Tuesday Guy - Questions for my Mormon Friends (Part 2)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Love for Mormon Friends and the Problem of Sincere Error

Well, welcome to No Compromise Radio, and this is the special Saturday edition. Tuesday guys, Steve Cooley here, and just talking again, this is questions from my Mormon friends, again, part two. And I wanted to just kind of do this, because again, my love for the Mormon people is immense.

Some of the best friends, best times in my life. I could probably do a whole show just about some of the highlights and the times I had growing up and the many kindnesses that were shown to me. Just another example.

My stepfather was a violent man, and my mom decided to divorce him while he was gone one weekend. And he came back and the front door was locked. Make a long story short, he took an ax to the front door, and we had no front door.

I mean, basically it was a great big hole in it. And this was before the shining came out, and it was pretty dramatic. And I remember my mom called our bishop, Paul Starr, and he came over the next day early in the morning and put up a brand new front door.

And I mean, that was, it was a door. It wasn't just some kind of halfway door. This was like, I mean, I'm pretty sure it could have withheld or withstood a battering ram hitting it full speed, one of those Sherman tank-like things.

I mean, it was built. And just wonderful people. Wonderful, giving, loving people. And that's not my point. My point is wonderful, loving, giving people can be sincere and be sincerely wrong, as my professor, Dr. Ross Kupp, used to say.

The First Article of Faith: The Eternal God, Christ's Deity, and the Holy Ghost

Now, we got through seven questions before, and I have several more, and I have a lot more, but I'm going to edit and we're going to keep moving. I want to talk a little bit about the articles of faith that Mormon Church has, 13 articles of faith.

And I remember being in primary, which is kind of like Awana for Mormon kids, and you memorize these articles of faith. And I definitely did memorize them. I had a little thing up on my wall, and you got these, they do a lot of cool stuff.

I mean, I'm not going to say, they've got programs. You want programs? You know, you can do that. But anyway, let's talk about it. First article of faith. We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.

Now, you know what? What's the first thing that just kind of sticks in your throat when you hear that? The first part that really just kind of galls me, and it's, you know, on first listening, maybe it's not going to offend you so much, but it says, we believe in God, the Eternal Father.

That bothers me. Why does it bother me? Because of what comes next. That's true, but what comes next? And in His Son, Jesus Christ. Why? Because I'm here to tell you, the Mormons don't believe that He was eternally God.

They believe that He became God. And again, this is a sub-Christian idea. This is non-Christian. You can't believe that Jesus Christ was just like one of us and came here, you know, on a special mission to make it possible for us to get back to heaven, and that somewhere along the way, He became God.

I once asked a Mormon missionary who was claiming to be a Christian, and I was trying to prove to him that he wasn't. I said, was there ever a time when Jesus Christ did not exist? And he said, yes, that's the problem.

Jesus Christ is not a created being. That is a heresy. So, and I mean, this is, it sounds good on first blush, but it is, it is a heresy. Was Jesus Christ eternal? The answer is yes. Let me tell you something.

If you do, I mean, there are many places I could go to establish that, but John 1, where it says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The words that, or the verb that is attached to Him was, doesn't really mean much to us, excuse me, in the English language.

We just understand it as being was. Well, there's another person in that little introduction to John, another person referred to, and that person is John the Baptist. When it talks about John the Baptist, it says there was a man sent from God.

His name was John. Okay, now that verb is different. Now what's the difference? Well, I think that John chose his Greek forms very carefully and what he wanted us to understand is there's an indefinite nature to the was that's attached to Jesus.

Why? Because he wanted us to know that there was a timelessness in the beginning. In other words, before there was time, creation or time is a creation. Before there was anything in creation, including time, Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, existed with the Father.

There was never a time where Jesus did not exist. Now that's a little bit mind-boggling to us and it's mind-boggling or it was mind-boggling to Joseph Smith and the idea of Mormonism really is to take some of the mind-boggling truths of the Bible and to kind of bring them down to a level that people can understand and grasp.

Why do people love Mormonism so much? Well, I think it's because it's sort of the dumbing down of the Bible to a point where people can kind of understand it. God is just beyond me. I can't really fully understand him and Joseph Smith says, in essence, through him and through his successors, well, God's just like one of us.

Let me tell you, he came from a planet just like we did and you know what? Here's the good news. You can become just like him. Do you see how unbiblical that is? But it's attractive. You know, here's another thing.

A lot of Christians are just like, well, can you just tell me what to do? Can I drink or not drink? Can I do this or can I not do that? Well, Mormonism's got a lot of rules, many, many rules. Again, it's just something that appeals to our fallen nature of wanting to contribute to our salvation.

We want to believe that we are, in some sense, responsible for contributing to, you know, getting back to or getting to heaven. That's the whole point. But getting back here to John 1, John chose these words, I think, very carefully because he wanted to make that plain.

At first, or in Colossians 1, again, you know, all of the deity dwells in him. He is fully God and always was God. You can't say that the fullness of deity dwells in him if somehow he became God. You know, it was a process and he kind of hit perfection and then he became God.

That would just be wrong. You know, I've said this before. One of the things that just sort of never sat well with me about Mormonism was the idea that by ceasing to sin, by doing the things that I was supposed to do, that someday I could become a God because I just thought, me, Steve, I knew then and I know now that I'm not good and goodness doesn't dwell in me.

I can't ever seem to get through a day without sinning in some way, without sinning with my tongue or my mind or, you know, my actions. So how was I ever going to become God? At least not a God as we would see him in the Bible.

And the answer to that obviously was, I never could, but that's not what Mormons believe. They believe that they can become that. Now, let's move on. I mean, there are things I could say about the Holy Ghost but I'm going to move on to the second article of faith.

Adam's Fall, Free Will, and the Second Article of Faith

Listen, we believe that men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam's transgression. Well, fully implied in that is the idea that Adam's fall has no impact on the world on us. In fact, I would say the Mormons are fully Pelagian.

They believe in free will and they believe that, in fact, that's part of, you know, getting back to the whole pre-existence. They believe that Jesus came to the father and said, you know what, because the father was looking for plans to have people being able to return back to him after they came to the earth, after a time of testing and trying, that's why we're here according to Mormon theology, is a time of testing and trying to see whether we're worthy of, you know, returning back to heaven.

So Jesus puts forth his plan and inherent in his plan is free will. Satan didn't want to give us, or Lucifer didn't want to give us free will and that's why the father chose Jesus' plan. I mean, can you see how, not just extra biblical, but really kind of bizarre this is?

But free will is really big for the Mormons and so they want to say that Adam had no impact on us and Joseph Smith, by the way, these articles of faith were written to a newspaper publisher back in the 19th century by Joseph Smith to kind of explain, I think it was just a few months before his death, to just kind of explain the Mormon faith.

And I think he didn't really think this all out super well, but anyway, we believe that men will be punished for their own sins. Well, that's certainly true if they don't believe in Christ, right? I mean, imagine, I mean, and there's nothing more to this article of faith here, but we believe that men will be punished for their own sin and frankly, if we know that one sin is enough to send us to hell, we're in a lot of trouble, but not for Adam's transgression.

Well, we don't believe that men are gonna be punished for Adam's transgression directly. That's not their real problem. Their real problem is Adam's fall, as explained to us in Romans 5, in fact, the ESV says, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin.

And so death spread to all men because all sinned. He was our head. And I've never heard an explanation in Mormon theology for what that means, but Adam was our representative. We all fell in him in the sense that because of him, we all have a sin nature.

We therefore choose to sin, willfully, and that's why we're condemned. So it's not just, we're not gonna be judged for Adam's transgression. We're going to be judged for our own sins that much as true, but Adam's transgression did have an impact.

It did plunge us all into sin. Every child of Adam is born with a sin nature and they just don't teach that. The third article of faith, we believe that through the atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel.

Salvation by Obedience Versus the Finished Work of Christ

Now, just think about that. Through the atonement of Christ, which they believe is Gethsemane and the cross. I mean, they mangle that all up, but all mankind may be saved. Well, that's true. If all people would believe, which we know they won't, but listen, here's how you get saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel.

Big picture. What are they saying? That Jesus' death brought us kind of back up to neutral. It made a path, they say. It cleared the way, they say, for us to get back to heaven. And then all we have to do is just obey the laws and ordinances of the gospel.

Really? So all I have to do is just go to the temple. All I have to do is just pay my tithing. All I have to do is, and it just misses the point. This is, you know, you could put it another way. Christ created the stairway, and now I have to climb that stairway to heaven, with all apologies to Led Zeppelin.

This is just, it is not the gospel. Good news is not work, work, work. The good news is not do, do, do. The good news is Jesus did it all. Now, their fourth article of faith. We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the gospel, are first, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think that's a great one. Second, repentance. Okay, but it's not what they mean by repentance. Third, baptism by immersion for the remission of sins. Listen, I was baptized March 2nd, 1968, with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I was confirmed a member on March 3rd. This is the way you did things, eight years old. And they believe that when you came up out of that water, your sins had all, but there was something magical in the water.

Your sins had been washed away. You were sinless. Well, that's just not right. Baptism did not remove my sins. The Bible clearly teaches that baptism is a sign of a change that has occurred within you.

Then their fourth principle and ordinance is laying out of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost. And again, that's just not, it's not emphasized, it's not taught that that is a requirement of anything, let alone the gospel.

The fact that it occurs in a narrative is problematic, but I need to keep moving. Next article of faith. Well, let me skip here. I'm going to skip a few. And down to this one, I'm not even sure which number it is.

It doesn't really matter. We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. We also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. Now notice, the Bible is the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.

Now they use the King James, anything else is kind of suspect. I remember having disputes with Mormons about that before, but we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God without qualification, right?

There's no qualification there. Now they will say, and I've had these discussions with my Mormon friends, they will say that, well, many plain and precious parts were lost. He had the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

Who knows what kind of ghastly things were done to the Bible. Certain things were kept out, certain things were put in. It was all a big editing process. And we know that the true gospel was excised from the Bible then.

Well, I mean, it leads itself to some more questions, right? Council of Nicaea, 325 AD. Now you've said that the truth fell away or the church fell away long before that, but it really makes me wonder then, do you believe that God is sovereign or man is sovereign?

Was man or was God helpless? When Jesus said he would build his church and nothing would prevail against it, and there are scriptures that say he, I think it's Psalm 139, it talks about, it values his word and his name, and those things are above everything.

And how can God, we have 2 Timothy 3, talking about the inspiration of scripture, it's breathed out by God. How can we trust a God who's not powerful enough to preserve his word? And it's amazing to me as archaeologists continue to unearth things that prove the Bible, and as they find more little fragments of scripture, here, there, and everywhere, and over and over again, it authenticates the Bible, and you just go, okay, we have scripture that predates, predates 325 AD.

We have bits of scripture that predate that, and they don't contradict anything that we have now. So the question then is, well, how do you know that we lost these things? And all we have, to be candid, is the word of Joseph Smith.

That's all we have. The entire Mormon faith stands or falls on the believability of Joseph Smith. And you know what, I'm not gonna go into this, but if you look into his history, if you take an analytical look, he was not the, we're not talking about the Apostle Paul here.

I mean, we're talking about somebody, they talk about how he was martyred. Well, do you know that he was actually armed and in jail, but part of the reason he was, because he had a big army, and they actually were gonna try him for treason because they were concerned that he was going to overthrow the local government and install himself as either president or king or what have you.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding this man, and his history, if you step outside of what the church actually teaches, and you look into what it does, or what actually happened, it's pretty interesting.

But anyway, what sort of God, is a God who created the universe with a word somehow incapable of preserving the Bible against the machinations of men? When we just think about all he did in preserving it anyway, just providentially in having it written in a place where it would be preserved against the elements, against the weather and all this, and in the desert.

I mean, how marvelous is that? How wise is God? And so we're able to still have it today. And by the way, as far as it is translated correctly, if you want a good translation, your primary text would not be the King James, not only because it's based on newer manuscripts.

I mean, which do you want? Do you want the ones that were written in the ninth century, which is what the King James is based on, or the ones that were written in the seventh and before century, which would be like the ESV and other translations, the New American Standard and others.

Obviously you'd want the older transcripts because they would be more accurate. As more time went on, more little kind of little commas, little errors would be introduced. And they're mostly, now what they're able to do now is to compare the different manuscripts that we have and kind of eradicate all those errors.

But the King James, in fact, one of the things I like to point out is Erasmus, who was not a believer. He was a humanist, one of the great stars of the Enlightenment period. And he was the one responsible for putting together the Greek text upon which the King James is based.

And he did this, he didn't have a complete copy of Revelation. So he actually translated part of one of the Roman Catholic Latin versions into Greek. I mean, that's no kind of way to put together a Greek transcript, is to rely on someone else's translation in another language and then kind of import it backwards.

That's not the way to go. And that's, you know, there are other problems with the King James, but that's just loopy. Skipping down into, and maybe I'll have to end here, another article of faith. We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the 10 tribes.

The Restoration of Israel, Ongoing Revelation, and a Different Gospel

Well, I believe in a literal gathering of Israel too, but listen, that Zion, the new Jerusalem, will be built upon the American continent. It will be built upon the American continent. I just think, you know, you just have to look at the Bible, what it says about Isaiah 2 and the mountain of the Lord and all these kinds of things.

You would never pick, and I think it's Missouri, you would never pick Missouri as the place that God was talking about in Isaiah chapter two and other places in the Old Testament. That's just foolishness.

That Christ will reign personally upon the earth, we believe that. But, you know, it's interesting because they do, they talk about Jesus, the whole reason for the Book of Mormon is Jesus allegedly had said that he had sheep, other sheep that were none of this fold.

Well, he said that. They believe he was talking about Americans, the ancient Americans, and so that he came over here. Now, how you would get that, I have absolutely no idea because he was talking to a predominantly Jewish audience.

And so what he meant was, I have other people who are not Jewish and I'm gonna gather them in too. But it wasn't, he didn't mean he was gonna go somewhere, it was just talking about the overall work of the gospel.

But this idea of there being another, that Zion is gonna be, the new Jerusalem is going to be in America, that is just a bizarre, strange, perverted idea. But overall, I think what you need to understand is they have a deficient view of scripture, they have a deficient view of God, of his power, of Christ and his work.

God just didn't make, or Jesus didn't just make salvation possible, he accomplished it, he actually saved his people. So this is, it's just wrong on so many levels. And when you talk about scripture, you know, when they say here, another one of their articles of faith, we believe all that God has revealed, all that he now does reveal, and we believe that he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God.

Meaning that 2 Peter 1 .3, when it talks about, he's given us everything pertaining to life and godliness, that's not true. That when Peter wrote that, that wasn't true, that we needed more, that we needed the book of Mormon, we needed the doctrine of covenants, the pearl of great price, that we needed ongoing revelation.

I mean, I remember once working out in the gym, and I had a friend who had converted from Christianity to Mormonism, and he looked at me, he knew I was a former Mormon, and he says, Steve, isn't it great that we have a prophet today who speaks to God and can tell us what God wants us to do?

And I just looked at him and I said, no, I said, what's great is that we have a God who's so powerful that he could speak once and then preserve what he wanted to say forever and ever. We have his word, he's maintained it against all manner of assault, all manner of devious plots and plans, even the Roman Catholic Church, trying to suppress it by keeping it out of the hands of people.

God kept and preserved his word so that we could have it today, and today we have a proliferation, we have an embarrassment of riches, and it's just, they're just wrong. And, you know, in closing, I just want to say Galatians 1a says that anyone who has a different gospel is accursed.

They're anathema. This is, Mormonism is a different gospel. It teaches a different God, it teaches a different view of man, namely that man isn't so bad and that he can perfect himself, a different Christ, and a different way of salvation, and a sadly deficient view of scripture, and I would encourage any of my Mormon friends to repent.

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