprehensible cosmic muffin, “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, who sits on the top of a topless throne surrounded by a myriad of beings who are saved, not through any acts of theirs but by His good pleasure.” I’m quoting the old endowment. If you went through before the minister’s role, it was removed. 

So when you go and you preach Jesus to them, they are not thinking what the theologians are thinking, they are thinking what you are thinking, they are thinking what Joseph was thinking. They are thinking about a man who came into the upper room and said, “handle me and see, for Spirit hath not flesh and bone as ye see me have,” they are thinking of that guy. They are not thinking of the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. And yet there are not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible. That is one of the things that Jesus denounced when He said the creeds are an abomination.

“…I will take care of your flocks.” (D&C 88:72)

“I will raise up Elders.” The Melchizedek priesthood, the higher order, wasn’t restored until 1831. In 1829 Joseph and Oliver were called the First Elders of the church. In the beginning, the title “Elder” – this is the problem with all of our filters and all of our vocabulary –in the beginning an elder simply referred to someone who knew more, someone who was wiser. “Respect your elders.” What if the oldest and wisest in the village is a woman, who was here the last time we went through this. She is the elder. Because what you are looking for is someone that is in possession of information that may help you. Does that mean that she is ordained to the priesthood and all the nonsense the “ordain women” are clamoring for? (Which by the way, ordain them all you want, it is not going to amount to a hill of beans.) Elders that the Lord intends to raise up are people whose wisdom and counsel will bring people closer to the Lord, whether that elder is Eliza Snow, Sister Martineau, Sister May. In the Proverbs there is a statement about if you hold your tongue, everyone will account you for being wise. Jan takes it all in. My guess is if you could ever get advice from her you would find an elder, indeed.

“And I give unto you, who are the first laborers in this last kingdom, a commandment that you assemble yourselves together, and organize yourselves, and prepare yourselves, and sanctify yourselves; yea, purify your hearts, and cleanse your hands and your feet before me.” (D&C 88:74)

What is the purpose of cleansing the hands? So that you do not handle anything that is unclean. How do you handle anything that is unclean? You go out and you meddle in stuff that isn’t your prerogative to do, all of the unclean things in this world, all of the stuff that bogs you down. How do you get contamination primarily into the body? Your hands lead you: on a keyboard, they lead you when you’re paid. There are manifestations of the cares that you have. [Do] you want clean hands? Change the things about which you care.

When we had animal sacrifice, particularly when we had industrial animal sacrifice in the courtyard of the temple of Solomon, and the second temple, and then temple there, you could not go into the courtyard where the animals were being sacrificed, even if you were only going to sacrifice a turtle dove. You could not go in there – and turtle doves they just wrung the neck and they say it’s a relatively blood-free thing – you couldn’t go in there and not get blood on your feet, because the sacrifices that were going on were just dumping blood. They collected it in bowls and they sprinkled it on the altar. But you severe the carotid artery in any animal and you’ve got spray, and the courtyard is a mess. If you walk out into the courtyard, even for a modest sacrifice and you walk back, you have blood on your feet. 

What is the blood representing? The sins of this world. How do you cleanse your feet? If you want your hands clean and you want your feet clean then walk in the paths of righteousness. “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” (Psalm 23:2). Your feet are walking where there’s peace, where they are going to stay clean. And if need be, you can take a step or two into the still waters to make sure that the feet are clean. But you can go sacrifice goats and lambs and anything you want to sacrifice all day long and be no cleaner from the sins of this world for that act. Just like you can have the Savior kneel and wash your feet and receive no benefit if you’re Judas (although I think he had left the room by that time.)

When it’s talking about this, they would invoke a ceremony inside the Kirtland temple to actually wash feet, but it’s a symbol of the cleansing and the abandonment of sin. Do you want to have clean feet? We can wash all of your feet, but it’s not going to take any greater effect upon you than what you already received in the LDS temple. If you want your feet clean, walk in the paths of righteousness and stay in there, “that I may make you clean.” That is the cleanliness that we seek for. 

That I may testify unto your Father, and your God, and my God, that you are clean from the blood of this wicked generation; that I may fulfil this promise, this great and last promise, which I have made unto you, when I will. 

Also, I give unto you a commandment that ye shall continue in prayer and fasting from this time forth. (D&C 88:75)

“Let your food be prepared with singleness of heart that your fasting may be…” (D&C 59:13). You can fast more effectively by shutting off the things of this world and tuning in the things of God than you can by simply by going hungry. Some people go hungry and they get grouchy. They don’t closer to the Lord, they get more irritating to their neighbor.

Comment: It’s called ‘hangry’.

“And I give unto you a commandment that you shall teach one another the doctrine of the kingdom.” (D&C 88:77)

Every one of you that have spoken up today, every one of you has been doing this, teaching one another the doctrine of the kingdom. That’s what we are supposed to do.

“Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in the law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient for you to understand.” (D&C 88:78)

We’re going to have an opportunity for that up in Boise and I’m hoping that those that are going to be talking are spending time on teaching one another this stuff. I would hope that it would be useful and edifying and in conformity with what we’re directed to do.

“Of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth.” (D&C 88:79)

This is a huge aside, but the things that are “under the earth” aren’t dirt and caves. It is the movement of the stars as they rise and fall on the horizon. [Adrian] has written a little about that. But the things under the earth, 

“…[T]hings which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass;” (D&C 88:79)

That’s the definition of truth. Truth is the knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come. 

“Things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land;” (D&C 88:79)

One of the biggest judgements that are upon this land, is that this land belongs to and is going to be preserved for those who worship the god of this land. And when they reject the god of this land they get swept away, when they’ve fulfilled the measure that is required for that. 

“…[A]nd a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms.” That means more than just France and Italy. Countries are places that are lands of inheritance that have been given by God. No one owns a country that hasn’t been given to them by covenant from God. “And of kingdoms,” that’s not the monarchs of Europe or the Middle East, that’s God’s. Because what difference does it make to us who the king of Saudi Arabia is?

“That ye may be prepared in all things when I shall send you again to magnify the calling whereunto I have called you, and the mission with which I have commissioned you.” (D&C 88:80)

Look, the commission has been given.

“I sent you out to testify and warn the people, and it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.” (D&C 88:81)

You guys have been warned. The content of what has been given, and understand all of those ten talks and Preserving the Restoration is entirely based upon expounding the scriptures. You can take the message of everything in that book, bypass the book, go to the scriptures, teach, preach, exhort and expound using only the source material, and they don’t have to listen to an apostate. My name doesn’t have to come up. I’ve noticed it’s been leaking into General Conference a little bit. 

“Therefore, they are left without excuse, and their sins are upon their own heads.” (D&C 88:82)

I’ve gotten the signal I need to shut up and sit down so I’m going to shut up and sit down. But I do think that everything that everyone has said is part of dealing with it. And once we have brought someone aboard, if their heart is right – I’m not going get around to pointing them to websites and inviting baptism in what I’m writing until the book after the book that is now coming out but that will be addressed to the Christian world. Very methodical. The pace is somewhat slow but I can tell you we’re better off bringing the right people aboard, as Abinadi did, than harvesting huge numbers and winding up with an absolute mess on our hands. But if they come aboard, then they come aboard as the Lord’s. The Lord is going to watch over them and the Lord is going to care for them in a way that exceeds our capacity to do so. 

Amen.

Question: Can you mention anything about what you received on the April 14th that you mentioned on your blog? 

Denver: I’m sorry, I laugh at myself. I’m not a very good student. I am embarrassingly oblivious to the obvious. I could tell you stories about that but you would wonder at the Lord’s patience. 

I wanted to know about Joseph and the restoration and details about what went on in Nauvoo and what has been going since Nauvoo, and where and what and who, and I couldn’t get enough questions out on the table. I was obnoxious, obnoxiously inquisitive, nothing about the future. I wanted to know about the past up until now.

I saw what we were doing and how apparently important that was, and how the Lord is watching over this. 

And then the view expanded and, God is working with people that we won’t encounter for some time still, to get them ready for what’s coming. And He’s surprisingly just as involved in caring for them as He is in attending to us. 

Then the view increased another order of magnitude and I could see every people everywhere, and it doesn’t matter who they are, where they are, what their culture is; it doesn’t matter where they are in this world. He is working to bring about ultimately their salvation as well. 

And then it got ridiculous, because He has concerns about creations that are without number. In trying to put it into words, this is the analogy that I’ve come up with:

Let’s liken Zion to a bus station. Someone needs to build the bus station, and that might be us. If we build a bus station and we have the place that can receive people and that is a place of safety where they can pass through. When we finish with that, the bus station won’t amount to much if someone doesn’t build a bus, and we’re not building that bus. The buses that get built are not going anywhere if they don’t have fuel, and someone has got to do that. That is going to involve miners and explorers and manufacturers and refiners and transport people and delivery mechanisms that God is working with. And when they finally fill the buses, that will be someone over whom God is responsible. 

When they finally get to our bus station we’re not going to be the ones that stand there and say, “Yeah, we built the bus station. We rock!” Zion is an absolutely critical component in the last day’s plan of God and indispensable in the salvation of the souls of men, living and dead. But it is just a bus station. And through it will pass concourses of people with whom we’ve had very little responsibility. 

When He says that there is going to come a time “when the prophets are going to awaken and will no longer stay themselves, and they are going to come from the lands of the north, and they are going to come to the bus station to receive something at the hands of His servants, Ephraim, in the boundaries of the everlasting hills,” He is working on that. And He is working with people on that. 

We need to be about what He has asked us to do. And it is important. It’s indispensable. But it is absolutely no more indispensable than what He is doing among people in Asia and Europe and Africa, and everywhere else in the world. He promises you to lead on with the scriptures, and He tells you after the voice of warning – then He is going to preach a sermon – and His sermon is going to shake and cause fear. It’s not because He is an angry God, it is because He is a loving God who knows what it takes to stir people up, to get attention, to consider the things of eternity.

But that’s essentially… It’s hard to put into words.

Comment: Heard and saw much.

Denver: Yes. That’s the analogy and I think that it conveys the meaning. He is the God of the whole world and every soul is precious to Him. Christ’s atonement was intended to yield the absolute greatest benefit that can be obtained through the suffering of the Lord. For some people, their reluctance is no deterrent to the Lord’s desire to save them anyway. I think Zion needs to be people that receive the word with gladness and not people we contend with to bring the glory. I am really interested to see what will happen up in Boise. I think that is going to be an interesting moment.

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This talk was given near Moab, Utah on April 10, 2016 by Denver Snuffer.

Transcript

I want to thank those that organized this for the invitation to come. I want to thank the landowners for allowing this to take place on their property, and I want to thank you participants for coming down and spending the time here to be present. I also want to thank Brian [Bowler] for imposing on me and requesting that I come and speak. Let me see if I can do something to add to what has and is going on. 

The Savior is extraordinarily positive, and when He speaks negatively it’s at those moments that I want to pay particular attention and give some careful consideration. One of spots in which, in 3rd Nephi, in His visit with the Nephites at Bountiful, He spoke quite negatively, He attributed the content of His pessimistic prophecy to the Father, and noted that the reason why He was stating it was because the Father had told Him to. This is in 3 Nephi chapter 16, verse 10:

“And thus commandeth the Father that I should say unto you:” is how He prefaces His direful assessment of the latter-day gentiles. “At that day when the Gentiles shall sin against my gospel, and shall reject the fulness of my gospel, and shall be lifted up in the pride of their hearts above all nations, and above all the people of the whole earth, and shall be filled with all manner of lyings, and of deceits, and of mischiefs, and all manner of hypocrisy, and murders, and priestcrafts.” Then He goes on from there: ” . [A]nd shall reject… Behold, saith the Father,” this is Christ attributing what the Father has told Him as the source for His message, “I will bring the fulness of my gospel from among them.” 

In that list we all can make a self-assessment about a variety of things but the fact that He included within the list of the defects of the last day gentiles, the word “priestcrafts” ought to alarm every one of us. “Priestcraft”, when it gets defined in the Book of Mormon, is something that I think all are tempted to engage in. Peter was equally concerned and in his First Epistle, chapter 5, verses 2 and 3 he wrote: 

“Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; Neither as being lords over the Lord’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.” 

It is not appropriate that someone should collect money from the flock nor “lord it over the flock.” Priestcraft is one of those toxic failures of the last day gentiles that we have to guard against it appearing among us as well.

Nephi wrote: “For the time speedily shall come that all churches which are built up to get gain, and all those who are built up to get power over the flesh, and those who are built up to become popular in the eyes of the world, and those who seek the lusts of the flesh and the things of the world, and to do all manner of iniquity; yea, in fine, all those who belong to the kingdom of the devil are they who need fear, and tremble, and quake; they are those who must be brought low in the dust; they are those who must be consumed as stubble; and this is according to the words of the prophet.” (1 Nephi 22:23) 

Nephi supplies us with a definition of priestcraft:

“He commandeth that there shall be no priestcraft, for behold priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world that they may get gain and praise of the world, but they seek not the welfare of Zion.” 

There is something so toxic about the practice of priestcraft that I want to flip the normal approach to this topic and not focus upon how we see it being practiced by others, but to use it rather as a check on what we do and how we approach the gospel of Christ. It is so toxic that if you engage in the practice of priestcraft, of setting yourself up to be the light, seeking yourself to become popular, seeking yourself to get gain and praise, that it interferes fundamentally with your ability to even be of service to the Lord. 

Tithes ought not be used to support a man. Tithes ought be used to help the poor and the weak and the infirm. There is “enough and to spare” according to the revelation given to Joseph Smith but only if the purpose for which the tithes are paid are satisfied first; not to enrich men. I would dare not participate in a ministry in which service and sacrifice wasn’t compelled, I wouldn’t dare do that. There’s a hardness that is associated with taking pay for what you do. There is an arrogance that sets you above the flock. It is better to pay than to receive tithes and offerings. It is better to give than to take.

We got an extensive warning. Moroni, reflecting upon what the predicament of the gentiles would be in the last days, in Mormon chapter 8 – and this is Moroni who is talking – beginning at verse 32:

“Yea, it shall come in a day when there shall be churches built up that shall say: Come unto me, and for your money you shall be forgiven of your sins. O ye wicked and perverse and stiffnecked people, why have ye built up churches unto yourselves to get gain?  Why have ye transfigured the holy word of God, that ye might bring damnation upon your souls? Behold, look ye unto the revelations of God; for behold, the time cometh at that day when all these things must be fulfilled. Behold, the Lord hath shown unto me great and marvelous things concerning that which must shortly come, at that day when these things shall come forth among you. Behold, I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not.  But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing. And I know that ye do walk in the pride of your hearts; and there are none save a few only who do not lift themselves up in the pride of their hearts, unto the wearing of very fine apparel, unto envying, and strifes, and malice, and persecutions, and all manner of iniquities; and your churches, yea, even every one, have become polluted because of the pride of your hearts. For behold, ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted.” 

He makes no exception for some latter-day church. He makes no exception for some latter-day organization. There may be those who are the humble followers of Christ that are mentioned with some frequency in the Book Mormon but they are never mentioned in a congregational setting. They are never mentioned in an institutional setting. Nor is the gathering that is to take place in the last days ever an institutional gathering. Christ Himself said it would be “one of a city, and two of a family” He did not say, one of an institution. There is no such thing, and the Book of Mormon preaches against it. We are just as vulnerable to that misapprehension as are any other group of people. 

It is our relationship to and our connection with God that matters. And you form that, not through me or through some other man, and not through the groups to which you belong. The groups to which you belong are a place to render service. They are a place where you can sacrifice to help others. I don’t care if that group is Methodist, Presbyterian, Latter-day Saint, or one of the fellowships that have been organized. That is of little consequence. You can be a Christian soul wherever you are, serving whoever you happen to be in contact with.

I’m going to talk about Zion, and Zion is going to be gathered. But the gathering of that group will not necessarily come exclusively from any party, group, denomination or lineage. Priestcraft damages the practitioner, I think more so than those on whom he practices. I don’t see how you can destroy equality, and injure and grieve the Spirit by holding yourself up as a light and interfering with the work of the Lord in bringing about Zion, and not suffer the greater loss.  

Now I have heard countless expressions of hope for the Second Coming to be upon us soon. I hope to clarify the challenge that’s faced in having Zion established. I know of eight (and I haven’t gone out of my way to look.) These are eight who have imposed themselves upon my awareness. I know of eight; there are probably many more individuals who claim that they are going to establish Zion. They think God called them. They are tired of waiting. And they know what needs to be done from their study. So they’re going to launch out on the project. I have to tell you, Zion is not going to be a human achievement. I hope to make the daunting nature of what it will include a little more clear today.  

I know of three who claim, presently, that they are Messiahs. It’s an odd thing, really, all three to make the same claim. 

Zion will be God’s work, and in the end it will be His and His alone. He will own it; He will bring it; He will be the author of it, and He is the one who says that He will take credit for it. When it happens, however, it will conform to a pattern. 

This is a verse that gets attributed to Enoch, who is in turn quoting a prophecy that was given by Adam. This is the original prophecy given at the beginning of the world through father Adam, who established in the beginning the covenant that God Himself intends to vindicate.

“Now this same priesthood, which was in the beginning, shall be in the end of the world also.” (Moses 6:7.) 

That authority gets explained a little more fully when Abraham sought for the blessing that began in the beginning. He describes what it was that he wanted:

“I sought for the blessings of the fathers, and the right whereunto I should be ordained to administer the same; having been myself a follower of righteousness, desiring also to be one who possessed great knowledge, and to be a greater follower of righteousness, and to possess a greater knowledge, and to be a father of many nations, a prince of peace, and desiring to receive instructions, and to keep the commandments of God, I became a rightful heir, a High Priest, holding the right belonging to the fathers. It was conferred upon me from the fathers; it came down from the fathers, from the beginning of time, yea, even from the beginning, or before the foundation of the earth, down to the present time, even the right of the firstborn, or the first man, who is Adam, or first father, through the fathers unto me.” (Abr. 1:2-3.) 

There are some very bright, well studied, Latter-day Saints who think they know what the gospel and priesthood of Abraham was. 

I’m here today to declare to you the truth, whether you accept it or not, whether you understand it or not, whether you think you can parse the scriptures otherwise or not. I’m telling you what the truth is today. Abraham sought for the right that came down through the fathers, from Adam, which was the right of the firstborn, which is that priesthood that must be restored in order to bring about the purposes of God is the last days. Abraham chapter 2 verse 11, the Lord says that through him:

“…I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee; and in thee (that is, in thy Priesthood) and in thy seed (that is, thy Priesthood), for I give unto thee a promise that this right shall continue in thee, and in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel.”

Abraham’s fatherhood reckons from priesthood. Although the right will continue through the literal seed, it reckons through priesthood. He sought for the right to be one of the fathers. 

We’re talking about a time in the last days, prophesied, and repeated by Jacob as his testimony in the Book of Mormon, when the natural fruit is going to reappear upon the earth. Natural fruit is always genealogical; it is always familial.

There is going to come a time in the last days when the Family of God will return again to the earth. “That same priesthood” includes a function that is not well understood. Abraham knew what this was when he said he desired to be a “father of many nations.” He was identifying one of the attributes and one of the roles that necessarily must return.

If you go to Moses chapter 5 there is an incident that takes place in which Mother Eve celebrated because, after the apostasy of son after son, she rejoiced because – well, I’ll read it to you. This is Moses 5:16:  

“And Adam and Eve, his wife, ceased not to call upon God.  And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain, and said: [now this is her, she conceived, she bare Cain, and she said concerning this son] I have gotten a man from the Lord; wherefore he may not reject his words. But behold, Cain hearkened not, saying: Who is the Lord that I should know him?” 

That is to say, Mother Eve looked at Cain in contrast to those that had rejected the gospel message that had been born by her previously. And Cain, apparently an answer to her supplication to the Lord, came as what she anticipated would be the son upon whom the birthright would be conferred. The one through whom the lineage would continue; the one through whom the government of God would continue upon the earth. The replacement for Adam.

But Cain when he arrived at the age of accountability and beyond, “hearkened not, saying: Who is the Lord that I should know him?” 

“And she again conceived and bare his brother Abel. And Abel hearkened unto the voice of the Lord. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.” (Moses 5:17.)

Now mind you, there is no attempt to set out the chronology here other than by milestones. But Cain had determined to reject the Lord and not hearken to Him by the time the replacement, Abel, was born. And when Cain, who thought it his birthright, found that he could be displaced by his younger brother, as an act of overthrowing the government of God, Cain slew Abel in order to prevent the birthright, in order to prevent the promised Messiah, in order to prevent the work of God progressing through any lineage other than his own. This was an act of treason. This was an act of overthrowing the government of God. This was an attempt to force God to place the Messiah, that should redeem all mankind, into a position inferior to Cain, his father. 

But God replace the slain Abel with Seth. And Seth who was the one through whom then the promise would be realized. 

As you go through the account in Moses chapter 6, at [verse] 10 and 11:

“…Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his own image, and called his name Seth.” 

So in “his own likeness after his own image” when Adam was created in God’s own likeness after God’s own image makes Seth, like Adam, a godly man. 

“And the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he (that is [Adam]) begat many sons and daughters.” 

There is no indication that any of them were as rebellious as were the descendents of Cain. He begat many sons and daughters. And yet, in the next verses there is only one son who is identified.

“Seth lived one hundred and five years, and begat Enos, and prophesied in all his days, and taught his son Enos in the ways of God; wherefore Enos prophesied also.” (Moses 6:13.) 

So although there are many sons and many daughters, there is only one name. And you can follow it through. Seth, “many sons,” all of whom are unnamed other than one — and that one that is named is Enos. 

Enos had “many sons,” all of whom are also unnamed other than one: Cainan. And Cainan has “many sons,” all of whom are unnamed other than one; the one that is named is Mahalaleel. And although all of his predecessors had “many sons,” Mahalaleel had “sons.” So the fertility rate is collapsing as we got closer to the Flood. There is only one named son of Mahalaleel and that is Jared. There is only one named son out of all the sons of Jared, and that is Enoch. And there is only one named son out of all of the sons of Enoch, and that is Methuselah. 

This is not a genealogy. This is a description of the government of God as it descended down through each generation. So that upon the death of one you then knew who stood next in line in order to be “the father of all, the father of many nations;” the role that is occupied by the head of the human family. It is a priesthood line, in which only one in each generation stands at the head as the father.  

This one stands as “the father of all,” and hence Abraham’s desire to become “a father of many nations,” because if he stepped into the line, he necessarily stepped into the role of providing the government of God. Christ is the one to whom all generations belong. He is the Redeemer of all mankind, and as the Savior of mankind He becomes the Father of all. 

In Isaiah chapter 9 there is a verse that is dealing squarely with this issue. This is chapter 9 verse 6 of Isaiah: 

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end.”

This is a prophecy about Christ coming to restore, in the meridian of time, the government of God in which He, Christ, represented the “Father” of all, as the Redeemer of all, as the bringer again of the holy covenant. 

He is prophesied to return with the description provided in the Book of Revelation, chapter 19 verse 16, as “the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords.”

In D&C section 76 He explains what His intention is with respect to mankind. He intends to make men: 

“[T]hey are they who are priests and kings, who have received of his fullness and glory, and are priests of the Most High after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son.” (D&C 76:56.) 

That’s the intention that He has for all men; that men should become like Him: “kings and priests.” 

Zion is a mortal responsibility. Men must cooperate with God for God to be able to bring it. It is not something that heaven is going to provide for us. 

When Enoch and his city were established, it was not until after it was established and people had gathered together that the Lord came and dwelt with them. They prepared the place, they extended the invitation, and the Lord came.

Likewise, in the city that was established by Melchizedek, it wasn’t the angels who built his city. He preached repentance; men repented, and as a consequence of having repented Zion was taken up into heaven. Enoch’s Zion fled. Melchizedek’s Zion fled.

The last days Zion will be built not to flee. It will be built as an established beachhead to which the Powers of Heaven will return in order for He whose right it is to govern the earth can assume the responsibility of governing the earth. He intends to overthrowing every other government there is and to establish as the King and as the Prince of Peace, and as the Father of Righteousness, His rule and His reign over the earth once again at His coming.

Joseph Smith described the priesthood that will function in Zion preliminary to the Lord’s return. This is a quote from one of his teachings: “That priesthood is a perfect law of theocracy and stands as God to give laws to the people.” (That’s from The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith on page 322.) In that same talk there is a better elaboration made [by] one of the note-takers. You can find this in The Words of Joseph Smith, page 246. Joseph said: “It is understood by many by reading this chapter [referring to Hebrews chapter 7] that Melchizedek was a king of some country or nation on earth. But it was not so. In the original it reads ‘king of shalom,’ which signifies ‘king of peace or righteousness’ and not of any country or nation.” 

What Melchizedek established was a community of peace, and as the one who preached the peace to which the people came he was acknowledged as the prince of peace or the King of righteousness. 

At the beginning of the restoration, while Joseph was still alive, there was an abortive attempt to get founded what would necessarily need to be reestablished in order for there to be Zion. In a sermon that he delivered in August of 1843, he said that the fullness did not exist in the church; if it did he wasn’t aware of it, because the fullness required a man to become a king and a priest. Joseph Smith was made a king by anointing the following month on September 28 of 1843. The month before his anointing he explained, “no one in the Church held the fullness of the priesthood; for any person to have the fullness of that priesthood must be a king and a priest. A person may be anointed a king and priest before they can receive their kingdom.” (Wilford Woodruff’ recorded that in his journal on August 6, 1843.) The following month then, 28th of September 1843, Joseph was anointed a king and a priest, and the month after that, on October [28], 1843, Hyrum Smith was likewise ordained to be a king unto God. 

Hold that thought for a moment while we turn to 2 Nephi chapter 10 beginning at verse 11:  

“And this land shall be a land of liberty unto the Gentiles, and there shall be no kings upon the land, who shall raise up unto the Gentiles. And I will fortify this land against all other nations. And he that fighteth against Zion shall perish, saith God. For he that raiseth up a king against me shall perish, for I, the Lord, the king of heaven, will be their king, and I will be a light unto them forever, that hear my words.” 

So now we have a paradox. There must be a return of the “same priesthood that was in the beginning,” in which there is a theocratic father or king, but God commands there shall not be one, and if you raise one up then God will destroy him. 

In solving the paradox I would suggest we go to the Book of Mormon first, in order to find out exactly how was it that at the time of the Nephites we had successful kings. One of whom is most notable is King Benjamin. We don’t even call him “Benjamin,” we call him “King Benjamin,” because his identity with his role is so linked together that we can’t talk about the man without talking about his status. This is King Benjamin in Mosiah chapter 2 explaining himself and explaining the greatness of the kingship which he held.  

“But I am like as yourselves, subject to all manner of infirmities in body and mind; yet I have been chosen by this people, and consecrated by my father, and was suffered by the hand of the Lord that I should be a ruler and a king over this people; and have been kept and preserved by his matchless power, to serve you with all the might, mind and strength which the Lord hath granted unto me. I say unto you that as I have been suffered to spend my days in your service, even up to this time, and have not sought gold nor silver nor any manner of riches of you;  Neither have I suffered that ye should be confined in dungeons, nor that ye should make slaves one of another, nor that ye should murder, or plunder, or steal, or commit adultery; nor even have I suffered that ye should commit any manner of wickedness, and have taught you that ye should keep the commandments of the Lord, in all things which he hath commanded you— And even I, myself, have labored with mine own hands that I might serve you, and that ye should not be laden with taxes, and that there should nothing come upon you which was grievous to be borne—and of all these things which I have spoken, ye yourselves are witnesses this day. Yet, my brethren, I have not done these things that I might boast, neither do I tell these things that thereby I might accuse you; but I tell you these things that ye may know that I can answer a clear conscience before God this day. Behold, I say unto you that because I said unto you that I had spent my days in your service, I do not desire to boast, for I have only been in the service of God. And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” 

This is King Benjamin explaining kingship; one that God recognized and ratified; one that was approved by Him; one that brought about peace in his day. 

Christ was born a King. In fact, wise men from the East came inquiring saying: “Where is he that was born King of the Jews?” Because that was His status, that was what the prophecies said of Him. That was the role He occupied. And the person they approached to find out where they might identify the newborn king was the king of the land who knew nothing about the matter, and had to go to the scriptorians to ask them, who after some fumbling came up with “Bethlehem.” Bethlehem of Judea, thou art not the least. 

Christ was born as a King, but He explained how He discharged His Kingship. In John chapter 18 beginning at verse 36, Jesus answered. This is when he was on trial for His life:

“Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”

That’s the King. He suffered Himself to be surrendered into the hands of wicked men who despitefully used, abused, beat, and humiliated Him and then killed Him publicly on a thoroughfare where the notoriety of His death would be on public display. No one entering or leaving on that day, the city of Jerusalem, could do so without noticing the humiliation of our Lord. That’s our King. 

He explained Himself further in contrasting who He, the King, the Almighty Father, the Wonderful, Counselor, of the end of His government there shall not be a failure of increase, He explained Himself and how He rules to his disciples. This is in Luke chapter 22 beginning at verse 25:

“And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doeth service.” 

The great King came, above all else, to serve. Zion will come. It will come, not because of the worthiness of any of us, it will come because of the repentance of us, and the worthiness of those with whom God covenanted to bring it to pass, including Adam and Enoch and Abraham and Melchizedek. It will come as a consequence of the righteousness of those who went before and with whom God, who cannot lie in a covenant, made a covenant to cause it to happen in the last days. It will surely come.  

Mormon wrote his book and had us in mind as his audience. After Mormon finished his book there was one reader, and that was his son Moroni, who buried it. Everything Mormon did he did for this audience today, the last days, the gentiles. As he is finishing up his record – this is in Mormon 8:31 – he talks about us and says: 

“There shall be many who will say, Do this, or do that, and it mattereth not, for the Lord will uphold such at the last day. But wo unto such, for they are in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity.” 

There is a right way, and it will be done according to the Lord’s will. And the Lord is actively working to bring that about right now in our day. The potential for Zion and the covenants being fulfilled in our day is as great as it has been in any generation from the days of Adam until now. And yet in all those generations there have only been two successes that the scriptures have captured.  

Well, the original priesthood and the original pattern will have to return in order for the last days Zion to exist. The first Zion, in Moses chapter 7 verse 13: 

“And so great was the faith of Enoch that he led the people of God, and their enemies came to battle against them; and he spake the word of the Lord, and the earth trembled, and the mountains fled, even according to his command; and the rivers of water were turned out of their course; and the roar of the lions was heard out of the wilderness; and all nations feared greatly, …so great was the power of the language which God had given him.” 

When the government of God is upon the earth in the form of Zion, as it was established by Enoch in his day, then God protects and defends it. God will be the force with which the nations of the earth must contend if they intend to do harm to Zion. Because it is His government, it is His handiwork, and it is an affront to Him to challenge His authority in attacking Zion, hence Enoch’s ability to speak the word of God and to have those that would bring harm upon Zion vanquished. 

Hence, further, the reason why, before the Flood, it was necessary to remove Zion, because God cannot destroy the [righteous]. The wicked can destroy the wicked, and the wicked can destroy the righteous. But when Zion is here, the wicked cannot destroy Zion because God is asserting His government. And because the wicked cannot destroy Zion, and God will not do so, Zion necessarily was taken up into heaven. The same thing happened with Melchizedek’s city.  

The Lord lamented: “How oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and ye would not!” There have been occasions on which it would have been possible to have established Zion, but men would not. When that happens, and men will not, the same rules apply as applied at the beginning. Hence the necessity for removing Moses out of the midst of Israel because through Moses we could have had Zion, but the children of Israel were not interested. Hence the reason why Elijah was taken up into heaven, because Elijah was an opportunity in which it would have been possible for Zion to have been established.  

Well, that same priesthood which was in the beginning that allowed [Melchizedek] to establish the city of peace, the city of righteousness, the city that God Himself would defend, necessarily must return. If you look at D&C Section 133 beginning at verse 26:

“And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep. Their enemies shall become a prey unto them, And in the barren deserts there shall come forth pools of living water; and the parched ground shall no longer be a thirsty land. And they shall bring forth their rich treasures unto the children of Ephraim, my servants. And the boundaries of the everlasting hills shall tremble at their presence. And there shall they fall down and be crowned with glory, even in Zion, by the hands of the servants of the Lord, even the children of Ephraim. And they shall be filled with songs of everlasting joy. Behold, this is the blessing of the everlasting God upon the tribes of Israel, and the richer blessing upon the head of Ephraim and his fellows.” 

Heaven will protect the last day’s Zion. It will belong to Him, and therefore God will not allow it to be overtaken or overcome. D&C Section 45 has another prophecy about the last day’s Zion. Beginning at verse 66: 

“And it shall be called the New Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the saints of the Most High God; And the glory of the Lord shall be there, and the terror of the Lord also shall be there, insomuch that the wicked will not come unto it, and it shall be called Zion. And it shall come to pass among the wicked, that every man that will not take his sword against his neighbor must needs flee unto Zion for safety. And there shall be gathered unto it out of every nation under heaven; and it shall be the only people that shall not be at war one with another. And it shall be said among the wicked: Let us not go up to battle against Zion, for the inhabitants of Zion are terrible; wherefore we cannot stand.” 

When they came to arrest the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane after His suffering, even though He intended to submit Himself, and to be abused and ultimately killed. When they entered the Apostle John records that Christ, despite the ordeal he had just concluded, stood up, confronted them in their arms and said: “Whom seek ye?” And they said: “Jesus of Nazareth.” And He said: “I am he.” And they stumbled backwards, tripped over one another’s feet, and they fell down. 

An armed group bearing swords and weapons were intimidated by the Lord identifying Himself. He made no attempt to defend Himself, but had He elected to do so, they could not have taken Him. He went as a lamb to the slaughter because he intended, though the Lion of Judah, to become the sacrificial lamb.  

Heaven protected Zion in its first iteration and heaven is going to protect the last day’s Zion. As a consequence of that, the time is going to come when it will not be the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt that people cite as evidence of the power of God. You see, Egypt had to be subdued. Moses was sent to subdue them because Egypt was, at the time, the greatest kingdom, the greatest nation on the earth. Moses was sent to them to establish the government of God. When you confront the government of God against the most powerful nation on the earth, it’s the most powerful nation that must yield the field, and not the Lord.

In the last days Jeremiah prophesied that the time is going to come when the talk about the power of God is no longer making reference to what the Lord did anciently with Egypt. It’s going to be what the Lord intends to do with the last days Zion. This is Jeremiah chapter 16 beginning in verse 14:

“Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.”

That will be the reference point to which people will point as evidence of God’s intention to establish His rule, His reign upon the earth, His authority over the nations of the earth.

It is going to come to pass. In your enthusiasm, it would be better to demonstrate the virtue of patience as the Lord brings His work about, than to exhibit the character flaw of impatience and enthusiasm in trying to bring about what the Lord intends Himself to cause to happen because you cannot give birth prematurely to a living Zion, or it will choke and it will die because it is unable to be viable outside of the hands of the Lord. We have to wait on Him. 

Just a few random concluding thoughts:

One bit of advice: If you’re going to have a school of the prophets, you are going to need a prophet.

God’s ways are higher than man’s ways. He said this to Isaiah: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Jacob, a prophet who stood at the presence of God, expounded on the meaning of God’s mysteries to an audience that include now us. This is in Jacob chapter 4 verse 8:

“Behold, great and marvelous are the works of the Lord. How unsearchable are the depths of the mysteries of him; and it is impossible that man should find out all his ways. And no man knoweth of his ways save it be revealed unto him; wherefore, brethren, despise not the revelations of God.”

In other words, I don’t care if you have a PhD in theological studies, and you are the most adept scriptorian of our age; the meaning belongs to God, it does not belong to me, it does not belong to you. It is not found out by our clever or witty parsing of what it is. In large measure the prophecies have as their purpose to hide from men what God intends to do until God has done it. And then having accomplished what He intended to do, the scriptures confirm that He knew the end from the beginning. But if you could know the end from the beginning you could interfere with the plan of God by going where the prophecies say, when the prophecies say, and interfering with the hand of God in fulfilling it. Even worse still, if your inclination were to priestcraft, if you knew what the prophecies meant beforehand, you could profit from them. The things of heaven were never intended to be given into the hands of men so that they might profit from them.

We are expected to sacrifice for God. A religion that does not require sacrifice is a religion that will not produce faith. If there is one thing that is going to be necessary for the establishment of Zion, it is going to necessarily be faith. You obtain it through sacrifice. You do not obtain it through adoration, you do not obtain it through the praise of men, you do not obtain it by sitting in chief seats, you don’t obtain it by faring sumptuously and administering the wealth that is surrendered to you as if you were God. It belongs to God. It is His. You should go get a job to support yourself if you’re going to administer the tithes and leave the tithes alone. 

I know there are verses that suggest that the laborer is worthy of his hire, I know that. I’m telling you it’s toxic. I’m telling you that there are, in the history of mankind, I can think of maybe five men who have lived that would be worthy and beyond corruption in occupying that role. And one of those five was the Lord Himself. Don’t look upon a passing verse as a basis upon which to revoke and to cast aside all of the other many verses, and warnings, and cautions, and prophecies about the abuse of the last days gentiles which largely emanate from the corruption of our religion because of priestcraft.

Priestcraft is toxic, not just to the listeners, but to the practitioners. If what you are saying, if what you are preaching is greeted with wild enthusiasm and it doesn’t get you shunned, then you are probably not saying anything that God would agree with.

God’s purpose is to bring us to repentance. The Lord is exceptionally positive, but He is positive in stating affirmatively the standard that is acceptable to Him. “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my name’s sake.” He expected us to be misunderstood, misapprehended, assessed very narrowly just as He was, cast out, not to be handed money and to be given a chief seat, to be adored, and to be respected. 

Our challenge among ourselves, however diminutive we may seem to be; priestcraft can invade our little fellowships every bit as much as it can invade multi-billion-dollar institutions. There’s no limit on where you can run amiss.

Rest assured that God intends to establish in the last days a Zion in which we will see the return of exactly what was here at the beginning. There will be a return. The reason why they are coming to the children of Ephraim in the everlasting mountains is because there will be a new Jerusalem. They will bring rich treasures when they come because they have records that they themselves are going to need to have translated. They are going to be crowned because the Family of God consists of people who are, in fact, kings and priests. All of that infrastructure has to be put in place by the Lord before His return. Therefore He intends to accomplish this work. When He accomplishes this work, you are not going to find at the top of it a king like the gentiles expect. You’re going to find something or someone or some group who are meek and lowly, who are rather more like our Savior than the kings who ruled during our Savior’s day. You won’t find a Caesar and you won’t find a local potentate; you will find a servant.

There is a parable. It’s just one verse. It’s a very short parable. It moves along, but it’s a response that Christ gave to the question that was put to Him by his disciples asking Him: Tell us what the signs of your return is going to be. He goes through a list of things but he ends with a little parable at the end. Our translation makes it seem kind of morbid so I’m going to substitute “body” for “carcass” because it sounds like what you’re dealing with in the current King James version is morbid, not a living body. He says one of the signs that are going to be of His return is: “Where the body is, that’s where the eagles will gather.” The “body” is the New Jerusalem. The “eagles” are going to be angelic ministrants who are going to come. 

There has to be an opening that occurs in order to prepare the way. The opening at this end is going to be handled by someone who has remained behind, and the opening at the far end is going to be the one to whom the assignment was given to open the way for His return; Elijah, the one who was promised.

Now, I want to be really clear. I don’t expect either of those individuals to have any public ministry again. They have a role in Zion, and those who dwell in Zion are going to have some contact with them. The three Nephites are a great example. They, like John, were given a similar ministry to remain around and to administer until the end of the earth. And they did minister. Two of the people to whom they ministered were Mormon and Moroni. They, like ministering angels, ministered to Mormon who in turn ministered to the public. They ministered to Moroni and kept his hope up in the waning days of that dispensation. But they did not minister publicly. John will have a role, but the work of Zion is the work of flesh and blood.

Men have to extend the invitation for God to return so that men who extend that invitation are worthy of His return and the Lord can safely come without utterly destroying all who are upon the earth. Therefore you need Zion, among other reasons, in order for there to be a place and a people to whom the Lord can safely return without utterly destroying the earth at His coming. However small, however diminutive it may be, there needs to be a Zion that extends the invitation for the Lord to return.

Now the good news is that Zion will be preserved. And the even better news is that all of those good people of the earth who live in ignorance but who would’ve accepted the truth if it were brought to them, they will be preserved also. There will be a mission field into the millennium. 

But the really bad news is in the laundry list of those whom the Lord intends to destroy at His coming – that is the description of those who are Telestial and therefore cannot endure His presence when He shall come – all of the liars, all of whoremongers, all of the people who have taken our Lord’s name in vain having not authority, all of those who have preached for hire and practiced priestcraft. One of the reasons it needs to be eradicated before you get to Zion is so you’re not ignited like a torch head to the amusement of everyone else that is in Zion. There has to be an end of all that nonsense. 

Our Lord was and is meek. When He said: “I am more intelligent than them all,” when He said: I am “the greatest of all”; there wasn’t one whit of arrogance in His announcement of that. What He was saying is: “Please have confidence in me. Please trust what I say to be true. Please recognize I’ve paid a price in order to be able to minister.”

You needn’t respect the messenger, but you must respect the message because salvation is limited in every generation to those who are authorized to preach repentance and to baptize, and if they’re not authorized then it is powerlessness. However good it may make you feel, it is powerlessness.

Well, I’ve covered the things that I was needing to cover. Let me end by saying that I don’t talk a great deal about any of the experiences, visitations, revelations. I don’t talk a great deal about any of that because the concern I always have is, that in the days of Joseph we made some foolishly laughable mistakes. Because when we had a man like Joseph walking among us, it was so easy to take our eyes off of the Lord and put them upon the man. That when Joseph got up to talk to the Relief Society in 1842 he said, “Your minds are darkened because you are neglecting the duty that’s devolving upon yourselves. You are depending too much upon the prophet.” If we don’t learn anything from that past example in failure, then we can expect the exact same outcome. We may get Kirtland, we may get Nauvoo, we may get Salt Lake City, but we will not get the New Jerusalem. We have to learn from the past errors. We have to determine not to repeat at least those. We may make new and inventive mistakes of our own, but at least they will belong to us and not be caused by our arrogance and stupidity in simply repeating what we have seen gone on before.

I don’t care how cleverly you parse the scriptures, God and God alone is responsible for causing them to be written in the first place, and He has a meaning in mind behind them. He has a work that He intends to do that they will vindicate when the work is done.

If you think that you can outthink the Lord, and you can arrive at the right place at the right time, then go ahead and buy some farmland in or around Independence, Missouri, and wait for the burning, because you’re not going to be at the right place. If Independence, Missouri was where the Lord intended Zion to be, He wouldn’t have told them in January of 1841 that He was going to make Nauvoo “the corner of Zion.” It is portable until it is fixed by Him. 

Adam-ondi-Ahman is not simply a location that you can find on a map in Missouri. It is the description of an event. The event is Adam in the presence of Son Ahman, Christ. Wherever that happens, that is and will be Adam-ondi-Ahman. So buy all the land you want, build all the bleachers you expect to build. The fact of the matter is that when Adam, the Ancient of Days, returns, there is going to be an orderly process in which a king, a mortal king – it necessarily begins there – surrenders the jurisdiction of the earth back to those who once presided over it, in turn, ultimately back to the Ancient of Days. That’s why he is going to be here. He in turn will surrender it to the Father, the Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father; of the end of whose government, or the increase of whose government there shall be no end.

Christ, when He returns, will have the lawful, the legal right, to possess this earth, to rule it and to govern it. And He will come to govern it. But before that day, groundwork has to be laid. There is a process.

Now, this may seem a little presumptuous and a little full of myself but I’m telling you it’s the case. If you go back to the very first book, The Second Comforter: Conversing with the Lord through the Veil, and you read everything I’ve written from there until now (and today’s talk, which we’ll get a transcript of up on my website) what you will find out is that I’ve only been giving one talk. Admittedly it’s long, admittedly it fills millions of words in English, but it’s one talk. I’ve been addressing one subject from the beginning until now; it is all one great whole. I’ve talked a little about, and pushed a little further back, understanding about some things related to Zion today. I’m telling you that the scriptures are full of hundreds and hundreds of additional verses describing exactly what I’ve been talking about today. They are all one. They are all covering one great theme. No one can lay it all out but I’ve been giving one long presentation, one long talk, one long dissertation, all of it leading up to this talk and hopefully I’ll be able to talk a little more about where things are going at some point in the future because it’s impossible and even forbidden for me to cover everything at this point. I remain absolutely optimistic in the goodness and the desires of the hearts of you people, and of others, who really do believe in and want the Lord to return again. I commend you for that. He may have put a burden on me, but it’s not for my benefit. I don’t worry about myself. I worry a great deal about mankind, including all of us who are here today and others who are not.

Christ lives! He is the One who redeemed all of us. He has a rightful claim as the Father of us all. In the resurrection we come forth out of the grave as His children, because He purchased with His blood our continued life. We symbolize that when we are baptized by going under the water and coming up again to be born again a new creature in Christ, as a preliminary ceremonial necessary sign that we accept Him. He is real. I bear witness of Him. I have stood in His presence. I have spoken with Him. He speaks in plain humility. He has a very poor student in me, and I don’t say that to be humble, I say that to be truthful. I wish I were better, but in His infinite wisdom He chooses what He chooses, He does it as He chooses, He does it how He wants. I am stuck in the position that I find myself, and you are stuck with me.

Worthy is the Lamb. He came deliberately to offer Himself up as a lamb without blemish. He had the right not to die, and therefore, He had the right to take His life up again, and it’s through that medium that we in turn obtain the right to live again. I bear testimony. I bear witness of Him, and I want to express my gratitude to Him for all that He has and is doing, and for the patience that He has shown with all of us.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

The post Zion Will Come appeared first on Restoration Archives Blog.

This fireside talk was delivered by Denver Snuffer, Jr. on November 22, 2015 in Bountiful, Utah.

Transcript

I want to thank Tony for the opportunity to get together and do this. Tony and I were talking and I said there’s something I want to talk about and he suggested this, and I was glad to respond. I wish all Mormons (Latter-day Saints and otherwise), I wish all Mormons were Tony. He is a man of convictions, but a man with a broad mind. He’s reflective, he’s contemplative and he’s tolerant. If all men were like Tony Gilbert, we would have a lot fewer problems between all of ourselves. It’s just the right kind of attitude that I see in him continuously. 

I want to talk about Mormon History. I want to redefine some terms in order to get the problem of Mormon history into a position that you can understand some concepts. I’m going to use terms but I’m going to define the terms so you understand how I’m using them. 

I’m not talking about any anti-Mormons. All of the stuff that the anti-Mormons have written is in a different category. If you go back to the very beginning and the first anti-Mormon stuff, Philastus Hurlbut was gathering a bunch of affidavits together to try and discredit Joseph Smith. His [Hurlbut’s] works and his affidavits got gathered together by E.D. Howe and published in an early anti-Mormon book , first one Mormonism Unvailed. Ezra Booth wrote a series of nine letters. He was actually a member of the Church. He was one of those who in June of 1831 was among the first 23 who got ordained to the high priesthood in Kirtland. And then he turned on Joseph and he wrote a series of nine letters that were blasting him. It does not appear that what Ezra Booth did in his letters was intended to lie. He thought the truth as he understood it, he thought the truth was bad enough that if you just said what he saw, what he heard, and what he thought that that would be enough to undermine confidence in Joseph Smith. The problem is that his attitude was viral. 

If you are trying to evaluate what Joseph Smith was saying and doing, you have to say, what was Joseph Smith meaning? For the interpretation of what Joseph Smith was meaning you don’t get to stand back at arm’s length and say, “I impute this.” “I take what you’re doing to mean this…” “I want to color what you have to say by this.” You have to say, “None of my attitude or my disposition matters one iota. Joseph, tell us what you mean. Joseph, explain yourself. Joseph, account for your sayings. Joseph, what do you mean by that?” 

You can’t stand back and say, “Joseph, you said this here, and you said that there, and those two are irreconcilable. Therefore, Joseph, you are a liar!” You have to say, “Joseph, you said this here, and you said this there. What do you mean by that?” And let him explain it. Because if all you’re going to do is to throw rocks you can say, “On Tuesday you said the sun was shining! And on Wednesday you said it was raining. It can’t be both sunshine and rain! You’re a liar.” That’s the problem with a great deal of the anti-Mormon stuff. If you’re going to look at the anti-Mormon source material what you have to do is to say, I’m going to take their coloring. I’m going to take their bias, and I’m going to try and wade through that to find out what was really going on in the process. 

But I’m not going to talk about those people today. I want to talk about people who believe. People whose religion is Mormonism. People who, despite radically different viewpoints view their religion as the religion of Mormonism, who accept the Book of Mormon as true, who believe that Joseph Smith was, in fact, a prophet. Because if you say, only look at those people you still have enormous conflict and enormous disagreement. I want to account for that. I want to try and get my hands around that so that maybe we can all take one step back from Mormon history and say, okay, now I get why we have such a tumult of opinion and strife and contentions among ourselves. 

I want to define the term “apologists” as those people who have written the story that we all have accepted as the orthodox story that gave rise to and accounts for the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That includes, most notably, B.H. Roberts. B.H. Roberts was involved in the gathering of the Documentary History of the Church. He is the one who wrote the serialized Comprehensive History of the Church. He wrote the Comprehensive History of the Churchas a series of magazine articles that got published in the East. Then they got gathered together and published in the seven volumes of the Comprehensive History. He’s one of the folks that is primarily responsible for the apologetic history. 

When I was baptized into the LDS Church I was handed a book that was written by William Berrett. I don’t know how many of you remember William Berrett, but he wrote a book in one volume called The Restored Church. It was one of those glossy paged things with color photos in it. I read it cover to cover as the first introduction. It was used in the Seminary and Institute programs. I checked; you can still find it on Amazon if you’re looking for one. After reading Berrett’s Restored Church I bought and I read B.H. Robert’s Comprehensive History. I bought and I read The Documentary History of the Church. I did that in the first year. 

Joseph Fielding Smith wrote a book called, Essentials in Church History. George Q. Cannon wrote, The Life of Joseph Smith. There are a series of others who are part of what I’m going to define as the apologists, including John A. Widtsoe, Glen Leonard, Thomas Alexander. Organizations sprung up to try and support the apologetic view of the Church and that includes FARMS and it now includes FAIR. As part of FAIR it includes the Mormon Interpreter. If you want to know what I’m defining as “apologists”, it’s that group of people and the narrative and the story that they want to tell.  

I’m going to define another term. These are people that I’m calling the “anti-apologists”. This includes people that are very friendly and very widely accepted, like Richard Bushman. It would include D. Michael Quinn. It would include Juanita Brooks, Gregory Prince, Mark Staker, and Terryl Givens. What I’m referring to as anti-apologists are people who are accepting of the history of Mormonism but who are saying that the apologists are not complete. They’re not trying to pick a fight with or undermine the Church. What they’re trying to do is to say that the story that has been told by these people are not complete enough so that we want to tell a different – and we believe more complete – story. 

These people do have motives. For example, Richard Bushman. He was the Columbia University History Chair. His intellectual ability to defend Mormonism to other historical critics provoked him into saying, “We can do a better job and we can be more fair.” What he was trying to do was give full disclosure. 

In the case of D. Michael Quinn, he still defines himself as a Mormon. He’s no longer a member of the Church but if you ask him what his religion is, it’s Mormonism. In some cases I believe that Michael Quinn’s motivation was he was hurting. He learned things. He felt bad about what he learned. He felt cheated or robbed, and he was lashing out to try and say, “Yes, but…” He was venting on the Church. You have to realize that after D. Michael Quinn’s work was done there isn’t a single historical writer of Mormonism, Rex Bushman or the late apologists that I’ve mentioned, that don’t go to Michael Quinn and the source material that Michael Quinn uncovered, because he worked in the LDS Church History Library. He had access to diaries and journals. He made copies of original source material that would not otherwise be available for anyone to see. When he finished with some of the work that he was doing he donated that material to Yale University Library so that it wouldn’t be lost. Someone went back to Yale University Library and took copies of the material that was back there, typeset it, and rolled out some limited edition books that made available, for the very first time, a bunch of diaries that Michael Quinn had read, and a bunch of journals and a bunch of other source material that had not been previously available. 

At the same time that these people are doing their work, there were sources for Church history, Mormon history, that were not previously available, such as The Joseph Smith Papers that have been coming out recently. Probably every one of you here own, if not all of them, some of them. A work was done to go back and to find all of the discourses that were ever given by Brigham Young. You can take the Discourses of Brigham Young that were drawn out of the Journal of Discourses and you can hold it in one book. It is standard book size. It has large print. That’s the complete discourses of Brigham Young, until Richard Van Wagoner went out and searched for and found source material. In fairness there were some shorthand transcriptions of Brigham Young’s talks that had never been translated from shorthand into English that took a big project to get that done. The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young is now a five volume set. They are very large volumes. They are oversize books. They are small print. They are double column. There are 3,260 pages of small print. Someone had gone to the trouble of trying to find all of what Brigham Young had said. They had searched for and they got into one set, 1,100 entries of Brigham Young addresses. This five volume set that became available in 1999 has 4,400 entries, many of which have not been seen previously. If you’re trying to understand who Brigham Young was, and you’ve read anything that was written before 1999, you’re only looking at a tiny fraction of what is now available to understand or see what Brigham Young was all about. 

This was a set of books that no one thought would be commercial. Only 350 copies of it were ever made. It was intended that libraries buy them – Yale University, Brigham Young University, University of Chicago, California – big libraries, people that were interested in theology or history. I bought a set when it first came out. They’re still around but they’re really quite expensive if you’re going to find one now. 

There was an effort made to gather together and put into typeset the Wilford Woodruff journals. That is a ten volume set, and that ten volume set has been out of print for over 25 years, but they’re still out there. They were put into print and you can find them still if you’re willing to be patient and you’re willing to spend enough money to get a copy. The Wilford Woodruff journal is one of the primary sources from which all of the historians drew and reached the conclusions that they reached. 

The Times and Seasons were put into print. They are a seven volume set. All of the newspapers throughout the entire period of the publication, from 1840 to 1847, are in the Times and Seasons print edition. 

I approached Mormon History like it mattered. I thought that what the religion was based upon at its final analysis, was a revelation by Jesus Christ to Joseph Smith, and that Joseph Smith, called as he was by God to do a work – and I still believe this – had some very important things to contribute. As I went through all of the works of the apologists and I ran out of anything they had to say, and then I looked at the work of the anti-apologists, one of the things that occurred to me as I read the anti-apologists was that they not only succeeded in persuading me that what the apologists had done was incomplete and in some instances unfair, but they aroused in me the suspicion that these guys were probably incomplete equally and unfair perhaps more so, because some of them were smarting from the sting of having realized that stories that had been told and retold were really nothing more than fiction. If the religion matters then the truth of the religion matters all the more. After getting through all of those what occurred to me was it’s really necessary to go back and look at the original material and to look at what the sources are. I don’t expect people to do this and I don’t expect people who don’t have an interest in it to ever take the trouble of even finding these things. But I care about it and I’m interested in it, and I wanted to try to get to the bottom of it. 

One of the fascinating things about the history is that all of these people tell the history like there’s a plot line.  There’s a story to what’s going on. They tell the story like: I’m leaving this house and I’m headed triumphantly out to the Interstate. With angels accompanying me I will go down south on Interstate 15 and, inspired by God, I will turn at 106th and I will head eastward towards the rising sun, towards Jerusalem, yea in the direction the Lord Himself shall one day return, until I arrive safely and happily at my destination. And they tell that story and we have a lot of confidence in that story. But when you read the journals of the people who lived the history what you realize is that when they left here they were headed to Brigham City, and they ran into a bunch of orange barrels. Swearing impatiently they took a southern route because they never imagined that they were going to have to head to the south. Then, through a series of happenstances and collisions and car trouble and flat tires and a search on your iPhone that locates the nearest place that will tow you to replace your flat tire, you exit at 106th. Then, through a series of pathetic acts of charity, someone houses me on the east side of Sandy, bruised and beaten, exhausted, and with my car in the shop. And that’s a very different story. When you read the journals what you realize is that these people’s understanding of what was going to happen and what was underway is just like that. They don’t have a clue. They lived their life like you live your life. You have your hopes, you have your desires, you have your fears, you have your uncertainties. Sometimes you tailor your hopes to reflect the sad realities of what’s going on, and then you adjust, and you adjust, and you adjust. 

I got to the point where I’m reading all of the contemporaneous events. I got to the point I was reading the diaries and the journals. Because I have read all of what the apologists have to say, and all of the anti-apologists reply an expansion on that, I can read the diaries and the journals and fit them into a story that is already out there. 

When I read the secretary to the First Presidency’s minutes about the meetings where they’re struggling over trying to get statehood and they’re grappling with the opposition that they’re getting in Congress and the federal court system over the practice of plural marriage, I already know what the story is going to turn out like. What’s new and interesting and vibrant is how they’re reacting as these events are underway, and what their intentions are. How they hoped it would turn out otherwise. What they planned and schemed and agreed and conspired to lie about in order to try and trick the government into allowing us to become a state so that on the other side of statehood, knowing that family law is a state law issue and not a federal law issue (boy, did that change recently), they would be able to do whatever they wanted to do in the structure of family life and there’s not a thing that the federal government could do about it. But the federal government perceived that they were lying about it, and so they made adjustments in the constitution for the state of Utah, and so everything folds out the way that it folds out. 

Given the fact that everyone whose writing has an agenda, the question that occurred to me is, if I’m going to try and understand history of the restoration and God’s involvement in us, how do you find the framework from which to reconstruct what God did? Not what men wanted or men hoped for. Not what men were thinking at the time. Not what men took advantage of because of opportunities that presented themselves. The question is, in my way of thinking, what was God up to? Did God have a plan and if so, where might that plan be found?

As it turns out, not only is the Book of Mormon filled with commentary about what was going to happen at the time the Book of Mormon rolled forth but the prophesies of Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants likewise contain an entire library of material saying, this is what God says he would do if, but then, if not, this is what God would do. And so, no matter how much I may have wished for it to turn out otherwise, no matter how much I may be rooting for a different story, the question that I posed to myself was: If these prophecies mean what they say, what then does the Mormon history look like? Because it’s going to have a whole lot more faith than what the anti-apologists give to it, but it’s not going to be as pleasant, as flattering, or as self-confident as what the apologists are going to say it looks like. In an effort to try and put it together in a way that made sense and harmonized – not with what men wanted or hoped or what they wanted to kick around but what the prophecies say would be happening in the last days, including what Christ himself said to the Nephites in the 16th chapter of Third Nephi. It turns out you can write a new history of what has happened with the restoration in Mormon history and you can reach conclusions that will fly in the face of what the apologists and the anti-apologists say. It is, in my view, just as faith promoting, just as glorious, just as triumphant, as the greatest story spun by the apologists, but it has a completely different look and feel. 

If you’re going to jump into Mormon history one of the things that frustrates me to no end are the many people who claim to be faithful believing Latter-day Saints, who accept Joseph Smith as the prophet of the restoration, but believe that Joseph Smith is a liar, who believe that Joseph Smith was a deceiver, who believe that Joseph Smith said one thing in public and another thing in private, and believe that a prophet of god can do that and can get away with that. 

In April of 1838, the high council at Far West held a trial in which Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated. Nine charges were brought against him, seven of them were sustained. One of the charges brought against Oliver Cowdery was that he was defaming the prophet Joseph Smith by accusing him of committing adultery. Joseph Smith testified in court. He was examined on the issue. Oliver Cowdery was questioned by Joseph Smith in the Church court and Oliver Cowdery backed off of those charges during the trial. One of the reasons why Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated from the Church was because it was found that he lied about the prophet Joseph Smith. This is in April. 

A series of crises were underway and a lot of the Church leaders were losing their fidelity to Joseph and their willingness to participate in the Church. A series of excommunications took place including the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon, members of the Quorum of the Twelve, and the Church historian. The Church historian was John Whitmer, brother of David Whitmer, who himself was one of the eight witnesses to the Book of Mormon, his brother one of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon. He had been given the commission to write the history of the Church and he had been writing it since 1831, but he left after he was excommunicated and he took the history with him. When he took the history with him, Joseph Smith began the process of rebuilding the history of the Church. 

The history of the Church written in 1838 was written by Joseph in an attempt to make up for what had been stolen from the Church by its historian, John Whitmer. 

I want you to listen to these words in the context of 1838 and what had been going on, including the trial and excommunication of Oliver Cowdery. 

Owing to the many reports which have been put in circulation by evil-disposed and designing persons, in relation to the rise and progress of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, all of which have been designed by the authors thereof to militate against its character as a Church and its progress in the world—I have been induced to write this history.

Joseph isn’t writing a response to what went on when he was a child in 1820, having the First Vision and the persecution that occurred then. He’s rewriting the history to defend the Church in 1838 against members of the Church’s own leadership ranks that left the Church and would subsequently testify the next year against him in legal proceedings that were conducted in Richmond, Missouri, in which he was under trial for his life. 

Remember that Oliver Cowdery had been on trial for his membership because he had, among other things, attributed to Joseph immorality. Keep that in mind when you read Joseph’s words in his history written a few months later, that in making a confession of his own sins: …”No one need suppose [him] guilty of any great or malignant sins. [For] a disposition to commit such was never in my [character].”  (JS-H 1:28.) Joseph Smith, after the accusation that he is an adulterer, says: “I never had the disposition to commit great or malignant sins. That was never in my heart.” 

What was it that Oliver was talking about? Oliver characterized it as “a dirty, filthy affair.” We hear the word “affair” and today we put that into a certain context meaning immorality, gross immorality. He was talking about the relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger. Fanny Alger is someone that if you haven’t encountered you will encounter. All you have to do is go online and look for Joseph Smith being blasted for his gross immorality and the first woman with whom Joseph Smith purportedly had “immoral relations” was Fanny Alger. When you study all the history and you look at all the source material, here is the material that you will find that deals with Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger: William McLellen, a former apostle, excommunicated from the Church in the 1880s, wrote a letter to Joseph Smith III, son of Emma Smith, in which William McLellen said that he spoke with Emma Smith. Emma Smith told him, William McLellen, that she witnessed the whole TRANSACTION (all in capital letters) in the barn!!! in his letter to Joseph Smith III. 

Okay, that sounds salacious. It really reads – those exclamation points probably mean something, and “transaction”, is that a code word for something immoral and unseemly, and you’re trying to convey that but you’re using the word “transaction”? What do you mean by that? William McLellen, repeating what he says Emma told him before her death, written three decades after the discussion, put into a letter written to Joseph Smith III. That’s one source. The second source is Mosiah Hancock, the son of Levi Hancock, wrote (I think this account was written after 1900). Mosiah Hancock wrote that his father, Levi Hancock, told him, Mosiah Hancock, that he, Levi Hancock, had performed a wedding ceremony in the barn in which Joseph was sealed to Fanny Alger, Joseph telling Levi the words to use and Levi repeating the words, which would be “the transaction” (with three exclamation points) that Emma witnessed through the door of the barn. 

Fanny Alger would subsequently marry a man and would bear nine children. Between Joseph and Emma they had eight children. Between Joseph and Fanny Alger there were no offspring produced. Joseph Smith claimed to have been a virtuous man after the allegations in 1838 involving Fanny Alger, saying that he had never committed any grave or malignant sins. The problem I have with the anti-apologists, and I now have with the apologists, because the apologists have to include the institution of the Church itself, is that they are saying that Joseph Smith was someone other than who I believe Joseph Smith was. 

While he was confined in the Liberty Jail, the Lord said to Joseph, “The ends of the earth shall inquire after thy name, and fools shall have thee in derision, and hell shall rage after thee; While the pure in heart, and the wise, and the noble, and the virtuous, shall seek counsel, and authority, and blessings (constantly) from under thy hand. And thy people shall never be turned against thee by the testimony of traitors.”

This presents another level of uncertainty about Mormon history because wise and noble people are going to look to Joseph as a source of blessings, not to Joseph as someone to excuse and cover over my own sins. Joseph Smith stood up in Nauvoo about sixty days before his death and said to the people that would inherit all of his legacy, and who would own the history, and who would manage the restoration following him, Joseph Smith said to them on that day: “You don’t know me. You never knew me. No man knows my history. If I had not lived it I wouldn’t have believed it myself.” 

The people who don’t believe in Joseph’s virtue inherited the restoration that came through him. Now in reconstructing the history they’re doing things with it that I would suggest you go back all the way to the source material if you’re really interested. I include in the anti-apologists Brian Hales, because Brian Hales has the view that the Church has never done an adequate enough job of reconstructing Joseph Smith’s polygamy and, sure enough, the three volume set that he has written is called, Joseph Smith’s History. If you ignore the editorial conclusions and you look at the source material that he’s gathered; one of the sources that he looks to, to try and prove that Joseph Smith had marital relations, that is sex, with other women, is a quote from Eliza Snow in which she doesn’t answer the question. Eliza Snow says, “If you have to ask the question then you don’t know Joseph very well.” If I think that Joseph Smith is an adulterer and I hear her say, “Well, if you have to ask the question, then you didn’t know Joseph very well,” and I reach one conclusion. But if I think Joseph was a virtuous man and I see Eliza Snow saying, “If you have to ask the question, you didn’t know Joseph at all,” I reach a different conclusion. She did not answer yes or no. She left you to put whatever is in your heart onto the table of the restoration. 

The fact of the matter is that you could go into issue after issue. You can go into question after question. If you go back and you read the material and you say, okay, let’s take everything that has been written about Mormon history and let’s erase all of it in terms of interpretation, and let’s go back to the First Vision and the visitation by the angel Moroni. Let’s say, if God had a work for Joseph Smith to do then let’s try and figure out exactly what the work was that God entrusted to Joseph to accomplish. I don’t care what happened after he handed it off. I don’t care what happened after he died. I don’t care what happened with really well intentioned people. The question is: what was the work that God had Joseph do? And if you confine it to that and you draw a line at that point and you say, everything that happens thereafter cannot help me in interpreting what went on. When the picture that emerges of Joseph Smith takes a very different look and feel than the picture that emerges of Joseph Smith when you start gathering affidavits in order to win a lawsuit over property in the 1860s. A very different picture than the image of Joseph Smith that emerges when the Mormon reformation gets underway. 

A very different picture emerges than the one that comes out after 1852 when what will become D&C Section 132 is first made public. Actually, it’s the teaching. The revelation itself wasn’t made public for another decade or so after that. When the actual document does get made public that is now Section 132 it isn’t in Joseph’s handwriting. It wasn’t in Joseph’s scribe’s handwriting. It’s in the handwriting of a fellow, Joseph Kingston, that wasn’t one of Joseph’s clerks at the time. 

Mormonism is true but it is possible for people to believe in Mormonism and have a whole bundle of ideas in their head that I don’t share with them. The difference between the views that I have of Mormonism and the views that that person has of Mormonism can largely be accounted for based upon how much study, effort, review, thoughtfulness, has gone into where they are and where I am. The effort to uncover the story of the restoration is still left undone, it’s still incomplete. I have been working as diligently as I can in every spare minute that I have, and I have to tell you, there’s still a monumental pile of material yet to be reviewed before I get to the end of what’s out there. I work full time for a living. I don’t have the luxury of doing this as a profession; I do it as a hobby. These things are expensive to acquire and require months to review and get through and find. But let me tell you, the search is worth it. 

No matter how shallow the pool is that you’ve drunk out of in trying to figure out what the history of Mormonism is, let me assure you that if you uncover a question there is an answer to your question. There is something out there that will give you the truth of the matter. I get so tired of reading these silly, inane anti-Mormon rants like that Grant Palmer book: An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins is silly. It’s trite. That letter to the CES thing that has caused a crisis? I read it and I laugh out loud at how superficially silly it is. In my view there is a great work left to be done, and I have to stay focused on some things that are important, some things that still never got completed in Joseph’s day that got promised would be completed at some point. We may yet see the restoration take on a power and a glory that it hardly attained to at the beginning. The easiest way to hijack that is to spend all of your time dealing with refuting arguments about our history. I have given up any ambition of either refuting critics or refuting my own critics. The only thing I’m interested in doing is trying to at last state truthfully, based upon the work that God had Joseph do, what it was that God accomplished through him. Historians can go back and take everything I’ve written and they can fill in all the gaps, and they can defend everything I’ve written. I’m going to keep pressing on and I’m going to keep plowing new ground in order to try and construct what it was the restoration was intended to accomplish. 

I would encourage every one of you to take seriously the restoration of the gospel. I would encourage every one of you to realize that Joseph Smith was exactly what he said he was and probably a whole lot more than he was ever willing to disclose. 

When the endowment was rolling out in the red brick store Joseph Smith didn’t have three angels named Peter, James, and John, he had two angels, and he didn’t put a name to those two angels. But he had two because there’s two witnesses required. Changing it to three and identifying them as Peter, James, and John was an innovation of Brigham Young, adopted to the temple ceremonies in order to reinforce the primacy of the Quorum of the Twelve as the leadership of the Church but it wasn’t there to begin with. 

In the endowment, the temple ceremonies, Joseph Smith constructed in a ceremony in a ritual form the idea of beginning a walk back in which you encountered sentinels along the way and you demonstrated by the life you had lived that you were in possession of certain standards of conduct so that eventually you could arrive at the point where you were able to converse with the Lord through the veil. And then, having proven yourself true and faithful in all things, you were permitted to enter into the presence of the Lord. 

That ceremony has been tinkered with. There’s been a lot that happened during Brigham Young’s time. There’s been a lot that happened since it got written down in 1876. The first revisions got done during the Smoot hearings in Washington, DC in order to conform the ceremony to the testimony that was given by the Church president at the time, and the first changes are in the handwriting of Joseph F. Smith. I’ll leave it there. The ceremony has been altered but the theme of the ceremony has remained the same. What Joseph Smith did was he lived that journey. He accomplished that walk. He made that pathway back to conversing with the Lord through the veil and then entering into the Lord’s presence. He encountered those that were opposed to the walk. He encountered those that were encouraging of the walk. If you want to know where the idea for the temple ceremony in the form that Joseph established it came from, all you have to do is read his letter when he was in exile: 

And again, what do we hear? Glad tidings from Cumorah! Moroni, an angel from heaven, declaring the fulfilment of the prophets—the book to be revealed. A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county, declaring the three witnesses to bear record of the book! The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light! The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county… And again, the voice of God in the chamber of old Father Whitmer, in Fayette, Seneca county, and at sundry times, and in divers places… And the voice of Michael, the archangel; the voice of Gabriel, and of Raphael, and of divers angels, from Michael or Adam down to the present time, all declaring their dispensation, their rights, their keys, their honors, their majesty and glory, and the power of their priesthood; giving line upon line, precept upon precept; here a little, and there a little; giving us consolation by holding forth that which is to come, confirming our hope! (D&C 128:19-21.)

That was what Joseph Smith lived. That was what he described the restoration as having included. That was what he attempted to turn into a ritual to be housed in the temple so that everyone in the ceremony could experience the same kind of angelic ministerance coming and talking to you and giving to you the obligation to live a higher life and then a higher life still, and then yet another higher standard of conduct, until at last you’re purified sufficiently to come and embrace the Lord through the veil, and upon embracing Him through the veil receive from Him, not a name but a seven-fold blessing that stretches from time into eternity. 

Any of you who have been through the temple will realize that what goes on there is something that is very other-worldly, very foreign, very strange, very unusual. We don’t typically see that level of ritual in the Mormon religion that’s really relatively informal. But in the temple it gets quite formal. It’s because that was the process by which Joseph Smith learned about what went on throughout history. 

Do you really believe that God would trust into the hands of a wicked man, a liar, and a deceiver, the restoration of the gospel for the salvation of every one that would live in the world thereafter? I feel like it’s silly that you have to defend the character of Joseph Smith to Mormons. But given the latest essays that have been published by the most successful Church that claims him as their founder, I find that the ridiculous is necessary. 

Joseph Smith was a good man. Joseph Smith was a far better man than most of you think he was. Joseph Smith was true and faithful to everything that had been entrusted to his care. His greatest mistakes were trusting other people that deceived him, that lied to him, that mislead him, that engaged in misconduct behind his back. Time and time again the people who betrayed Joseph, as soon as they were found out, blamed Joseph for what they were doing. Time and time again, the testimony of Samson Avard in the court in Richmond, Missouri, when he testified against Joseph, he was the one that went out and lead the mobs. He was the one that destroyed the property that belonged to the Missourians. He was the one who engaged in darkness and assault and murder with his band called the Danites. But when he testified in Richmond he said “Joseph did it, Joseph lead this. Joseph conspired to do this.” 

When John Bennett was caught committing adultery, practicing a system that involved adulterous relationships with other married women and he was caught and discredited, he immediately published a book saying that all of that he learned from Joseph. Joseph did it. But if you go to the talks of Joseph Smith consistently he denounced that kind of conduct. When you go to the words of Joseph Smith and you look at what happened in Missouri, consistently he sued for peace. When you go to the public talks and you go to the high council minutes of the Church courts that were held in Nauvoo, to find out and to deal with inappropriate misconduct by church members including adulterous relationships, Joseph Smith was the one who was the accuser. Joseph Smith was the one who brought them to the court. Joseph Smith was the one looking to find it, denouncing it, and standing against it. And yet, after he dies, Joseph Smith then becomes responsible for the practice of plural marriage in a way that he denounced while he was living. 

Brigham Young got a testimony of plural wives while he was a missionary in England. Wilford Woodruff got a testimony of plural wives while he was in England. Snow got a testimony that it was true, and if Joseph’s dead and you get to run the Church and you already know something is true and you’re not quite sure whether anyone will accept an innovation from you, but you know that they honor the dead martyr, well, don’t trust historians. Trust the people that lived it. Trust the scriptures. The best entries are the entries that were made on the day that the talk was given, the conversation was held, or the thing was witnessed. Unfortunately, one of those people who was in an ideal position to contribute a lot, William Clayton, had a double set of books and we don’t know which set was right and which set was altered, and how reliable he was. So when you’re reading William Clayton’s journals you’ve got to take into account the fact that Joseph was dead a lot longer than he was alive when William Clayton was working for the hierarchy, and he fell in line with Brigham Young and those that inherited the Church after the death of Joseph. 

I haven’t said for many years that the Church is true but I have said, and I say again, the Gospel is true, the restoration is true, Joseph was what he claimed to be and probably a lot more. And, if you stumble into questions in LDS Church history that raise some doubts in your mind about the restoration itself, trust me. If you’ll just study the matter out and take the time to look into it, you’re going to find an answer. Very often those answers are quite glorious, glorious beyond anything that you could imagine. If anything, Joseph Smith understated what he did. That list I read you, which is found in D&C Section 128, doesn’t tell you what “divers angels from Adam or Michael down to the present,” who claim and declared the keys, the rights, the honors, doesn’t tell you what was involved there. Joseph Smith left out more than he put on the table. 

Let me end by bearing testimony to you that Joseph had a work to do and he did it. It was the introduction for something far more glorious that God is still going to do. It will include the establishment of Zion. It’s going to happen. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

The post Mormon History appeared first on Restoration Archives Blog.

The following discussion was recorded as Denver answered questions from various individuals on 20 September 2015.

Transcript

…They were gathered together in the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman, where, and it outlines the names of those who participated. This is a series of High Priests, one in each generation (because you can only have one in each generation) the total of seven generations from Adam being gathered together there in the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman with the residue of the posterity who were righteous, and the Lord came and administered comfort to Adam. Adam, being filled with the Holy Ghost, gets up and he predicts all things that are going to happen to his posterity down to the latest generations of time. That’s in the same section of the Doctrine and Covenants that describes the First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve, and so on. In fact, what Joseph was doing was preparing and using the church as an incubator. The incubator was supposed to produce a product. The end product of that would literally graduate from the church, and it would be a King and a Queen, a Priest and a Priestess, the idea being that those would go off and they would establish their own kingdom. They might use “churches” to prepare and incubate their groups. But they would be fully equipped to go off and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. It never happened. 

They had one dry run. The one dry run occurred in the Counsel of Fifty in a meeting in which Joseph and Emma were made a King and a Queen, a Priest and a Priestess. It was not done in a way that systematized or regularized it and therefore it got lost. In the post martyrdom era of the church what has happened is we’ve adopted the phraseology of “King and Queen, Priest and Priestess” and have incorporated it into a temple endowment. We’ve said, “There it is.” It is owned by the Church and the Church administers it. When you’re done with that you’re supposed to be a good member of the Church, and that’s it. You never do graduate. 

But Joseph had turned the church over to Hyrum. He was moving on to be and do something different. Hyrum was the one who was taking over and running the church. Joseph got up and complained to the members that the members were not paying attention to Hyrum the way they ought to be paying attention to Hyrum because Hyrum had essentially taken over and was now running the thing, not him. But all of that has been lost. It never had a fulsome enough development while Joseph was still here for us to be able to reconstruct even what the objective was. We don’t have the capacity to complete that process. To the extent that there is any description of that, or any vocabulary that relates to that, everyone assumes that that has been adopted and is incorporated into the Church or the ordinances of the Church. 

So there is a lot of work left to be done, if the restoration is going to be completed.

We know that Joseph prophesied there would be another Adam-ondi-Ahman event. Except that one, instead of it being prospective with the history of the world yet to occur, and with it being reflected by prophecy from Adam filled with the Holy Ghost, in the next one it will be retrospective, in which what has happened returns, and keys and accountability for what has happened are the subject matter of the future meeting in which the term “Adam-ondi-Ahman” means “Adam in the presence of Ahman”, or in the presence of God. It is a description of an event. It is an occurrence. It’s like BYU/UCLA football game. BYU/UCLA football game happened yesterday in the colosseum in LA, but it also happened a few years ago in the LaVell Edwards stadium in Provo and it was still the BYU/UCLA football game. The fact is that if there was a flood or some other problem you could play that football game anywhere. You could even play that in a bowl game somewhere in Louisiana; it would still be the same event. Adam-ondi-Ahman is a description of an event, and it will happen at a location that is not owned by the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because quite frankly they don’t belong in that meeting and they won’t belong in that meeting. When it occurs, it will occur on different criteria and on a different basis. 

How you get from where you are now to the point where it would be suitable and appropriate for an event like that to even be considered is a long, long effort, because we have a restoration to complete. We have prophecies to fulfil. We have things that need to be done and we have covenants that need to be renewed. 

All of that begins again in embryo at the very basic level of faith, repentance, baptism, fellowships, collecting tithing, assisting one another and acting like we are Christians, acting like we care about one another. In fact, stopping with the notion that climbing up and having authority over someone is a “good thing” and recognizing it for what it is: it’s an Evil thing. No power or influence can or ought to be exercised by one man over another. The only way that you should exercise influence is by meekness and gentleness and persuasion. If you know more than I do, then enlighten me. Persuade me. Teach me, that my heart will resonate with what you have to say. But don’t presume that you have the right to “call me” and afflict me and tell me that if I don’t bend my knee at this particular moment then you’re going to use some compulsory means in order to get from me exactly what you hope to extract from me. No one should be imposing upon anyone else. 

I heard someone comment about how all these fellowships that are gathered here are remarkably diverse. That is because people are diverse. God went to the trouble of making every tree here absolutely unique. There isn’t one that is like the other. There isn’t a snowflake that is like another. I would venture to say that when we finally get the mechanism with which to measure and recognize we will realize there isn’t an atom that is the same. We are all humans. There is not one of you that are the same. Should a fellowship be put together with a cookie cutter that says, this is what you must do, and this is what you must not do, when in fact the needs are so diverse from one to another? There ought to be diversity. There ought to be uniqueness, there ought to be recognition of what each group has in terms of contributions and what each group has in terms of needs. It ought to be flexible enough to do that. 

I was reading in the Times and Seasons a bunch of conference minutes of conferences that were held in the early church. This was in 1841, so we’re quite a ways into the restoration at this point. They were still ordaining elders by the voice of the congregation. In other words, there wasn’t this concept of marrying together priesthood and priesthood lines of authority. The office of elder was filled pretty much the way the office of relief society president is fulfilled. “Can we all agree to support her as the next relief society president?” And we all raise our hands and she just became that. We’ve ordained her just by that act. Well someone set her apart. But she’s already been ordained and the congregation did that. They ordained them to offices. Offices were not priesthood. We’ve conflated priesthood and office together in such a way that we don’t even appreciate the rudiments of priestly authority. Priestly authority comes down in a line by men, but it isn’t empowered until the man connects with heaven. If you go to the scriptures and you look at what I’ve written, I point it out. It’s in there, over and over again. 

The ordinations had two features, had two facets: The laying on of hands by someone that is in that tradition, and then secondly connecting to heaven and God empowering you. And so here we have this long standing tradition. There’s probably not a guy here, including someone as young as 12 years old – there’s probably not a male here that hasn’t had someone lay hands on their head and give them some form of priesthood. The second part of that, that is connecting to heaven and having heaven animate that, is not considered necessary by those who don’t understand priesthood but is considered vital by those who do, and when God is the one that completes that process. 

I saw an article. The church is now building a memorial where they are claiming Peter, James and John came and restored “Melchizedek priesthood” which had to happen before the Church was organized. Except that as I point out, citing Joseph Smith’s own history, his ordination to the priesthood did not happen until June of 1831, when the voice of God as Genesis chapter 14 that he translated in the Joseph Smith version, that’s when then got permission to do the ordination. Peter, James and John are referred to by Joseph only – not in Section 27, that was added by a committee, that wasn’t Joseph’s work. All of that additional language was added by them. He refers to Peter, James and John in his letter that’s in [Section] 128. There he says, Peter, James and John who came and “declared themselves as possessing the keys of the dispensation of the fullness of times.” I am in possession of keys to my office [Denver shows keys in his hand]. Do you have the keys to my office? Do you have the keys to my office? I declared myself as possessing the keys to my office. Oh, cool. Great for Peter. Great for James. Great for John. 

I will tell you what that means, and I will tell you it only means this: It does not confer upon Joseph or Oliver authority. But it does connect them in a line of patriarchs to the fathers. If you’re doing a genealogy chart and you’re asking, unto whom then would Joseph have been connected? He would not be connected to Joseph Smith, Sr. Joseph Smith, Sr. if he’s going to be connected in, would be connected in as a son of Joseph. That connection was not something that having been established was even appreciated during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. Still isn’t appreciated. There is so much more to the restoration that still has to be put on the ground that the restoration has hardly begun. Joseph laid the ground work and in order to take the very next step you have to return to the point of the beginning at which it ended. You have to gather back together everything that happened before, in order to be able take the next step in that line. It does not matter if you’re over there if the destiny is up there. Develop all you want out there, but you’re never going to find yourself back into that final gathering at Adam-ondi-Ahman in which Adam will be present, and Adam will be present in the presence of Ahman, or Son Ahman, and a meeting will take place. 

But there’s a lot left to be done. We tend to think as soon as we’ve got something that that means we’ve got everything. And when we’ve got something, what we’ve got is something. But everything is a lot further down the road with a lot more diligence, heed, effort and study. I’m constantly amazed at our arrogance. I said it, and I don’t think it’s in the book but it’s on the recording, I said there’s absolutely nothing special about us – yet! And the fact is that there can be. There can be, if we are diligent.

All of that came out of the discussion that was going on up there. Someone said, ah, people are feeling left out, but all of that was provoked by some questions and stuff. Are there any questions that someone’s wanted to ask?

Question — Comment on how disjointed or “octopoid,” that is having eight separate folks vying for primacy, how disjointed the fellowships can be.

Answer – Disjointed and ill organized. The fact of the matter is that the freedom… That is not a bad thing. That is a normal thing. Try to envision yourselves as a temporary family. A temporary gathering together of members of a family. If you don’t have some wonky aunts and some curious uncles, in fact maybe an uncle or two that you want to keep the kids away from. Every family has some strange folks in it. Consider the fellowships nothing more than an extension of that and try and love one another. The fact is that there are going to be those who through their behavior in fellowships are going to disqualify themselves from being able to be gathered because they are just not the kind of people that can live in peace one with another. That also is a good thing. Then there are others who come to the fellowships and their primary interest is in what they can take and what they can get. There are others who come with the only idea in their heart being what can I give, how can I serve. And even through they may not be able to give or serve much that’s what’s in their heart. And you all recognize that, you can all see that in people. Those are the kinds of people from which the Lord is going to gather and build Zion. 

No one in Zion is going to be a threat to someone else. It can’t be. It defeats the purpose of it all. To be able to live in peace with one another means that you literally are harmless to one another. The diversity in which you find yourselves and the ability to bump the corners off one another in fellowships, those are healthy, good, normal things. Hopefully they run their course and eventually result in people becoming smoother and becoming easier with one another. There are some people I admire immensely and they’re tough personalities and they are difficult to deal with. And there are other people who are hard to deal with because they are too easy going and they really need to speak up more. They have more to add but they won’t do it until you coax it patiently out of them. If you don’t figure out that you have to coax it patiently out of them, you’re missing the treasure that this person represents. In your fellowships think of one another as members of a family and then work out your issues, because that is how you grow into being a community. You may really prize the more difficult members if you take that approach. 

Question –…I know everything is orchestrated in the hand of God…This lack of family. What I’m leading to is, it’s frustrating to me, but it’s all meant to be, I guess. It seems to be difficult out there to find… On the front of Tim Malone’s page he has… I get deluged and I’m sure he does, about …how to meet. He gives you a link to a site. You go to it, and yes, it’s got the one… Our’s isn’t on it. There does not seem to be a way …to find a group. 

Answer – They are working on that right now. There is work on several things. There will be a site… in which anyone worldwide who wants to be baptized can submit a request and anyone who has the ability to perform the baptism can check worldwide and if they are able to perform it they can connect up. That site will become live. It has security features built in to it, it has anonymity built into it, it has confidentiality built in to it. That’s going to come live within the next two weeks. 

There will be another site that is in the preliminary development stages in which you can click on a map anywhere in the world and find out if there is a fellowship anywhere in there. My suspicion is that there may be, for example, in Indiana and Ohio, people who may not live close enough to fellowship with one another face to face, but people who can get together in a conference from time to time. Eventually the numbers will grow.

There is another phase of the work that is going to launch in the next year that has nothing to do with the Mormon corridor and has everything to do with going out to try and find other people who may be interested in the Doctrine of Christ, the Restoration, and in learning about more than their typical Christian view of Joseph Smith and the Restoration and Mormonism.  

Joseph Smith has been maligned by the church that claims itself to have been established by him. If you take Joseph Smith’s words, if you take Joseph Smith’s sermons and conversations and you stand them on one side, and then you take the [LDS] essays, they [the LDS Church] sold Rough Stone Rolling in Desert Book. You take the typical history that is told by the Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith was required to undergo a metamorphosis in order to make what Brigham Young claimed to have any defensible position to it. Joseph had to change. In the preface to the book that just came out [Preserving the Restoration] I quote from one of the fellows that worked in the Church historian’s office, watching them alter the history that the Church was maintaining precisely to accommodate the claims that the Church was making. So although the Joseph Smith Papers have proven to be extremely useful, they are useful because the Church doesn’t know what to edit out. They don’t know what to change. So in their ignorance they have published things that I have extensively footnoted that demonstrate exactly what Joseph was and was working on. The restoration was not complete. The manner in which it was taken over and it was managed thereafter has altered the view and has altered the trajectory. It has substantially altered the view that you would take of Joseph Smith and that’s a project I’m taking on. We will be going out into the Christian world and doing a great deal more there to try and reintroduce Joseph Smith to the evangelicals, even the Catholics. 

The Catholics have had people in their history that stood exactly in the same position as Joseph did in introducing a new religious insight. You take St. Francis and the struggles that St. Francis had. You take Martin Luther, and although Catholics hated him at the time they respect him now. You take John Wesley. You take religious reformers throughout history and Joseph Smith stacks up favorably in a comparison with any one of them. He said and he did magnificent things in the struggle to perpetuate faith. The most remarkable thing about Joseph is that he never doubted and it didn’t matter how big a mess the people made of it.  

Two things about Joseph that I’m hoping will become clear, (and I’m working on it): The first is, Joseph Smith never doubted, never turned back, never relented, never said, “is what I’m doing really what God wants done?” That was never the question. The doubts he had were about his ability to get others to recognize it, his ability to preach it, his ability to teach it, and his ability to get others to practice it. That was what he doubted. That is the first point.  

The second point is: From the beginning, after his childhood ended, Joseph Smith’s biggest enemies, his biggest opposition and his greatest detractors were those who were one-time members of the Church. Members of the Church were the ones who drove him out of Kirtland. Members of the Church were the ones who betrayed in Missouri and wound up getting them driven out of Jackson County. Members of the Church were responsible, in the Salt Sermon and in the wake of the Salt Sermon, in stirring up literally… The extermination order issued by Governor Lilburn Boggs, is a concept drawn from Sidney Rigdon’s 4th of July Salt Sermon. “A war of extermination…” Sidney Rigdon preached it first. Lilburn Boggs took the Mormons at their word. In Nauvoo, if it were not for Mormons betraying Joseph Smith he would never have been martyred. A mob may have killed him, but he was surrendered to the mob by members of his own church.  

Sixty days before his death he got up and he said, “You don’t know me, you never knew my heart…” talking to the people that were subsequently entrusted to preserve and teach the legacy of Joseph Smith and who he was. So we have borrowed a history that has been relayed to us from people that Joseph said never knew him. One of the things about getting back to the starting point necessarily therefore is we’ve got to do a better job of carving our way through the fog and getting back to a point of departure, so that the work can resume.

So far as I can tell Joseph Smith greatly respected women, in what he said, and what he taught, and how he taught it. I know all the arguments. I’ve read all the histories. I’ve read what the people say. I’ve read what the accusations are. The fact of the matter is that they are not accurate. The histories that they are based upon and much of the information was ginned up in consequence of litigation, in which Joseph F. Smith went around gathering affidavits in the two affidavit books from which we draw most of the information to redefine what Joseph Smith was doing in Nauvoo and earlier with plural marriage.  

Plural marriage was denounced by him as an abomination. He got up and said before a crowd, “I hear all the time that I have wives, I’ve got seven wives. I’m looking out in the audience and can only see one.” (Meaning Emma.) If you read the letters that Joseph sent to Emma and you read the letters that Emma sent back to Joseph, and they are preserved in the correspondence and the documents of the Joseph Smith History, you realize that those two, whatever else was going on around them, those two were in love with one another. Joseph relied on her, respected her, and she loved him. They had a fabulous relationship between the two of them. I don’t care what In Sacred Loneliness wants to portray otherwise. A fair reading of Joseph’s life was that he was a man who was faithful to his wife. 

I’m off on a tangent now. Was there something else we ought to talk about?   

Question – I’ve been hearing of some other groups and even some of the people in the group I meet with. They talk about receiving revelations that it’s time to flee Babylon and prepare a place of refuge. So people are actually leaving their jobs, selling their homes, buying up remote properties, and deciding to live together and live the law of consecration. As I’ve prayed and fasted about this I’ve felt concerned about that, I don’t know we’re anywhere near that. So the question is: Does the Lord actually want us to do physically something to prepare or is it all spiritual preparation at this point? Are we anywhere near the law of consecration?  

Answer – I don’t think it is useful for people to argue over the revelations that they have received in contrast to the revelations someone else has received. I think that we should give allowances for the possibility that someone has received for themselves some communication that for themselves they ought to act on. Therefore, I don’t want to be dismissive of someone’s revelation that says they ought to be doing something. But, I was reading out loud to my wife’s amusement, a letter written in 1841 by Wilford Woodruff in England in which he was writing back back to the saints in Nauvoo about how obvious it was that we are right now at the end of all time. The poverty in England that he was seeing, and the abuse of people, the great pollutions that were on the land, and all of the signs, the cholera that was going on in India, the earthquakes that they read about from South America; it’s really clear that we are now at the culmination of the final distress, and that God is coming soon. The plagues have been opened, the angels have been released, and the end is upon us. That was, I think it was in the March edition of the Times and Seasons for 1841. 

The apostle Paul writes about the times of distress are upon us. Everyone in every generation sees that. 

Here’s the reality: In order for the entire earth not to be smitten and utterly wasted at the Lord’s return it will be necessary for there to be a Zion. In fact, it’s almost a cause and effect. You have to have the reestablishment of what was in the beginning of the world in the end of the world also. That was a prophecy of Adam. He made it in the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman. Enoch was the one that preserves it, so it appears in the Enoch portion of the Book of Moses, where Enoch preserves Adam’s prophecy that that same priesthood which was in the beginning of the world shall at the end of the world be also. I have to tell you, that’s not your senior chief apostolic high and holy pontificate of the ninth order, it’s not that at all. It is reestablishing something about which we know very, very little and that has to occur only within an environment that has been insulated from the world and accepted by God. It has to be physically accepted by the Lord. That edifice has to be located in the place that is approved by the Lord. We don’t know the place, we haven’t built the edifice, we don’t have the right to proceed, but all of this must occur before the invitation is extended. Because God is not going to come to a planet that He utterly wastes at His coming. An invitation has to precede the return of our Lord, and that invitation needs to be done in His way, at a place of His choosing, in a manner that He ordains, that occurs according to His will; established as a consequence of Him returning what was once here back to the earth again. 

People are wildly enthusiastic about a lot of things and I don’t deny the possibility that their enthusiasm can be based upon something that is authentic, God talking to them. But as for wrapping up of the creation and the culmination of the ages, God’s direct involvement in that and the impressive nature of how that will roll forward, will not be some people deciding to flee and go farm somewhere. It’s going to be a little bit different kind of enterprise, culminating in a city of righteousness and a people of righteousness, and in that sense, righteousness includes a great deal of knowledge. The glory of God is intelligence or in other words light and truth. Knowledge and redemption, all of that go together.  

I don’t talk about any of the revelations or visitations I’ve received except to say they have happened. I will tell you, they have happened. The Lord in His wisdom… I did a little post on Nephi and constraining him, and how smart I thought that was in the long run. The Lord in His wisdom has asked that I talk using the scriptures and the things put on the ground by Joseph Smith and not anything else. I think that’s an important thing to do. 

Until we have first remembered and straightened out what it was that came to us through Joseph, we have no business going out and starting another experimentation. I’ve used this analogy and some of you have heard it and I apologize to those that have heard it, but I’m going to use it again. Edison tried iron, he tried copper, he tried aluminum. He tried a number of elements, all of which failed, until he finally used carbon as the filament and then he got light.  

Joseph Smith proceeded with the restoration as a come-as-you-are party. He believed that with the right kind of preaching you could take any people, convert them and turn them into Zion. There’s some reason to suspect that’s a possibility, because of what we learn about Melchizedek in the book of Mosiah, in which [Melchizedek’s] preaching resulted in people repenting from their wickedness and becoming righteous. So it’s not an irrational thought, it’s not an non-scriptural thought, because Joseph had translated the book of Mosiah and would be familiar with that. My conclusion however is that there’s no reason to try iron if Edison tried it and it didn’t work and there’s no reason to try copper if Edison tried it and it didn’t work. There is no reason to expect that you can take people and gather them and then try to produce Zion. It makes a whole lot more sense, as the scriptures seem to indicate, that first people are taught repentance and then some few repent. Then they are gathered, one of city, two of a family. Then they are gathered, and they are gathered by those who are the angels to whom the keys are entrusted to do that gathering. Then you put them together.  

We know what Joseph tried to do, failed. He did not produce Zion. Brigham Young doubled down on the model that he assumed Joseph was putting on the ground, and in doubling down on that model he didn’t produce Zion. We didn’t get it in Kirtland, we didn’t get it in Missouri, we didn’t get it in Nauvoo and we sure as hell don’t have it in Salt Lake City. Therefore, there is no reason for us to try and repeat exactly the same thing. It’s time to try something new, something other, something different.

I’m getting the signal from the one running the show it’s time to wrap this up. I wish I could have been with you here, it would have been more fun than some of the things I was doing. I’m pleased to see everyone who is here and to renew acquaintances with a number of you folks, some of whom I know came some distance in order to be here. God bless you all. God’s hand is moving again. This is going somewhere. It will eventually culminate in the fulfillment of the prophecies. The trouble is whether we do it or whether it is left for another generation depends on what we do. I don’t think religious enthusiasm or religious fanaticism produces it. It’s kindness to one another. It’s taking seriously the things that God asked us to do and then in a meaningful way being self sacrificing and trying to help and lift other people. Because at the end of the day, Christ summarized all the law and all the prophets in loving God and loving your fellow man, which goes back to the question that Lewis asked about all you quirky people liking one another. Well, that’s the challenge. If you want to see Zion get a little closer, then love one another.  

In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.  

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On May 13th 2015, Tim Malone sat down with Denver and asked a number of questions on a variety of subjects, including questions about specific statements made in the 40 Years in Mormonism talks.

Transcript

TM: In a recent talk (3-22-15) on plural marriage, you said (page 39),

“There have been many signs given by God that He was about to do something new from the time of the death of Joseph Smith till today. All that was left at the end was for a witness to be appointed, to come to declare, ‘Now it has come to an end.’ In the last talk in the ten lecture series I said, the witness has now come, and I am he. It has come to an end with something new now begun. One of the signs of it having come to an end was the passing of Eldred Smith.”

Will you elaborate on the significance of the passing of Patriarch Eldred G. Smith on April 4, 2013 and how or why we should take this as a sign that something has come to an end? In particular, what has come to an end? You are declaring you are a witness of an end-time event. This seems vital. What is that event, how are you a witness, why is it important for us to recognize this event and how should we, or how do you think God expects us to acknowledge such an event in our own lives?

DS: In a word, the fullness of the Gentiles is ending – one of the last signs of that was the passing of Eldred Smith in 2013 and with him the office of patriarch to the church. That office was never well understood. And I’ve never been told it was necessary to fully explain the significance so I’ve left most of the details unexplained. But to what I’ve said already I would add the following. The LDS church makes enthusiastic claims about their priesthood. And those claims would be much more accurate if they were dialed back some. If they were considerably more modest. They claim to have Melchizedek priesthood which has the following list of things associated with it, when it is described for us the first time in scripture in Genesis chapter 14, Joseph Smith translation: the authority ‘to break mountains, to divide the seas, to dry up waters, to turn waters out of their course, to put at defiance the armies of nations, to divide the earth, to break every band, to stand in the presence of God.’ I pointed out that it’s not necessary to do all these things. But any one of them is sufficient to show the authority is present. But this priesthood does have signs.

The ordination of Hyrum in 1841 was and, I’m reading from the scripture, to “the office of Priesthood and Patriarch.” That’s in section 124 verse 91. What was intended with that ordination was so that, and again I’m reading from the same revelation:

“His name be had in honorable remembrance from generation to generation, forever and ever.” (D&C 124:96)

There was a colorable claim to priesthood while Hyrum and his descendants remained in office. That ended. So far as the LDS church was concerned, it was good riddance. Because they found the office was troublesome. It was not part of the twelve, yet it claimed the status of prophet, seer, and revelator while it was part of the general authorities. It was uncontrollable because only the descendants of Hyrum were holders. That gave them independence and leaders wanted the office to be discarded and it has been. There are many prophecies that foretell the Gentiles will reject their invitation to have the fullness of the gospel. Christ said that this would happen in 3 Nephi 16:10. There have been many signs Christ’s prophecies were fulfilled. Only one thing now remained to be done, God needed to send a witness to be the final required sign – sent by God to declare his intention to begin something new. The signs include, but are not limited to, the condemnation of the church in 1832, which is in D&C 84:54-58. The expulsion from Missouri that happened and was explained in D&C 101:1-2. The forced winter exodus from Nauvoo. The suffering during and following the exodus. The afflictions, judgments, and wrath of God at the saints. All of which was foretold in D&C 124:44-45. Their pride, lying, deceit, hypocrisy, murders, priestcrafts, and whoredoms. All of which Christ foretold in that 3 Nephi 16:10 verse. There has been inquisitorial abuse of the saints once they were isolated in the wilderness. As part of the Mormon reformation the population was interrogated to root out heresy, sin, and root out disbelief with a threat of blood atonement – which was slaying the sinner to save them from hell – then being taught. There were mass murders. Over 200 non- Mormons were executed at Mountain Meadows to vindicate an oath to avenge the death of the prophets. Originally that was aimed at those who slew Joseph and Hyrum, but news of Parley Pratt’s death and slaying arrived just at the time that the Mountain Meadows crew was going through Utah. And since Parley Pratt was regarded as a prophet by the saints it included him also. Brigham Young traditionally has not been directly implicated, but everyone including LDS church assistant historian, Richard Turley, admits that his rhetoric – during the Mormon reformation – coupled with the temple oath of vengeance that Brigham Young added to the rites of the temple…

And just as an aside, an oath of vengeance for slaying the prophets could not have been put there by Joseph Smith because he and Hyrum Smith had not yet been slain. And so the oath of vengeance was necessarily the product of the mind of Brigham Young. But it was part of the temple rhetoric and everyone admits that the blood atonement and the oath of vengeance and the Mormon reformation, and Brigham Young’s fiery rhetoric, and Jedediah Grant’s fiery additions on top of that, were responsible for creating an environment in which the slaying took place.

Other signs are contradictions in what are called fundamental teachings for example plural marriage was once required for exaltation, now it will result in excommunication. Ordaining blacks would once forfeit all church priesthood, now it is unequivocally condemned as false. Adopting a well-paid professional ministerial class. In Alma, the Nehor incident included Nehor advocated that priests should not labor with their own hands, that they should get supported with the believers’ money and this was something the Book of Mormon condemned being guilty of priestcraft. Alma, on the other hand, ordained priests in Mosiah 18:18 and he instructed them that they must labor with their own hands for their own support. In Mosiah 18:24:

“And he also commanded them that the priests whom he had ordained should labor with their own hands for their support.”

King Mosiah adopted this standard as the law. In Mosiah 27:4-5:

“That they should let no pride nor haughtiness disturb their peace; that every man should esteem his neighbor as himself, laboring with their own hands for their support. Yea, and all their priests and teachers should labor with their own hands for their support, in all cases save it were in sickness, or in much want; and doing these things, they did abound in the grace of God.”

See, I could raise money if I wanted to. I could raise a lot of money if I wanted to. And if I raised money off of the religion I preach I could get a lot more done. Instead I labor with my own hands and I work nights, evenings, weekends. The amount of work that is going into the book that will come out next – that includes not just me, but my wife, and practically every spare moment that we have – involves enormous sacrifice. But it has exactly the effect, “we should esteem our neighbor as ourself laboring with our own hands.” We should not think that we are better than anyone.

If you take money from someone in order to advance your religious purpose. The mere act of doing that creates an inequality. It creates an arrogance. It removes the burden of sacrifice. It removes the humiliation of having to lose sleep, and to fret, and to worry about things, and to face an uphill battle, and everything that you do in order to please God. But you can’t please God by taking advantage of your fellowman. There have been changes to the ordinance. Isaiah 24:5 warned:

“The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.” (Emphasis Snuffer)

Those changes include the most single radical change to the temple endowment in 1990. In 2005, they eliminated washings and anointings. Before the January 2005 changes, washing and anointings were literal. The change made them only symbolic thereafter. That has significance, and I leave it to people to query why it has significance.

There was a reason why Christ was anointed preliminary to his death, by the woman that blessed and anointed him. It was to preserve him into the resurrection. Now we don’t do that.

There’s a quest for popularity. Gordon B. Hinkley was the original employee and secretary for the, what was then called the radio, publicity, and missionary literature committee in 1934. The predecessor to the public communications department. By the time he became the 15th LDS church president his work had hardwired public relations to the institution. Another problem has been the centrally controlled, tightly correlated rejection of teachings. Which David O. McKay predicted would lead the church into apostasy. I discuss this in “Passing the Heavenly Gift,” you can read about it there, if anyone is interested.

The history of gentile Mormonism has been a long downward path. I laid that out in “Passing the Heavenly Gift.” The gentiles have walked away from the light and increasingly embraced darkness and foolishly trusted in men. All Mormon sects are now ruled by traditions contrary to the scriptures and commandments of God. They are asleep, and cannot be awakened. God is now leading something new and has left the leaders of all the various Mormon sects to find their own way.

Emma Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and William Marks said that without Joseph Smith there was no church. That comment was preserved by William Clayton in his diary in August of 1844, because to William Clayton that was offensive. The election had taken place on August the 8th. So when Emma Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and William Marks said that without Joseph Smith there is no church, he recorded it in his journal because he thought that was inappropriate and offensive. But they were right.

Following Joseph’s death there was a complete overthrow of the church by the quorum of the twelve. The quorum of the twelve substituted themselves in the place of the equal distribution of power established by revelation. The first presidency and the quorum of the twelve are supposed to be equal in authority. That’s in 107:24.

Joseph never moved a single apostle into the first presidency. They were independently equal bodies. Likewise, the quorum of seventy was equal with the twelve. That’s in 107:25-26. And therefore should be equal with the first presidency also.

The standing high councils of Zion were also equal in authority. That’s in 107: 36-37. All the keys, to the extent that there were any, were and are held one hundred percent by the first presidency, one hundred percent by the twelve, one hundred percent by the quorum of seventy, and a hundred percent by the high councils. There was no primacy in the twelve – when originally organized by Joseph Smith according to revelation. In the years before Joseph’s death the twelve were away from Nauvoo doing missionary work as their calling required. Joseph spent his final three years in close association with the Nauvoo high council, as the Nauvoo high council minutes reflect. Following Joseph’s and Hyrum’s deaths Emma remarked:

“Now as the twelve have no power with regard to the government of the church and the stakes of Zion; but the high council have all power, so it follows that on removal of the first president the office would devolve upon the president of the high council in Zion. The twelve were aware of these facts, but acted differently.”

Emma was the wife of Joseph Smith and I know that she’s taken a lot of bad press from LDS Mormonism. At one time I enjoyed that same opinion. But these are comments that she made in the immediate aftermath of Joseph Smith’s death.

None of the equality of these four different bodies survived Brigham Young. When Brigham Young assumed control all equality was destroyed and the church became an oligarchy run by the twelve. This continues from Young until today. Now, the senior apostle automatically becomes the church president. An unscriptural and unwise system for consolidating power.

Equality among many has been replaced with the dictatorship of one. Here’s another quote:

“Emma bore testimony to Lucy Massur that Mormonism was true as it came forth from the servant of the Lord, Joseph Smith, but said the twelve had made bogus of it.”

Bogus is another word for counterfeit. Bogus was always a reference to counterfeit money. Joseph cautioned the saints about violating God’s trust. As he put it:

“His word will go forth in these last days in purity. For if Zion will not purify herself, so as to be approved in all things in his sight, he will seek another people. For his work will go on until Israel is gathered. And they who will not hear his voice must expect to feel his wrath.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, page 18)

To the same effect, during the Mormon reformation, Heber C. Kimball said:

“We receive this priesthood and power and authority – if we make a bad use of the priesthood do you not see that the day will come that God will reckon with us and he will take it from us and give it to those who will make better use of it.” (Journal of Discourses, Volume 6, page 125)

George Albert Smith said essentially the same thing, Brigham Young said essentially the same thing.

We should expect God’s house to be ordered around only one principle – repentance. When the pride of a great organization replaces repentance, the heavens withdraw and when they do amen to that portion of God’s house.

The restoration through Joseph Smith will always remain, even if God chooses to order it differently before his return. It is his to do with as he determines best. He’s now sent me as a witness.

The passing of Eldred Smith was a moment in time that reflects the cumulative effect of a lot of decisions – including and beginning with the initial overthrow of the government of the church by the twelve at the passing of Joseph and Hyrum. Culminating in the final overthrow of the priesthood itself, by the death of the discarded Eldred Smith and the discontinuation of the authority that was supposed to have been kept in honorable remembrance from generation to generation. God will bestow that authority again and it will go forward. But it will go forward without these organizational pretenders that amass wealth and practice priestcraft.

TM: In the lecture on Christ, the Prototype of the Saved Man given in Ephraim (6-28-14), you said,

“…either I am a liar, and you ought to forget everything I’ve said, or I have been sent by someone greater than I am. If I have been sent and you reject and quibble over the things I declare to you, it is at your peril! It ought to be that way. I ought to be damned if I’m a pretender, and I ought to be damned and rejected by God if I’m saying things about which I know nothing! But I bear witness to you I know what I’m talking about. I have no reason to lie to you. I have no reason to pay to reserve a place to speak to you, and ask nothing of you but to listen. It requires a sacrifice to do what I am doing. I have no other reason to do this than to tell you the truth. Joseph Smith testified to these things and I am come as a second witness. Therefore you now have two proclaiming the same doctrine.”

You bring up Joseph Smith. Joseph testified the heavens are open. He bore witness of God the Father and His Son as two separate and distinct personages possessing glorified and perfected bodies. He also testified he was an instrument in the hands of Christ to bring about a restoration of things hidden since before the foundation of the world. You say you know what you are talking about. Do you mean this in the same sense Joseph Smith declared his knowledge, that it was received through revelation, vision and the visits of angels? As a second witness, how is the Savior working through you to continue the restoration He began through Joseph Smith?

DS: The answer to that question is yes. If that were not the case, I would not be doing anything. What I do, teach, and write is a product of contact with heaven. I’ve not elaborated on all the contacts, messengers, and visitations I have received because that would be, in my view, very counterproductive. It would suggest I am more important than I am. God matters and men do not. God can save you and I cannot.

The most important issue involves the substance of what is taught. The most important individual is whoever hears what is taught. When Christ appeared on the road to Emmaus, to announce his message, he did not bother announcing who he was. All he did was announce his message which was to expound the scriptures beginning with Moses and all the prophets. In order to show how in all things it was testified that he needed to suffer and he needed to die.

All I’m doing is modeling the one I serve. That is, by taking Joseph and all the revelations of the restoration and showing how in all things it is necessary for exactly what has and is happening to occur in order to fulfill the word of the Lord.

If I started talking about all the visits and visitations immediately what people would say is that, ‘this is a great man. He has stood in the presence of various angelic personalities, he’s had various interviews and instructions. Oh my! Isn’t he wonderful?’ And the fact of the matter is, I’m not wonderful. I labor for my support. I have a hard time making all of my ends meet. I have a very difficult time meeting all of the responsibilities my wife and I have. She and I work together on a lot of problems that deal with family, that deal with money, that deal with budget, that deal with just life’s challenges. I am no better than the next guy. To say something other than the content of the message is to inspire either adoration or envy. It’s foolish, it’s unnecessary. But the answer to your question is: Yeah. If it were not so I would keep my mouth shut.

TM: As a second witness then, which you have proclaimed you are, how is the Savior working through you to continue the restoration, he began through Joseph Smith?

DS: God could, does, and will work through anyone who awakens and then pays attention. There’s an army of witnesses and awakened individuals that are being assembled by God. It’s required to know him, and I know him. I’ve been taught and understand his gospel. The first task is to assure people that he lives and that his gospel is an authentic method for saving souls. The second task is to remember the restoration Joseph gave his life to begin.

We’re ungrateful when we fail to remember and practice it. At the moment, there is almost no clear understanding of that gospel. I’m working to set that out in a comprehensive way. It’s never been completed. There’s a great deal prophesied to roll out as part of the restoration that has not even commenced! Do we have Zion? What about the lost teachings of the brass plates? Do we have the rest of the Book of Mormon? Do we have the testimony of John? Do we have restored knowledge of the Jaredites? The list could be very long. But the fact that there is a list, tells us that the restoration must resume at some point in order to be completed. We don’t have it on the table, but we’ve forgotten what we once had.

So the first job is to show that we are grateful enough to remember. And to remember it in a fulsome, comprehensive way. Before God is going to say, now I will permit it to move forward. We haven’t gotten to the point of remembering yet. Which is why we ought to be studying a lot more diligently the material we got in the restoration. We ignore it at our peril.

TM: In the Phoenix or Mesa lecture (9-9-14), you stated,

“The Lord has said to me in His own voice, ‘I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you.’ Therefore, I want to caution those who disagree with me, to feel free, to feel absolutely free to make the case against what I say. Feel free to disagree, and make your contrary arguments. If you believe I err, then expose the error and denounce it. But take care; take care about what you say concerning me for your sake, not for mine. I live with constant criticism. I can take it. But I do not want you provoking Divine ire by unfortunately chosen words if I can persuade you against it.”

In Genesis 12:3, The Lord said unto Abraham, “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” Abraham was further blessed to be the father of many nations, that in him “shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Abraham was a prophet. Isaac and Jacob were prophets. Abraham referred to the Fathers going back to Adam. You spoke about that in the talk on plural marriage and elsewhere. It seems there is something significant about connecting to the Fathers. Abraham was a patriarch. The LDS Church no longer has a presiding patriarch, or even such an office. Is there a patriarch on the earth today who can connect us to the Fathers?

DS: The simple answer is that there is always one on the earth. That has been true from Adam to the present time. Remember that in Nauvoo the Lord offered to connect the saints. A clearly defined condition for that to happen was necessarily an acceptable temple where he could come and restore the connection. The reconnection is ordinance based and will require an acceptable temple before it goes beyond the single representative.

First, ideas need to be advanced and accepted. Second, we need to act on the ideas. Primarily by repenting and opening ourselves to the influence of God. Third, we have to be humble and patient and willing to practice the religion before we can have any hope of God deciding to gather us. Practical experience is absolutely necessary. Theories and pretensions are not going to get us anywhere. Everyone can theorize the virtues that are necessary to gather people together and live in harmony. Everyone can envision themselves as one of the residents of the city of peace. But the practical experience required to iron out our selfishness and competitiveness so we can actually live in peace is another order of magnitude harder. In the Nauvoo city council minutes you see them grappling with a society that is trying to be composed of Saints. The practical problem solving goes on. There are moments when I’m reading the Nauvoo city council minutes that I’m laughing. Because they go to solve one problem, but the solution creates another.

Basically people are discourteous of one another. And because they’re discourteous of one another, they adopt an ordinance in order to drop one discourtesy only to create another discourtesy on top of that.

For example, one of the problems that they had was Nauvoo was organized as a city in which everyone had a garden plot. But because the garden plots were not fenced, horses and foot traffic would go through the gardens. The result of that was the destruction of needed food stuffs. So they couldn’t get people to build fences around their gardens. The solution to the problem was to turn the hogs loose. Because when the hogs are loose the hogs are going to go into the gardens. So they adopted an ordinance and the ordinance let the hogs in Nauvoo go free, and that produced the required fences that they wanted at the expense of the hog wallows in the middle of the streets in the middle of Nauvoo until finally some guy, tired of the hog problem, went out and killed and butchered and ate a couple of guys that another guy said belonged to him and he sued him and they had the public fight over it.

The point of all this isn’t hogs in the Nauvoo city council, the point of all this is we need practical experience, not theory. The way in which the practical experience can be had is in gathering in fellowships of societies collecting our own tithing. Then grappling with the fact that there is a pile of money sitting there which is ever a temptation and to deal with that in a responsible way that forces individuals to confront their own self will, their own pride, their own desire, their own jealousy, their own envy, their own ambition, their own covetousness.

In the fellowships that have been organized there have been moments of profound breakthroughs in the kind of attributes that you would want for Zion. One group, when they begin their meeting they gather all of the needs and they put all of the needs together. Then they gather the money and the money is always cash and in a container that they don’t know how much cash there is. Without opening the cash then they open the needs and as a group they reason together and agree on what the priority of the needs are. So that they have a list of the most compelling and on down. Once they know what the most compelling, the second, the third, the fourth are they open it up and they count their money. There have been occasions, on one occasion the person whose need could be satisfied – because there was enough money there – looked at the person next in line in the priority behind them. And concluded that in their heart they thought that need greater than their own. If they satisfied that need there would be nothing left for them. So they voluntarily passed on their priority and took none of the money and let it all go to the next person behind them. That is a person that I would willingly add to a community because they’ve learned self-sacrifice.

Someone who advocates incessantly, ‘we have got to live the United Order. We have got to have consecration,’ because they intend to benefit from that, is unfit to be gathered. They would destroy Zion. Someone who says, ‘what can I give? At the cost of my own self-sacrifice.’ And who is willing to live the law of consecration in order to bless and benefit others. Not expecting themselves to be blessed or benefitted, but instead for themselves to carry a burden. Those people can be gathered and they represent no threat. But the way in which those people get identified is by practical experience, which is what the fellowshipping communities are designed – by the inspiration of God – to allow to take place. Every one of us theorizes that we are a great candidate for Zion. Go out and get some practical experience and see how great of a candidate you truly are. You’ll be disappointed in yourself. Most of us would be anyway.

TM: In the same lecture, you quoted from your journal, describing the disciplinary process you went through, your appeal and the significance of section 121 which contains the phrase, “Amen to the priesthood of that man.” You then read,

“Last general conference (April 2014), the entire First Presidency, the 12, the 70, and all other general authorities and auxiliaries, voted to sustain those who abused their authority in casting me out of the church. At that moment, the Lord ended all claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to claim it is led by the priesthood. They have not practiced what He requires. The Lord has brought about His purposes. This has been in His heart all along.”

This is an astounding declaration. It has been the subject of much discussion on the forums and blogs. It was and is a difficult thing for many LDS members to hear or read. FAIR and other apologetic sites have fallen all over themselves to show how impossible such a claim can be. The idea of a modern, living prophet, authorized and in possession of all priesthood keys held by Joseph is the bedrock of the LDS Church claims to be God’s kingdom on earth today. Your claim evokes emotional distress in some who consider it. It’s been a while since this declaration came out. Is there anything you would add now to help multi-generational members of the LDS Church deal with such a devastating, all-encompassing foundational claim?

DS: I would add that it’s a mistake to focus on me when you think of this issue. The issue is larger than a single man. And the issue deserves careful consideration of everything that was covered in that first answer.

I am no happier than others are about this. Does anyone really think that this doesn’t upset me? Does anyone believe that I have pride in this or it makes me pleased to say what I have said? Those who think that have no idea who I am or what’s in my heart. I’m probably more broken hearted by the things I’ve been told and commanded to teach than the audience could be.

I have spent days mourning. Unable to speak about some things, even with my wife as this has unfolded. There have been times when I have been so upset that I’ve not been able to carry on a conversation. It’s required two and three days to adjust. I could give you an example, but I’ll pass on that. Well – I will give you the example. The section I read of my journal was written months before it was read to an audience. And when it was written, I thought that writing was only for my family, my kids.

There are some times when the Lord gives you the words to write and there are some times when you compose it yourself. That was given to me to write. But I considered it extremely private. I considered it extremely personal. Outside of my wife alone, no one was aware of that until the talk.

Every one of the ten talks were given to me in outline form before they were given. On the day that I began to prepare to give the talks, I sat down and in one sitting I wrote all of the notes for the first five talks because I ran out of time. I didn’t bother putting notes down for the next series until after I delivered the first two because they were in fairly rapid succession. Then I went on from the sixth, seventh, eighth, and then finally the ninth talk. I never got anything for the tenth talk. And understand that these were prepared months, months, in advance. And I had a long hiatus between the first and second parts of the year during winter we didn’t drive. And so I had all nine talks and I had nothing for ten. Nothing. My conclusion, because it had been given to me on one through nine, my conclusion ultimately was all the tenth is going to be is a summary of the first nine. So literally I began to go back through the notes and to highlight what I was going to use as a summary in the tenth talk.

I prayed about it, nothing happened. Finished the talk in Saint George, so the ninth talk was given and on the night that the ninth talk was given, that night the tenth talk was revealed to me. If I had known – if I had known anywhere along the line the content of the tenth talk, I would have done something to prepare the audience for what was coming. I didn’t know what was going to be in it. When I got the content of the tenth talk it was so distressing to me that I told my wife the next day on a walk in Saint George, we stayed in the area for a while, that this was not going to be good. This was not going to be a pleasant thing.

I wrote out all of the notes. I transcribed what needed to be said, but I didn’t give the talk to her, unlike the other ones. I just continued to try and change the Lord’s mind about the content. She heard the talk for the first time during the audience. She knew how upset and distressed I was about what I was saying. During the first break she got up and came up to me and said to me “I now get it.” Because it wasn’t easy. That was not easy.

People who think that I’m enjoying this and that I look out and say, ‘Good. Now I’m giving the Mormon church their comeuppance,’ don’t realize anything about what it takes to get up and say this stuff. Or how extremely difficult it is. I’m not happy about it.

Multi-generational families may have a family tradition but I was converted at the age of nineteen and I invested my heart and soul into the church. I was the single most successful missionary in the mission that I got baptized in as just a lay member of the church. When I was sent down by the military to Texas I was called to be a stake missionary. We had through one missionary waiting for a visa to go to Brazil, we couldn’t get a visa for him. Every night when I came home that missionary showed up and he and I were missionary companions. And we went out and we tracted, and we taught, and we baptized. We had a young couple, the husband was studying to become a minister for the Church of Christ. And we began teaching him. We got them to the point of having a testimony. They got an answer, they had a testimony. But they were faced with the crisis of losing his profession and of alienating his family. So they concluded, despite the fact that they had been converted, they concluded that they couldn’t pay the price. They told us they didn’t want to have us come by anymore.

I taught Gospel Doctrine for nearly three decades. I was on the high council, when I spoke in the high council in my stake the bishops announced in advance who the high councilman was, because attendance would go up. Because I loved the gospel and I was devoted to the church.

To say it was more distressing to multi-generation families than it was to me is incomprehensible to me. It’s a tragedy. I’m just on the scene, to focus on me is ridiculous. Forget about me.

TM: That multi-generational reference was in regard to my wife and how strong and powerful that tradition is. How devastating it is.

You have proclaimed God has ended the way he works with his children on the earth today. You have announced yourself to be a witness of this fundamental change. You have declared yourself a second witness of the many works of God through the prophet Joseph Smith. You have reaffirmed the importance of the Patriarchal Priesthood, the law of adoption or sealing to the Fathers in the family of God. You have announced the LDS Church can no longer claim to be led by the priesthood of God, virtually making it no different from any other church today.

Yet the title and focus of the last lecture in the series “Forty Years in Mormonism” is “Preserving the Restoration.” You have counseled those who have accepted this message and you as the Lord’s servant, witness or messenger in this great change, to be baptized. Specifically, you quoted 3 Nephi 11:26–27 and said,

“I am telling you in the name of the Lord that commandment is renewed again by Him today, to you. This is His command … confirmed again today.”

Thousands of individuals have been baptized at your invitation. Will you elaborate on how your declarations and baptismal invitation preserve the restoration, as opposed to tearing it down?

DS: All – universally – all of the various iterations of Mormonism are less and less like the foundation and we need to return. If you go back to what I said about baptism you will find that on the topic of baptism there is an example taken from the Book of Mormon in which Alma, who had been ordained in the court of King Noah. He was chosen precisely because he was wicked. Alma, who probably had a line of authority that was compromised by wickedness that had intervened, went out to baptize Helam. Before he did so he asked heaven to give him the power to baptize. He got the power to baptize and he baptized Helam.

What I suggest in the talk is that everyone who has been ordained in the LDS tradition, who fits in the category that President Boyd Packer, in general conference, lamented that we’ve done a good job of spreading the authority of the priesthood but we’ve done a poor job of getting power in the priesthood. Go out and obtain from heaven the connection that gives the power in the priesthood. Those who get the power from heaven, let’s have them go out and baptize again, so that we know it is done with power. And not done merely with an authoritative tradition lacking in power that cannot be accepted by heaven.

The evidence of Alma’s authoritative baptism was the outpouring of the Spirit. There have been those who have been baptized, and spent their life in Mormonism, or some other sect – Mormon related, who say they never felt like they had the confirmation of the Spirit. They have gone out, sought for, obtained power from heaven, baptized, and the ordinances had an effect upon people.

The purpose of renewing baptism is to take what may be a hollow gesture, performed by people who have authority with no power and turn it into an event with power that connects people to heaven. So that we can renew the restoration like it was renewed in the days of Alma through Alma and in the model of the Book of Mormon; which answers so many doctrinal, imponderables for us today. ‘Why do we have authority and now power?’ as the president of the quorum of the twelve apostles in general conference lamented to the church. It’s because we’re not doing what we should be doing. It’s not necessary to have a revolution that divorces us from the restoration. It’s necessary to have a revolution that connects us back to the restoration and its beginnings.

TM: You proclaimed Jesus Christ has revealed Himself to you. You declared you have seen Him, embraced Him and have been given specific assignments of things to teach, which you have done at your own expense in publications and lectures. The focus of these teachings is the establishment of Zion. You have counseled those who wish to prepare for Zion to institute fellowships for gathering and practicing the principles of Zion, specifically to use tithing as a means to help the poor. You have taught there is to be no new church, no legal entity to receive and centrally manage funds and property, yet you acknowledge the need for a temple.

A new website has been established for a central recorder, where those who have been baptized are encouraged to submit their names. The purpose of this gathering of names is to present them to the Lord in a temple. You said in Mesa,

“We do not need numerous temples, but we will need one to which Christ can come. We will not need to perform endless work for the dead until first there has been a covenant made for us. We must be first connected to the fathers in heaven. Only then can we do something to liberate the dead.”

You have already taught much on the sealing to the fathers, but will you take a moment to elaborate on the difference between the visit of Christ to an individual and the visit of Christ to a temple yet to be built?

DS: Individual salvation and promises of eternal life are just that, they are individual. A restoration of the family of Israel requires more – including cooperation and interrelationships that will be formed by God himself. Promises made to individuals give the individual hope.

If you take the vision of the redemption of the dead – that we find in D&C 138 – he saw a vision where they were gathered together in one place an innumerable company of the spirits of the just who had been faithful in the testimony of Jesus while they lived in mortality. And who had offered sacrifice in the similitude of the great sacrifice of the Son of God, and had suffered tribulation in the redeemer’s name. All these had departed the mortal life firm in the hope of a glorious resurrection through the grace of God the Father and his Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ. All of them. These were the righteous. They were in paradise and all of them were worthy, they had hope, and not only did the Savior give them hope before death, he visited with them in the spirit world during the time between his death and his resurrection. But that did not get them reconnected to the fathers in heaven. Nor did it even get them resurrected because it goes on to say in the same vision, ‘from among the righteous he organized his forces and appointed messengers clothed with power and authority and commissioned them to go forth and carry the light of the gospel to them that were in darkness. Even to all the spirits of men, and thus was the gospel preached to the dead.’ So the righteous who departed this life firm in the hope of a glorious resurrection, who had offered sacrifice in the similitude – many of whom had seen him in the flesh, who witnessed him and were ministered to by him, and given authority by him in the spirit world, remained in the world of the dead to preach to the dead.

Only the organization through a temple and associated rites results in finishing the family of God in the house of order, following the results achieved – or allowing the results achieved – by Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. Which are described in D&C 132:37.

Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob they did none other things than that which they were commanded, they have entered into their exaltation according to the promises. And they sit upon thrones and are not angels, but are Gods.

In D&C 138:41, Abraham, the father of the faithful, Isaac, and Jacob were also there. In verses 41 and 42 of D&C 138 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were there, but in the revelation given in 1843 they’re sitting on thrones. They’re not in the spirit world proselytizing. They’re sitting on thrones. The difference between these two categories are the differences between individual salvation, which can come, and reorganizing the family of God, which must occur by an ordinance in a temple, to be acceptable to God.

This is why the command was given to build the temple in Nauvoo. And why God offered to restore to them the fullness that they did not achieve. We need to let God take the lead and we need to patiently await each step along the way. This is the stuff of which the prophecies speak. And it is the stuff that will be fulfilled. But the rites and the ordinances necessary to accomplish that – people in this generation don’t even have a clue how that necessarily has to roll forth. But rest assured, it will. It will.

TM: I have heard you say, and read in many places in your books and on your blog, you dislike the public attention received as a result of performing the assignments given you by the Lord. You’ve been emphatic we should not replace one idol with another. Yet the people look to you for leadership. For example, in the Phoenix lecture you provided some direction on tithing, the sacrament, ordinations, worship or fellowship groups, and in particular, the requirement that the approval of seven women is needed to sustain a man in performing ordinances in public. You also said a man was unworthy – the Lord’s word – if his wife will not sustain him.

In the Jewish tradition, when questions arise, everyone turns to the Rabbi. In the LDS Church, local leaders consult the handbook or turn to a General Authority for help with difficult procedural questions. You have stated you don’t like the term used by some – Snufferites – to describe those who read your writings. You have made it clear every man should have a sufficiently strong relationship with the Lord to get answers to procedural and doctrinal questions. Yet, you are the one the Lord sent as a servant, witness or messenger to declare the orderly dismantling of the established hierarchy. Does that not make you a prophet and de-facto leader?

DS: Let me say and clarify, because I think it is an important point to clarify. I view my role only to be a teacher at this point. But I would hasten to add that if you search the scriptures to look at what role was occupied by Enoch and the success that he had in his day. The only thing he claimed to be was a teacher and a preacher of repentance. That’s it. The success that he had was not because he was some great dictator. It was because he was a teacher that provoked people to repent.

Melchizedek, Joseph Smith clarified, was not a king of a city or a king of a country, he just preached. He was a teacher. He was a preacher. He preached and the people, according to the Book of Mormon, who heard him – Alma clarifies they were wicked people, but they repented and because they repented they were able to gather and live the principles that brought them together.

I think the idea of a strong central leader is no more likely to succeed in our day than it was in Joseph’s. I mean, in the end when Joseph was lamenting that they were depending too much on the prophet and therefore they were neglecting the duties that were devolving upon themselves. And they were darkened in their minds. It was too late. In 1842 when he made that comment, in the meeting with the Relief Society, it was too late. The moment had passed. They were dependent upon him.

The responsibility in preaching the gospel is to take the burden and put it upon the individual and have the individual connect to God. One man being saved and saying, ‘I’ve got a pipeline to God and so now I get to be your boss,’ won’t save him nor those who listen to him. But someone who says God is willing to speak and does speak to every one of you and who encourages you to use the gifts that God gives every one of us. Every individual, though curious some of them may be, all of us have some kind of gift. Use it to reconnect to God. And then build upon that to have your life filled with light and truth.

I really think it is unnecessary to build a new canon of scripture, when we haven’t paid enough attention to the canon of scripture we have already. We need to plumb the depth of the volumes that we have been given and figure out what they are saying. Because they say a whole lot more than we have drawn out of them as of yet.

What I have talked about in the ten talks and the fourteen books I have written is the scriptures. Hopefully it served to remind people of what the scriptures actually do contain. Because they are plentiful and I think the only role I would carve out for myself is a teacher.

TM: A follow-up to the last question about the need for leadership in this movement can be illustrated by a recent post from Keith on the Recorder’s blog. In there he noted some people are submitting names of children baptized as young as five years old. The scriptures specifically teach the age of accountability is eight years old. He also noted the fact that some baptisms are being submitted for recording as having been performed by a woman. He quoted, again from the Phoenix lecture, your statement about priesthood being confined to men because of the Fall. You elaborated much on the idea there are so many opportunities for believers to go off the rails. I see it all the time when we discuss doctrinal questions on my blog.

For example, the worship of Mother in Heaven is a subject about which some people feel very strongly. They advocate a practice – a sacred dance – in which the objective is for a manifestation of divine favor. Specifically, they look for, expect, and report they have experienced the presence of Heavenly Mother in their ritual. This is similar to what happened with the children of Israel when Moses was up on the mountain for forty days communing with the Lord. In the end, Moses wore himself out because he had to judge every little thing that came before the people. What is the right way? How will the Lord provide leadership for His people who are awaiting His return? I’m looking for a practical answer here, not idealism.

DS: For those who think they can please and appease Heavenly Mother by that sort of innovation, I think they will be very surprised when they finally have an opportunity to meet her. She may not at all be the soft, kindly, genteel, little old lady that people imagine. She may be tougher by far than our Father. Do you imagine for a moment that Lucifer would have been cast out of heaven without the Mother consenting, approving, and advocating? Do you think for a moment that would be the case? Do you think that those who were cast out with him had some weak-willed woman weeping at their departure? Do you think she wasn’t protecting and approving? I don’t talk about her, but I think there’s a lot of imagination that needs to be reined in.

Gifts are an open conduit. What flows through the gifts will include opposition. Just because you have a gift doesn’t mean that that gift is not equally accessible by the opposition as it is accessible by God. It must needs be that there is an opposition in all things. You can’t bring about righteousness without there being an opposition in all things. So how do you avoid mistakes when you allow something to influence you through your gift that actually comes from the adversary who pretends to be the source of light, the bringer of light, the light-bearer which is Lucifer’s name’s meaning.

Well, to avoid mistakes, first of all I would look to the scriptures as a standard against to which measure. If you look at Christ on the road to Emmaus and you look at Moroni’s lectures to Joseph everything they did was scripture based. I’ve given a greater restatement of the restoration than anyone since Joseph, but have almost entirely confined it to the scriptures and statements attributed to Joseph. That measuring standard is where you first find the anchor. People who don’t read their scriptures are subject to all kinds of foolish presumptions about things that aren’t there. If you go back and look at the exact wording sometimes the foolish presumption is not justified by the actual language and content of the scripture you think justifies what you are doing.

Secondly, personal worthiness – we have to live our lives in conformity with the light that we have. We cannot ignore or excuse ourselves and expect that we can avoid deception. If we’re willing to disobey and excuse ourselves then we become unable to distinguish the light from the shadows. It’s just the way it is. If we lie to ourselves we love a lie. And if we love a lie, we are going to be deceived by lies. We make ourselves open to them. We make ourselves willing to accept them. We have to rely upon light and truth and the Holy Ghost.

D&C 45 beginning at 56:

“And at that day, when I shall come in my glory, shall the parable be fulfilled which I spake concerning the ten virgins. For they that are wise and have received the truth, and have taken the Holy Spirit for their guide, and have not been deceived – verily I say unto you, they shall not be hewn down and cast into the fire, but shall abide the day.”

The way you do that is by knowing what’s in the scriptures, with some considerable care, living according to the truth that you have, and allowing the Holy Ghost to become your guide even when what you hear from the Holy Ghost challenges, disappoints, or even frustrates you in what you learn.

TM: Did you want to address the part about leadership? I know it was kind of an add on, it didn’t quite fit there. What I added at the end?

DS: Yeah, in fact the narrowness of the question at the end was really kind of delightful because it allowed me to avoid that. (Chuckle)

TM: Very good. (Chuckle)

DS: Yeah. But I do think that the work that I have been doing, the lectures that were given as part of a single talk, the stuff that I have been trying to remind people of, it’s all in the scriptures. It’s all in the foundation of the restoration. I don’t think that leader as micromanager is an answer to anything. Teacher, as someone who brings material to your attention, allowing you the freedom then to choose is good. If people engage in a sort of inordinate wickedness that Moses found when he came down from the mountain is practiced anywhere among those who are responsive to this they simply won’t be gathered. They’ll be left behind. Those that are patient and humble and those that inspire the confidence of angels that are going to do the gathering, they will be gathered. It won’t be because some boss manages to whip them in line. They need to be given the freedom to get out of line. Then once they’re out of line, be allowed to go their way.

TM: You have declared we have an opportunity to bring about the conditions for Zion. You had proclaimed the Lord is willing and ready to help individuals and groups prepare themselves to become the kind of people who can be sealed to the Fathers, join with the City of Enoch when the Lord comes and not be burned at His coming. Joseph tried to accomplish this in his day. The people, he said, were too thick skulled to accept the things he wanted to teach them. They would fly all to pieces, he said, at the first hint of something not held in their orthodox tradition.

The response to some of the things you have tried to teach has been similar, even though you have taught them from the scriptures. Change is hard for most people, especially when it involves changing long-held beliefs that are mostly tradition. One of the most difficult things for the LDS people to accept is the idea that the Lord could possibly have had in mind what you have declared has taken place. In particular, Daniel’s interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is interpreted by most LDS folks to mean the LDS Church IS the kingdom of God, that it IS Zion and that they are the chosen people. How do you help closed-minded people who are steeped in tradition open their eyes to the idea of non-traditional possibilities?

DS: I can’t, but if they will pay heed to the scriptures, the scriptures can. That wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth through disobedience from the children of men and because of the tradition of their fathers.

One of the tools used by the enemy of your soul is to take away light and truth through the tradition of your fathers. If the tradition of your fathers is what governs you then you can’t be saved. You just can’t be saved. You have to become childlike. You have to be humble. You have to be teachable. The theme of the book, “Come Let Us Adore Him,” is how very offensive, revolutionary, and difficult it was for those who heard Christ to recognize who they were hearing. The test is exactly the same. If people will not hear what I have to say they would not have listened to Joseph, nor would they have listened to Christ. The test is exactly the same. I’m not saying anything that Joseph wouldn’t teach in our day.

TM: I’d like to end this first section of questions with something near and dear to my heart and that is the pursuit of personal spiritual communication with the Lord. I have delighted in your focus and emphasis from your first book that we can and should seek an audience with the Lord. You have declared He is willing to come to us in a literal, physical sense and that we can come into His presence, embrace Him and be taught by Him personally. If there is anything that gives more power to your teachings than your declaration you have seen Him, I don’t know what it is.

In my own pursuit of an audience with the Savior I rely on a sacred dream received shortly after I read The Second Comforter for the first time. Without going into any detail, the dream satisfied my desire to know when I could expect to enter into the presence of the Lord. In interpreting my dream, which I prayed to understand, it is not soon. I have years of work ahead of me – years of faithful and diligent effort to do as the Lord asks. And He has asked things of me, some of them very difficult. I note some people looking to unusual sources for inspiration and help – Shamans, questionable scripture, etc. I know you’re asked this all the time, but if you don’t mind, what counsel would you give for my readers who are anxiously seeking an audience with the Lord, and have become weary with the length of the process?

DS: The fact is, it requires patience, and patience is an absolute necessary virtue that even Christ was required to accomplish. He thought he was ready at age twelve and eighteen years later he finally had the day come when he was allowed. He wanted to be about his Father’s business and his mother told him to get back home. The fact is, there are those who, including our Lord himself, find the most difficult virtue of all is patience. It was twenty-seven years in the coming for me. Godliness, is a gradual thing. Even what is revealed is not necessarily going to be immediately understood, as that last talk I gave mentioned. It’s one thing to receive, it’s another thing to comprehend. And it’s still another order of magnitude difficult to teach. They are a gradual process and to think that you can leap, that’s remarkable, because I don’t see a precedent in scripture where that was the case. What did the apostle Paul take? Fourteen years? From the encounter on the road to Emmaus before he began to preach? What did it take, forty years, from the date Enoch was ordained at twenty-five before he walked with God at sixty-five? And that was a remarkably quick accomplishment. Moses forty years in the wilderness before he had his encounter with God at age eighty. If you think you can rush it, you are probably going to be deceived.

TM: May I share something? This is from a fellowship community member in Arizona. It’s called “River Church.” I’d like to know your impressions after hearing it if this is what you had in mind when you talked about organizing:

“What a beautiful day. The water was so clear I could see the bottom. The sun was bright and warm. I arrived at the Waters of Mormon about 4pm. As I walked down the bluff, I could see many people going in the water. So many were gathered at the edge of the water cheering and clapping. It was a magnificent scene for sure.

“As I arrived, so many of you greeted me with warmth and kindness. It was like the first time walking through the veil into the celestial room with loved ones there to greet the newly endowed. Such a feeling of peace and acceptance. Thank you. I counted about 33 members of our community there.

“The most wonderful part of the afternoon was right after the bread and wine were blessed and passed. There was such a wonderful feeling in the group. It was so quiet, just children playing in the distance and toddlers cooing. The rest of the group sat earnestly as the waters rushed by.

“Right then I was in the moment. I pushed myself to take mental note. A wonderful experience to hold in my memory. For all my life I will remember that wonderful moment. This morning a word came to me to describe the feeling of that moment: ‘solemn’. I hope many more of you will join us in the future. I love River Church.”

DS: To me, the description sounds heavenly. It’s in nature, it’s worshipping God. It describes fellowship and worship, both of which are godly. It’s necessary to allow creative solutions to the independently functioning among different groups. There was not a single “New Testament church.” There wasn’t one. There were churches.

Each of the twelve and Paul established different churches with markedly different emphases. Petrine churches emphasized authority and order. Johanian churches emphasized love. Pauline churches emphasized both evangelical fervor and gentile participation. Jacobian churches emphasized charity. They were all adapted to teach of Christ. There wasn’t a central hierarchical command and control.

In fact, there is a book, and the title of the book really says it all. It’s The Churches the Apostles Left Behind. The idea of a universal Catholic church was imposed some centuries later and it was adopted as the title Catholic, or universal, in order to try and achieve a missing ingredient of diversity. The fellowships ought to have diversity. We should not think it is impossible to have godliness with diversity. Nor should we assume that a one size fits all solution is going to work among different groups.

There’s some groups in which there are a lot of children. And the emphasis needs to be directed toward the needs of the children. There’s some groups that are primarily childless adults. They need to emphasize what suits them. Every one of them needs to adapt to whatever the local conditions are and have the freedom to do that as was once the case with the churches. At the beginning of the restoration they were called churches – plural, they were not called a church. They were societies of believers in different locations and they governed themselves differently and locally.

TM: Daryl’s group is just one of dozens of communities organized in a tithing and fellowship group. However, as far as I can tell, most of these fellowships are only along the Mormon Corridor, specifically in the areas where you presented the lectures. I know some have created web pages to help interested people connect to one another in a specific geographic region. In my case in Southern California, our fellowship is very, very loose with participants ranging from Alaska to San Diego.

I see the movement growing. I imagine you get a lot of emails from people asking about organizing and fellowshipping. You gave good counsel in the Mesa lecture when you suggested our time would be well spent if we did nothing more than read the scriptures – printed version – to one another and pray together. Will you share a little more about why fellowships are so important in bringing unity to the church?

DS: We cannot bear one another’s burdens without fellowshipping with one another. Bearing one another’s burdens presumes that you know what the burdens are that someone else carries. Which means that I have been patient enough, I have been attentive enough, I have been friendly enough, and I have been trusted enough that I can find out what the burden is that they bear.

I have a very good friend, went to elementary, junior high, high school with him and I’ve kept in touch with him for many years and he has recently contracted a terminal form of cancer. He called me to talk about that without telling his family, without telling his neighbors, without telling his friends because he and I have a friendship that is built upon the kind of trust that allows me to share that burden with him because of the relationship.

We’re supposed to help one another get through this ordeal of mortality. And it is an ordeal. It is not easy. Even the people that you think you envy. If you were living inside their world you would find out that they have burdens they are carrying as well.

Fellowshipping allows us to carry one another’s burdens, and bearing one another’s burdens implies a whole universe of connectivity, trust, confidence, friendship, and affection between one another before you get to the point that you even know what the burdens are. But that is supposed to be a blessing and part of what it means to worship together. Worshipping together, by assisting one another allows all of us to feel a great part of what it is that Christ is and does. It allows us to know who we worship. It allows us to know how to worship him. It allows us to know what makes us one with one another. Now, it’s really hard to accomplish that across state lines, but it still can be done.

The example I use of that friend, he and I have spent a lot of time on the phone since I learned of the illness about a month ago. That’s because I care and that’s because he needs to talk to someone and because he finds it a relief to be able to do that with me. It can be done. It can be done across any barriers.

All of us are victims of institutional abuse. Many of us can sense it when the slightest hint of abuse appears. One recent writer on your blog has identified it as paternalism and that’s not an inappropriate designation for it. We should learn how to be loving and equal with one another. The idea of equality is resisted by a lot of skeptics, who accuse me of wanting authority and control, when I despise control, but I absolutely welcome fellowship, equality, and worship with one another. This isn’t easy, but it is godly to pursue. We’re going to make mistakes and there are going to be a lot of institutional habits that we walk in and we want to ‘whip this into shape.’ The idea of a whip – when Christ resorted to the scourge to drive them out, he didn’t drive them out to organize them. He drove them out to cleanse the place. If we’re going to whip anything, we’re going to drive them out. We would be better off practicing the kind of patience, and kindness, and to realize that in terms of Mormonism almost everyone is a refugee suffering post religious trauma syndrome and they’re going to think you’re abusive. They’re going to think they want to be used as a tool for someone else’s power base. Someone wants to use you. The idea that there is someone who doesn’t want to use them, or abuse them, but wants to fellowship with them, and help them bear a burden – that’s the idea of Christianity at its core and that’s what is really alien in this world. We need to bring that back again.

TM: I love the heading on your old blog,

“The content of this blog presumes you are already familiar with Denver Snuffer’s books. Careful explanations given in the books lay the foundation for what is contained here. If you read this blog without having first read his books, then you assume responsibility for your own misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the writer’s intent. Please do not presume to judge Mr. Snuffer’s intentions if you have not first read his books.”

From the Wikipedia page created about you:

“Snuffer claims his intentions are faith-promoting: ‘I have loved every minute of being a Mormon since I joined the church in September 1973 in New Hampshire,’ he says. ‘I am actually advocating activity and fidelity to the Mormon church.’ Snuffer claims that he intended Passing the Heavenly Gift and his other works to promote loyalty to the LDS Church.”

Have your intentions changed? Do you still advocate LDS Members stay faithful and active in their wards and stakes? How can they do that and yet accept the invitation to be baptized which was renewed at the conclusion of the lectures?

DS: My wife edits everything, so whatever it is I wrote it turns into something useful after she applies her editing skills to it.

Here’s the problem, since that talk, the LDS church has behaved poorly. I wish they would allow people to worship God and still be allowed in fellowship within the LDS church. That seems to have been a naïve expectation on my part. The LDS church simply will not permit it if they can find it out. Therefore, I’m not certain it is possible. But that having been said, I think it ought to be attempted.

I attend LDS services. Sunday I was at sacrament meeting, then I attended a high priest’s group, I talked to two members of the stake presidency in the hallway. I contributed in high priest’s group. I’m not sure how long the church is going to continue to tolerate that. But from my end I don’t have any animosity. I’m not argumentative, but I have to say the fellowship groups that I have attended offer – I’m seeing prophecy and miracles. I’m seeing gifts that are evident. I’m seeing things in fellowship groups that I don’t see when I go to an LDS meeting.

I wish it were possible to not only co-exist peacefully but to import some of the blessings from the one into the other. But there seems to be a hostility there. There seems to be a desire not to permit that kind of coexistence to take place.

I actually think that a Catholic could be baptized and join one of these fellowships and be better accepted in the Catholic church, than a latter-day saint could in an LDS church. Same for Presbyterians, Methodists, and others. And that is coming, but right now we’re still focused on the Mormon corridor and the Mormon community. But eventually it’s going to spread. There are actually right now people who have been baptized in Iran, who are putative Muslims that have been rebaptized a member of this restoration movement. It will go worldwide. It will penetrate every clime. It will cross every barrier. It will do so in a non-institutional way and it will do so in a way that cannot be controlled. Because an idea cannot be taxed, cannot be regulated, cannot be overcome by the cares of this world. You cannot prohibit an idea. Even if you make a law against it you can’t shut an idea down. This assumes a form in which man has no ability to resist it. It will spread.

The stone cut out of the mountain without hands is an idea. And it is virtue, and it is individual. It resists all opposition.

TM: From page four of the Mesa lecture:

“The Holy Ghost does not thrill you, it informs you. It gives you understanding. … thrilling music can rouse you. A great TV show can get you thrilled and feeling goosebumps. That is not the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost enlightens your mind, it enlivens your senses, it brings light into your life, and you understand something anew. There are some people who have the Spirit with them in such a degree, that to be in their presence is to understand things better. Understanding, comprehension, light and truth—these are the Holy Ghost, not emotion, thrills and goose bumps.” (See DS blog 1-21-15 for more)

I can’t tell you how many times I have been in LDS Church meetings and heard the individual offering the invocation say, “Please bless that we will feel the spirit in our meetings today.” I can’t begin to recount the number of testimonies I have heard where the person sharing their thoughts becomes emotional, and states they are feeling the spirit so strongly. I suppose this is based on our interpretation of D&C 8:2 (mind and heart) and D&C 9:8 (bosom shall burn). Are you saying the Holy Ghost NEVER causes one to feel emotional? I have felt strong emotion in prayer that I attribute to the presence of the Holy Ghost. Isn’t that the comforter?

DS: The Holy Ghost is informational. Its purpose is to enlighten the mind and to inform you. It is a revelator. Our reaction to the information can be very emotional. How we react is up to us. I’ve had very strong emotional reactions to some of the things revealed by the Holy Ghost to me. Those aren’t always those positive, warm feelings. It has been sometimes dread. It has been sometimes fear. It has been sometimes anxiety. And being troubled in mind, body, and spirit.

If I were to liken the Holy Ghost and its function – imagine that you were sitting in this room. Imagine that this room is absolutely pitch black, so much so that you can’t even see your hand in front of your face if you put your hand there. It is just black. And you want to go about determining what is in this room. You begin by feeling. And you may be able to feel enough to determine that there is in front of you a table. You may be able to determine how wide the table is immediately in front of you. But you’re going to have to get up and move around in order to find out how long the table is, because your arm will not reach to that other end. If you’re going to explore that, between here and the other end of the table, you’ve got a lot of obstacles, including as we said here a chair that you occupy, a chair that is unoccupied, another chair that is occupied, several empty chairs down further still, and you’re going to have to feel your way through all of that. And it is a long, arduous process.

Let’s assume that the Holy Ghost is a light. And let’s assume that the light is initially a candle, and you light the candle and set it in front of you. The first thing that you begin to realize is that sitting in front of me is not only a table, but there are papers on the table, and there’s a book on the table, and there’s a glass of water and a watch on the table. And that the table is actually made of wood. I can see that, because I’ve lit a candle, but I still cannot see the far end. I don’t know what’s down there, because the candle does not produce enough light for me to perceive that. It has been lost in the shadows.

The Holy Ghost illuminates something. When you get the fullness of something revealed to you, you turn the light switch on and you no longer have to feel your way to the far end of the table. At a glance you can look and you can take in the fact that there are a dozen chairs around this table, that it’s probably twenty or more feet long. The ceiling in the room is vaulted and there are four lights overhead. There are windows on two of the four walls and a door through which you can enter and exit. There’s wainscoting in the middle of the room. Different colored wallpaper between what is below and what is above. You can take that all in and I think I can recognize Pennsylvania Avenue and the capitol building in a painting on the wall. All because someone turned on the light. Nothing more than someone turned on a light.

I got a phone call, from a fellow asking me a question about a matter that I knew nothing about and I cared nothing about. I was about to tell him, ‘stop calling me with stupid questions. I’m not interested in that. If you’re interested go search the Bible and see if you can find an answer to this rubbish.’ Instead, I had the impression that I ought to say, ‘I’m not going to talk to you about it on the phone. Why don’t you come in?’ So I said, “I don’t want to talk about this on the phone, why don’t you come in? Let’s get together in a couple weeks.” Hung up the phone and I thought, ‘you know I’m not even interested in this subject. But if I’m going to talk about it I probably ought to look into it.’ So I spent a few minutes until I was distracted by work. Looking into it I found nothing. The two weeks came and went. I’m a busy person. I didn’t have any time to look into it. The fellow arrived for the appointment. When he arrived, I thought to myself, ‘oh crap, I was going to look into that and have an answer. This guy has come. I told him to come, and now he’s here. I got nothing. I have absolutely nothing.’

So I went out, in fact it was two instead of one, he brought a friend with him. Brought them in, sat them down in my office and I was shutting the door to my office and taking a breath to say, ‘I’m sorry I made you come in. I don’t have anything to say to you.’ In the time it took to take that breath, in that instant, a light came on. And I knew everything there was about the subject. I knew where it was in the scriptures. I knew what the answers were. I knew what the explanation was. I even knew nuances and details about the scriptures that are only implied that you have to tease out of them but they’re not there. Because a light went on. When the light went on, I turned and for the next forty-five minutes, using these scriptures that I’ve got in front of me, I found and read from the scriptures the examples that proved the answer to the question that he asked.

The Holy Ghost illuminates. Your reaction is your reaction. The purpose is to enliven and enlighten and to reveal. That’s what it does, but how we respond to that is up to us.

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