July 4, 2016 Show with Jason Wallace on “Is the Church of Latter-Day Saints the Church of Jesus Christ?”

Iron Sharpens Iron

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September 25, 2016

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
00:46: It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
00:57: Now here's our host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon
01:05: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet
01:10: Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy 4th of July on this 4th of July 2016 and I'm in here in the studio with my co -host the
01:25: Reverend John Buzz Taylor and the reason why I mentioned his real first name will be made clear in a little while because he happens to share a name with an infamous member of a cult, but we are going to be discussing something very apropos for the 4th of July.
01:47: You know I remember the old Chevrolet jingle on TV, they go together in the good ol'
01:53: USA, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. Well you could add and the
01:58: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints to that, but you know even though many people take pride in seeing a label or putting a label on a product that they have invented, created, or sell that says made in the
02:14: USA, that may stand for quality and authenticity in many areas of life, but that is not necessarily the case with religion as we will come to see.
02:25: One of the most well -known homegrown religions born right here on American soil, the
02:32: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, also known as the Mormons, is going to be our discussion today with my friend
02:41: Pastor Jason Wallace, pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church, which is an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation in Salt Lake City, Utah.
02:50: We're going to be talking about a dialogue that our mutual friend
02:55: Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries is having at Christ Presbyterian Church, not this weekend but the following weekend, and he's also in addition to that going to be having a dialogue with a
03:06: Muslim on another day of this conference, and we hope that as many of you who live in the
03:14: Salt Lake City area can attend that as possible, and we hope that those of you who don't live in that area make the trip out there.
03:23: We do have listeners all over the United States and some of them are very close to Utah and in Utah itself, but let me welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Jason Wallace.
03:39: Great to be back with you, Chris. And Pastor Jason Wallace, in addition to this conference, wants us to discuss a really professional, informative, fascinating, riveting documentary.
03:53: Those things don't often go together, riveting and documentary, but in this case especially if you are theologically minded, you will be riveted by this documentary,
04:03: I believe, and you can see that video absolutely free of charge at LDS .VIDEO,
04:09: LDS standing for Latter -Day Saints dot video, but on the air I'd like to have my co -host
04:18: Reverend John Buzz Taylor greet you. Well, hello, it's good to talk to you again, and of course we've met each other over the phone a number of times because of working with you on the video, which
04:29: I guess we're going to be discussing later on also. In fact, I think the reason Chris talks about this as being riveting and all is because his voice is on it.
04:40: Well, that was where the quality and the professionalism came in, and of course you could stop listening when
04:47: Reverend Buzz Taylor's voice comes up. You could fast -forward or whatever you have to do. They won't even recognize me.
04:54: And that's always a good thing. But anyway, Pastor Jason, first of all, tell us something about the denomination where your church is a member, the
05:09: Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I know we do this every time, but there are people who do discover this program for the first time regularly, especially now that we're in World Magazine with a full -page ad, and there are some people who have a knee - jerk reaction to the name
05:26: Presbyterian because they immediately think of the liberal, mainline, dead, apostate church that may be down the block.
05:35: Now please, I do have friends in the PCUSA who are evangelical
05:40: Bible -believing Christians, and I do not intend to broad brush you, but you yourselves know that there's a lot of mischief going on, to say the least, in that denomination of the
05:52: PCUSA. But the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was actually formed because of that, wasn't it, Jason? Yes.
05:59: When the PCUSA started sending out missionaries in the 20s and 30s that no longer believed in the resurrection of Christ, the virgin birth, miracles, things like this, there were men at Princeton who took a stand against this, and they were seen as troublemakers.
06:21: You know, they were getting in the way of things, and long story short, they were given the right foot of Christian fellowship in 1936, and the
06:30: Orthodox Presbyterian Church was born. Oh, so they were actually kicked out. They didn't voluntarily leave on their own initiative to begin with.
06:37: Not... the leaders were kicked out. That'd be J. Gresham Machen and others? Yeah, Machen was actually put out.
06:46: They had tried to stay within the denomination. When they reorganized Princeton to force in liberal theology in 1929,
06:57: Machen and a number of other conservatives left Princeton and went to Philadelphia and started a new seminary.
07:05: But what really got them on the outs with the hierarchy was, you know, a hierarchy that had developed within the
07:13: Presbyterian Church. You're not supposed to have one in a Presbyterian Church, but they started an independent board of missions where churches could contribute and have confidence that their funds were actually going to promote the gospel rather than the good news of Western civilization.
07:30: You know, Pearl Buck was a Presbyterian missionary and didn't believe in the authority of Scripture, the historicity of Christ's ministry, really.
07:42: You know, she was a theological liberal. But if you ever wanted to upset a bureaucracy, you challenge the money flow, and so when they started the independent board of missions, they were told cease and desist, and they pointed out you can't administratively require that.
07:59: You have to go through a trial, and they said, no, we can do that.
08:05: And then they didn't submit to it because it was unconstitutional, and so then they kicked them out for not obeying the administrative declaration.
08:17: And so in order for churches to leave and follow them, almost every one of them had to forfeit their property, their pensions, and everything else.
08:26: So there wasn't exactly a rush for the door, but we're a remnant of Bible -believing historic
08:32: Presbyterians. We hold to the same statement of faith. The Americans tweaked it in 1789 since there's no longer a king, but essentially the same
08:43: Westminster confession of faith that was adopted in the 1640s in England. Yes, and I happen to be, as you know, a
08:50: Reform Baptist, as is your guest speaker next week, James White, and we hold to the 1689
08:55: London Baptist Confession, which was intentionally almost copied verbatim to demonstrate unity between the
09:05: Baptists and Presbyterians in the 1600s, but there was obviously alterations to conform with Baptist polity and the ordinance of baptism.
09:15: But now, tell us something about Christ Presbyterian Church, which is, it's always good to hear that there is a solid congregation true to its
09:26: Reformation heritage in a place like Salt Lake City, Utah, which is immediately,
09:32: I'm sure that people who aren't even theologically minded, the first thing that they're going to think of when they hear of Salt Lake, let alone
09:42: Utah, is Mormons. You know, that's gonna be the immediate thing that pops into their head, but if you could tell us about that congregation, how it started there, and so on.
09:52: Sure, basically I saw in the Scriptures that the same
09:57: God who converted me could convert anybody, and the Lord had shaken me from a nominal faith through someone trying to recruit me into another cult called the
10:06: Way International, and so I had developed a heart for people who were in these kinds of groups, and back in 1988
10:17: I had an opportunity to visit out here and pray that the Lord would send people out here, and I had absolutely no intention it would be me.
10:27: But you have to be careful what you pray for. I was a painful introvert,
10:33: I was a number cruncher by profession, and public speaking was the scariest thing
10:40: I could imagine, but the Lord kept opening doors and shoving me through them, and ten years later
10:46: I came out here as a church planter with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We started pretty much from scratch.
10:54: It's a difficult field. The Protestant church membership in Salt Lake County is just over four and a half percent, and that ranges from the most liberal to any kind of Pentecostal.
11:11: I mean, anything remotely describable as Protestant. We are historic
11:18: Protestants, and we believe the Protestant Reformation was about bringing back the Bible. They read the
11:23: Bible, they taught the Bible, they preached the Bible, they sang the Bible, they prayed the Bible. It was
11:29: God's Word, and it's God's Word in His Spirit that He uses to build up His church, and so we're sort of a throwback.
11:40: We have simple reverent worship, expository preaching, we sing psalms and hymns, and the actual metrical psalms set to hymn tunes.
11:53: Along with hymns, we probably sing about 60 -40 psalms to hymns. The hymns are ones that mirror the content, so the great evangelical hymns of especially guys like Newton and Watts and such.
12:14: Well, the website for your church, your congregation, is very easy to remember. GospelUtah .org.
12:23: GospelUtah .org. That's a new URL that you have. It used to be ChristPrez .net,
12:29: but that still goes to GospelUtah .org if you click on the right button there.
12:37: So remember that folks, GospelUtah .org. Now, let our listeners know about these exciting events that you have coming up with our mutual friend
12:46: Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. Well, Dr. White has done numerous debates for us over the years.
12:52: He used to come up twice a year before the street preachers made it impossible to carry on any kind of conversation with the
13:01: LDS. And we have to be more specific, though. These aren't just ordinary street preachers.
13:06: In fact, James White and I have friends that we love dearly, like Tony Miano and Jeff Rose and other guys who are wonderful guys.
13:15: These are guys who are, for the most part, aren't even connected to a church. Right, and they do things like they'll take a
13:23: Book of Mormon and drag it around on a string and say, come on Mormons, defend your Book of Mormon. They'll take
13:28: Mormon sacred garments, their underwear, and they'll throw them around in the air, and they'll blow their nose on them, they'll spit on them, they'll throw them on the ground.
13:38: And their idea of preaching is generally very specific, or accusations of very specific sexual sins, coupled with some vague ideas about Jesus.
13:53: The burning effigies of Joseph Smith. Well, yeah, they've got one of the popular flyers they've got is showing
14:00: Joseph Smith in the flames of hell and is calling it the LSD Church instead of LDS and LSD.
14:06: And they just mock, and it's not preaching. It's just it's insulting.
14:14: Yeah, and it's very unfortunate that that's really brought an abrupt end to a very long history of James White's evangelism there, and I'm sure that he still, in some capacity, is reaching out to those people because he's constantly, through the airwaves on the
14:33: Dividing Line program and other things, and his writing and his public speaking and debating, the word is getting out to them.
14:40: When he used to come to town, he would do debates for us sometimes two, I think we had as many as four a year for a little while there.
14:51: We had a professor from BYU, we had the retired director of the
14:58: LDS Institute of Religion at the University of Utah, Mormon authors, we also had some
15:03: Roman Catholic debates. We got Bob St. Genes and Gary Matitix to come to town to debate him and such, but he's coming back.
15:12: He came last year as just a way of encouraging the church here. We were struggling mightily at the time, seemed like we were getting attacked from every direction, and he wanted to encourage us.
15:25: He's graciously coming back, and we're going to have four days of conference.
15:36: Friday, July 15th, he's going to be at the University of Utah in the
15:42: Social and Behavioral Sciences Auditorium, and he'll be dialoguing with Alma Allred, who's an instructor at the
15:49: LDS Institute at the University of Utah. Yeah, I've actually heard of him. Yeah, I've had him on my...
15:55: I used to have a television show here, in the Lord's Sense of Humor. It was a live call -in show, and for seven and a half years,
16:03: I had Alma on probably 14 times over the years. And Alma is the most articulate defender of Mormonism, I've found, and James knows him very well.
16:17: And so they'll be dialoguing over the question, is the Jesus of Mormonism the
16:23: Jesus of the Bible? And then the next night, he'll be dialoguing with a
16:29: Muslim imam, I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly, Shuayb Adin, and he's the imam of the
16:38: Utah Islamic Center. And I was excited a couple days ago,
16:46: I finally got word back from the Muslim Student Association. They're excited, and they're getting the word out supposedly throughout the whole
16:51: Muslim community here in Salt Lake. And then that'll be Friday and Saturday, and this is all free.
17:00: And then Sunday, Dr. White will be teaching Sunday school on the
17:06: Trinity, and then he'll be preaching at the 11 a .m. service, and the 530 p .m.
17:12: service will have communion that evening.
17:20: Last year, we had a number of churches, including some folks from a freewill Baptist Church and their pastor come and join us for that.
17:28: Oh wow, you mean the denomination Freewill Baptist? Yeah. Okay, great. And we weren't doing a joint service with them, but we invited them to come to our service, and we have close but not closed communion.
17:45: It's basically anyone who's a member in good standing of an evangelical church. And so those same churches, our sister church up at Ogden came down, a couple of Baptist churches, and this year a couple of others may be coming as well to the evening service.
18:04: So that'll be really nice. And then Monday night at 7 o 'clock in our chapel,
18:11: Dr. White's going to be presenting Proclaiming Jesus Christ in a hostile culture. And with all the stuff in the news, it's just anyone who's paying attention is going to have to wonder how long before they come after us.
18:31: It's getting more and more rampant, and so we thought that this would be a good way to tie it all together.
18:39: The conference is all centered around who is Jesus. And so we've got the two dialogues, and then
18:46: His Ministry of the Word, and then the final presentation Monday night. Well don't forget gospelutah .org.
18:56: Gospelutah .org is the website for Christ Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah.
19:02: And now you might want to talk to your graphics guy, because I'm looking at the website.
19:09: I'm colorblind, but all of the subheadings of home and resources and all those things, it looks like dark gray and a black background, so I can hardly see any of these.
19:22: But how do our listeners find out actually about the conference when they go to gospelutah .org? Chris, you gotta understand,
19:29: I'm a pastor of a very small church. Besides being an evangelist, and as we'll talk about in a moment, a videographer,
19:40: I'm also a plumber, and I'm also our webmaster. So just about anything you pick,
19:50: I'm him. But yeah, if the far right side, it has debates, and if you just click on that, very top in red is the link to the
20:01: Who is Jesus. We've got some past debates further down that page, but right at the top in red.
20:08: If you just click on, go to gospelutah .org, click on debates, you'll see it right there in front of you.
20:14: Great. And if you are a fellow sufferer of colorblindness like me, best of luck to you.
20:27: It's right next to debates for the color of white. Okay. When you pull up the page, it's right there at the top.
20:38: And I want to also get into this really masterfully done documentary that you created.
20:47: And unlike the insult that we heard earlier from my co -host Reverend Buzz Taylor, who is accusing me of only boasting about this because I am a part of it, or my voice is, it is actually a, believe me, if I was embarrassed by it, my voice was in it,
21:04: I wouldn't tell anybody about it. It's a really well done documentary. The research that is involved in this documentary, and the evidence, the irrefutable evidence, which leaves the honest person with no conclusion other than to realize that the leaders of the
21:28: Mormon Church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, from its inception to the present day, have been very dishonest and very crafty about spinning the facts, what they present to the general public is something far different than what they know to be commonplace in their own private meetings and so on.
21:55: But the truth will make you free. An Earnest Plea to Latter -day
22:01: Saints is the documentary. And before any of our Mormon friends get upset that they think this is a hit piece or something nasty that the
22:13: Christ Presbyterian Church has done out of a motivation of bigotry, you are actually responding to something that Joseph Smith had said, which is a part of the very cornerstone of the foundation of the
22:28: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, that you felt compelled to respond to as a
22:33: Presbyterian. It was in regard to something specific that Joseph Smith had said, the founder of Mormonism, about the
22:42: Presbyterian Church. Yes, there's a mindset that is inculcated among the
22:49: Mormons that anyone who challenges them is malicious or misinformed and that they never do these kinds of things.
23:01: But in their own scriptures, in the Pearl of Great Price, in Joseph Smith's history, chapter 1, it specifically says that,
23:16: I told my mother, I have learned for myself Presbyterianism is not true. That passage, in theory, has just as much scriptural weight, if not more, than John 3 16.
23:33: This is as much scripture as anything in the Bible, and it says in the
23:40: Mormon scriptures Presbyterianism is not true. Now it also says, just before that, that Joseph Smith claimed that he was told by God, when he had this vision in the grove, that he should join none of the churches because they were all wrong and all their professors were corrupt and all their creeds were an abomination in his sight.
24:05: And so this is one of the first things we deal with in the film is that, you know, Mormons, I've been told more times than I can count, we never speak negatively of anyone, you know, we never attack other churches, this is, you know, why are you attacking us?
24:24: And if you're simply responding to what they say, then you're attacking. One of my favorite quotes from the
24:34: NFL, Bubba Smith back in the 70s said, it all started when he hit back, and that's sort of a mindset of Mormonism, that, you know, they can say all the other churches are wrong, that our creeds are an abomination to God, but if we respond, we're attacking.
24:53: Yeah, and just to remind our listeners, and I hope to repeat it several times throughout the broadcast, but you can find out more about this documentary at LDS .video,
25:03: that's LDS for Latter -day Saints dot video, and we should, obviously, because there are a lot of people, even evangelicals, who are really ignorant about what
25:19: Mormonism is. I have heard a number of Christians, even theologically reformed
25:26: Christians, not anybody in pastoral positions or people of any kind of authority, but people who are just members of congregations, who largely due to the popularity of Glenn Beck, the conservative political pundit, talk host, who is a
25:46: Mormon, they have come to think of Mormonism as just a denomination of conservative evangelicalism, and I know people who are convinced he is a born -again believer in Christ because of things that he says, and what they don't know is that Mormons very often use the same vocabulary, but have a different dictionary, but if you could tell us something about the actual origins of Mormonism as far as Joseph Smith's visit from the angel, and obviously we're gonna have to summarize because there's a lot of other things we want to get into, and also the main pillars of what they believe that makes them, makes their religion actually a polar opposite, 180 degrees opposite religion to Christianity, and that may surprise people because the name
26:42: Jesus Christ is in the name of their their religion, they think well it's gotta have some connection to Christianity, but it's really amazingly totally foreign to Christianity in almost every aspect, but we will have you do that when we come back to the break, because we have to go to a station break right now, and if you'd like to join us, those of you listening, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for our guest
27:11: Pastor Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
27:19: chrisarnson at gmail .com, don't go away, we're gonna be right back after these messages with Pastor Jason Wallace.
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29:28: That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.
29:36: This is Chris Arnzen on our special 4th of July edition of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I'm here with my co -host
29:44: Reverend Buzz Taylor and our guest Pastor Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church.
29:51: And we are discussing Mormonism and it just so happens that Christ Presbyterian Church is located in Salt Lake City, Utah, so it's a no -brainer that when we have
30:03: Pastor Jason Wallace on the program we at least have to discuss this issue sometime. And he is not only pastor of that church but he's producer of the video documentary that you can see for free at lds .video.
30:19: I'm sorry lds .video. That's lds .video. That's a new
30:26: URL that many of you may be unfamiliar with, the .video. And we hope that as many of you who hear this program watch that video, whether you're
30:37: Mormon or not, and please share it with your Mormon friends and loved ones.
30:43: And before we return to our discussion, I just have a couple of announcements to make. First of all, speaking of cults, my very dear friend
30:54: Deborah Antignano who is a former Jehovah's Witness who is now a born -again believer in Christ and who she is on fire for the doctrines of Sovereign Grace.
31:09: And you can go to her website at matteroftheheart .net, matteroftheheart .net.
31:15: She's also a Christian recording artist. She is going to be on Fox and Friends tomorrow morning,
31:22: God willing, at 730 a .m. And she is going to be sitting on a panel discussing why political correctness is destroying the
31:34: United States of America and making the lives of all of its citizens in further jeopardy.
31:43: The political correctness is basically putting us all in danger in many aspects of life, and she is going to be on a panel,
31:52: God willing, tomorrow morning at 730 on Fox and Friends. So I hope that you tune into that.
32:01: Also a very good friend of mine who's been on this program a number of times,
32:06: Pastor Mac Tomlinson. He is going to be a part of a
32:12: Bible conference August 4th through the 6th in Portland, Maine.
32:17: Maine, the former home state of my co -host Buzz Taylor. And this is going to be a conference which is called
32:26: Fellowship Conference New England, and it's going to feature fellowship preaching and singing that center on the glory of God.
32:37: And there is going to be a whole host of speakers there, including my friend
32:45: Pastor Mac Tomlinson and Michael Durham and a number of other speakers,
32:52: Charles Leiter. And this is going to be an event that if you live in New England, especially if you live in Maine, you should certainly attend.
33:03: And I know that we do on occasion get listeners from Maine emailing us, but even if you are just close by, you might want to make an effort to jump in a train, plane, or automobile and get there.
33:17: Dog sled. Yeah. And the website for that is fellowshipconferencenewengland .com.
33:29: fellowshipconferencenewengland .com. And we thank our friends Pastor Mac Tomlinson and all involved in the
33:37: Fellowship Conference New England for helping to sponsor Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Now returning to our subject at hand is the
33:45: Church of Latter -day Saints, the Church of Jesus Christ. Mormons and their new efforts on ecumenism, a religion as American as apple pie examined on 4th of July.
33:57: And if you could, Jason, tell us about the genesis of the
34:03: Mormon Church, which I believe initially was called just the Church of Christ or something to that effect, something a lot more simple than the
34:11: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. But if you could tell us the origins of this and even a little bit of the background of Joseph Smith, who
34:20: I understand was a treasure hunter and whose integrity was was called into question by a lot of people who knew him well.
34:28: Most definitely. Yeah, I mean the big picture, the
34:35: Smith family had not been rooted in any church for generations.
34:43: There had been universalism, there had been a lot of occultic practices, they seemed to be sort of out on the fringes of society, and they would sort of drift in and drift out of churches, but they were like a lot of other folks on the fringe.
35:02: They seemed to dabble in all kinds of things. Joseph was a money digger, which was he claimed to have a seer stone and he could help people find buried treasure, he claimed.
35:20: And so this seer stone he would put into his hat and would claim to see where the
35:29: Spanish or Captain Kidd or various others had hidden treasures around.
35:35: And he was hired to do this, and he was actually arrested on the charge of glass looking, as it was called.
35:45: It was basically very similar to using a crystal ball, and he claimed to find golden plates.
35:57: Well, this story develops over time. There was a religious awakening and Smith's mother, brother, and sisters all joined the
36:09: Presbyterian Church for a time. Smith himself didn't, he said he always found himself much more attracted to Methodism.
36:19: And supposedly, it appears that he actually tried to join the
36:25: Methodist Church at one point, even after a purported vision that he wasn't supposed to try to join any churches.
36:35: But he comes up saying that he has found these plates and begins, and supposedly is going to be translating them.
36:45: And they are supposed to be in Reformed Egyptian. And surprise, surprise, he uses the same seer stone at the bottom of his hat to translate them.
36:56: Now over time, this narrative gets embellished. Years later, he accounts that as a young man, he had gone, this is supposedly in 1823, he doesn't know which of the sects he's supposed to join.
37:14: And so he goes into a group of trees and prays, and God appears directly to him and tells him he should join none of them.
37:19: This is where the whole vision I alluded to before comes in. The supposed finding of the
37:26: Book of Mormon, well, he claims that an angel, first it was Nephi that he gets changed later to Moroni.
37:36: He tells him that where these golden plates are hidden, but he doesn't let him find them until 1829.
37:45: And that's when he gets them and starts translating them. And the Book of Mormon gets published in 1830.
37:54: Well, there was a prepared people for this. What a lot of folks don't understand is they tend to look back at the early 1800s as everyone being basically
38:06: Puritan. But Puritanism had fallen on hard times long before this, and to some extent there were people for whom
38:18: Joseph Smith was the new Benny Hinn. There was a prepared people that wanted to hear what he had to say.
38:25: This was in upstate New York, right? Correct. And so he has a number of followers who come from the same glass -looking circle that he's been involved in.
38:37: But the big initial growth when two of these guys take the
38:48: Book of Mormon over to Kirtland, Ohio, which is just east of Cleveland.
38:56: And so we're going from western New York over to Cleveland, which is not, the
39:01: Cleveland area basically is not that far. But they find a man over there by the name of Sidney Rigdon who had been part of the whole
39:10: Campbellite movement, and had fallen out with Archibald Campbell, and so was currently in...
39:17: You mean Alexander Campbell? What did I say? Archibald. I'm sorry, wrong
39:23: Campbell. Thomas and Alexander Campbell, but it was
39:29: Alexander that he had fallen out with, and he reads the
39:35: Book of Mormon, and to him this is the new Restoration. And fairly quickly
39:43: Smith and his followers move over to Kirtland, Ohio, because there there's a whole congregation that Sidney Rigdon brings in, and Sidney Rigdon has connections with all these other
39:58: Campbellite churches. And so 3 ,500 of the first converts to Mormonism, they were overwhelmingly...
40:10: 3 ,500 of them came out of Campbellite churches, and so it was overwhelmingly
40:15: Campbellite at its impetus. So there's sort of almost a splinter group, even though Smith himself was never part of the
40:24: Campbellite movement. Some of his rehearsed apostles were Sidney...
40:30: the guys who had been connected with him even before Rigdon entered the picture.
40:36: Sidney Rigdon ends up becoming first counselor of the first presidency, basically the second highest position in the church.
40:44: Yeah, the commonality there, the Restorationist vision, is that Christianity basically had entirely become corrupt, and it was their job to restore it to its original purity, as if there ever really was a purity, even in the
41:02: New Testament church, because you see all kinds of horrible things going on with the church at Corinth and so on.
41:07: But that's basically the similar vision that those two groups had, right?
41:14: Definitely. And to me, it's the religious manifestation of what you see in the
41:21: French Revolution. It's this idea that if you burn it all down like a phoenix coming out of the ashes, something far more glorious will come about.
41:30: And, you know, they don't want to reform the church, they want to get rid of the church and reinvent it entirely.
41:39: And so there's no correcting its apostate, and this Restorationist mindset was really, really popular with the
41:50: Campbellites, of course, Martin Stone with his own movement before they joined up, but there were many, many others as well that flourished, especially in what was known as the burned -over district there in Western New York.
42:09: There had been... Finney and others had focused on a lot of emotional manipulation, and instead of the kind of preaching that you heard in the
42:23: First Great Awakening, this area had a lot of emotionalism devoid of content, and it just became almost a breeding ground for the cults.
42:40: So I'm going to... Believe it or not, folks, we actually have an original recording that was made in the early days of recording devices.
42:51: We have a recording of Brigham Young, who is the successor to Joseph Smith, the founder, but here's something that Brigham Young had to say about Christianity that you might find interesting.
43:04: Should you ask why we differ from other Christians, as they are called? It is simply because they are not
43:09: Christians, as the New Testament defines Christianity. That was Brigham Young, the second leader of the
43:18: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, was actually me pretending to be Brigham Young, and I don't know why...
43:26: I'm sorry? And doing a great job. I appreciate that. I have no idea why I chose that kind of voice, but I was trying to give some kind of a sound of somebody who had authority, and perhaps a little bit of self -righteousness combined.
43:45: But anyway, I am glad that you were happy with that. I think you nailed it.
43:52: And let me just, since that was so brief, I'm gonna play one more for now, and we'll get to some more in a little bit.
43:58: But let's see, here's another one. This is, and believe me, folks, there's a lot more in this documentary than just me.
44:07: It just so happens that Jason sent me the mp3s of my recordings. To my certain knowledge,
44:13: Emma Smith is one of the damnedest liars I know of on this earth. Yet there is no good thing
44:19: I would refuse to do for her, if she would only be a righteous woman. But she will continue in her wickedness.
44:27: Not six months before the death of Joseph, he called his wife Emma into a secret council, and there he told her the truth, and called upon her to deny it if she could.
44:38: He told her that the judgments of God would come upon her forthwith if she did not repent.
44:44: He told her of the time she undertook to poison him, and he told her that she was a child of hell, and literally the most wicked woman on this earth, that there was not one more wicked than she.
44:57: He told here where she got the poison, and how she put it in a cup of coffee. Said he, you got that poison from so -and -so, and I drank it, but you could not kill me.
45:10: When it entered his stomach, he went to the door and threw it off. He spoke to her in that council in a very severe manner, and she never said one word in reply.
45:20: I have witnesses of this scene all around, who can testify that I am now telling the truth.
45:26: Twice she undertook to kill him. Now that is pretty startling, because that is an actual verbatim quote from Brigham Young, who is one of the very key original leaders of the
45:43: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, the successor of Joseph Smith after his assassination.
45:50: And the thing that's ironic or amazing about that quote is that today, although the
45:57: Mormon Church upholds Brigham Young as their hero, obviously, not too many people, especially not too many college sports fans, are unfamiliar with BYU, Brigham Young University.
46:12: Brigham Young is still upheld as a hero, obviously. They have to uphold him as a hero to maintain any semblance of him being a prophet.
46:19: But at the same time that they still regard him in such a way, they also elevate
46:25: Emma Smith to a heroic level of adoration, and yet here we have of a plot to kill
46:33: Joseph Smith by his own wife, Emma, the very one that the Mormons seem to have rewritten history about.
46:41: Am I right? Yeah, that's one of the things that we tried to do in the first part of the video, was to show that the history that has been taught to people today is so out of line with the reality.
46:58: It's a lie. And they present Emma, for instance, as this model
47:07: Christian woman. There was a documentary done about, oh, 15 years ago or so called
47:14: American Prophet, and it was financed by Marriott and a number of other
47:21: Mormon -owned businesses, and they present Emma speaking in her letters to Joseph in a way that sugar wouldn't melt in her mouth.
47:35: And they've done these histories of Joseph Smith church -produced biographies.
47:45: One was produced by the church, and then the same people took the same actors and made it at the same time independently called
47:53: Emma, My Story. And she's a heroine.
47:59: They play her up. There's a statue in front of the church offices, this massive high rise in Salt Lake.
48:09: There's a statue showing her and Joseph Smith holding hands, gazing into one another's eyes in love.
48:20: But it bears no resemblance to what you just read. Brigham Young...
48:26: Did the original statue have her hand behind his back with an eyedropper and a cup of coffee?
48:36: One of the numerous, one of the things that I was so sorely tempted to do numerous times, this is one of them, was to make some comment about Joseph Smith drinking coffee.
48:47: Because this is forbidden in the... That's right. That's right. And I originally thought that it had to do with the caffeine content, but I heard that it was really the hot beverages were not allowed or something like that.
49:02: I think per capita we sell more Mountain Dews in Utah than anywhere in the world. I'm only guessing at that, but I think it's a pretty safe guess.
49:15: Now, how have Mormons responded to this irony that Brigham Young...
49:22: I'm sure the average Mormon has no idea that Brigham Young revealed this murder plot by Emma, but I mean, when they are confronted with these things,
49:31: I mean, especially leaders, how do they reconcile their elevation of Emma Smith as a hero while she was attempting to kill their very prophet, according to Brigham Young?
49:42: Now, and of course, do you think Brigham Young was telling the truth? He may have been lying. I don't know.
49:48: Well, he stated it in general conference. This is him speaking as the prophet to the assembled
49:56: Church in the most official capacity he could, basically. And so, you know, this is not an offhand statement that somebody else recorded, and maybe they got it wrong.
50:09: But even if he was lying, it's their prophet who's saying this. Yes. So therefore they can't elevate both of them as heroes.
50:16: Right. And the section we have this in is really focused on Joseph Smith's lies, that, you know, we pit
50:26: Joseph Smith in 1844, the year of his death, saying, you know, what a thing it is to be accused of adultery and fornication, having seven wives, when
50:36: I can only find but one. That's a pretty close paraphrase. We pit that against the official statement from two years ago, where they admit that Joseph Smith had somewhere between 30 and 40 wives at the time that he said he could only find one.
50:55: They're lies. Now, there seems to be... Look it, I'm sorry. No, no problem.
51:01: Their response, 99 plus percent of the Mormons have never heard these things. If you do confront them with them, some get shaken, and that's what we're trying to do in the video, is shake them up with the history in order to then present the real gospel to them.
51:20: But those that are aware of these things, if you point them out, their typical response is, well, no one's perfect.
51:29: Yeah, that's the same kind of conversations I have with my moderate to liberal
51:35: Catholic friends when I bring up the Council of Trent's anathemas against Protestants. And they'll say, hey, it's the third millennium for crying out loud.
51:44: The Council of Trent was in the 1500s. What are you still bringing that up for? Well, it's dogma, that's why. But now, what
51:53: I was going to say is, and I don't want to go on too many rabbit trails, because we do have a lot to cover here, and I already know that I have to have you back for another two hours soon on this same subject.
52:04: But from my understanding of the founding of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day
52:12: Saints, which does have some radical differences than the
52:18: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. The Reorganized Church is not polytheist, from what
52:26: I understand. And it was started by, I believe, wasn't it started by Emma and Joseph's son, who she believed was the rightful prophet to succeed
52:38: Joseph after he was assassinated? Go ahead.
52:44: Yeah, there were a number of papers that backed up her claim that Joseph had said that his son would be his successor.
52:57: Brigham Young was not even the highest -ranking person left in the
53:03: Church after Smith's death. He was one of the twelve, but Sidney Rigdon was actually the first counselor.
53:12: And so Rigdon starts his group, but Rigdon was kind of on the outs by this point.
53:20: And somewhat through force of personality, Brigham manages to get the twelve behind him, and most of the people to follow him out to Utah.
53:32: But a lot of people stayed. They didn't come to Utah. Some of them stayed in the area around Nauvoo.
53:41: Some of them scattered off to Missouri or to Minnesota, different places.
53:48: But they ended up reorganizing the Church, I want to say 1872.
53:55: And today it's known as the Community of Christ. They just recently, within a decade,
54:00: I think, changed the name. Maybe even less than a decade. Yeah, it's a whole lot easier just to call them RLDS.
54:06: Right. One of the reasons I brought them up is, do they not claim, and since Emma was a very crucial part of the formation of that group, do they not claim that Joseph Smith was never a polygamist and that's why they never practiced it?
54:21: They used to. Oh, the evidence has become so overwhelming,
54:27: I believe. Even the hardcore folks now admit, yeah, he did practice it.
54:34: Oh, okay. I didn't know that. But they, I mean, for years they denied it.
54:40: Emma denied that he practiced polygamy. But... Now, did you think that she was being dishonest or do you think that she just didn't know?
54:48: Okay. Oh, she did. I don't know if he was going on long business trips, you know, very long business trips.
54:54: Yeah, one of the other little tidbits, there's lots of stuff out there that's a little more tenuous.
55:04: I've tried to stick to things from their own general authorities, but, you know, there's the accusation that Emma kicked one of the polygamist's wives down the stairs and made her lose her baby.
55:16: Wow. Joseph. We know there are supposed revelations warning
55:23: Emma that God will destroy her unless she accepts the revelation of polygamy.
55:30: Wow. Before we go to the break, I'm going to play one more clip for now, anyway, of yours truly on this documentary.
55:40: You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.
55:55: The first man that committed the odious crime of killing one of his brethren will be cursed the longest of anyone of the children of Adam.
56:04: Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings.
56:10: This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.
56:16: Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race, that they should be the servant of servants, and they will be until that curse is removed, and the abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree.
56:33: How long is that race to endure the dreadful curse that is upon them? That curse will remain upon them, and they never can hold the priesthood or share in it until all the other descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the priesthood and the keys thereof.
56:51: Until the last ones of the residue of Adam's children are brought up to that favorable position, the children of Cain cannot receive the first ordinances of the priesthood.
57:01: They were the first that were cursed, and they will be the last from whom the curse will be removed.
57:07: When the residue of the family of Adam come up and receive their blessings, then the curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and they will receive blessings in like proportion.
57:18: Well, that was the voice of me pretending to be Brigham Young, but reading from an actual quote, and we're going to be right back after these messages to discuss the ramifications of that quote from Brigham Young, the
57:35: Mormon prophet, and it's just as Desi Arnaz used to say, you got some splain and todo, because this doesn't go well with the politically correct atmosphere of our modern society, and actually this would be one area of political correctness that is good, because we even as Bible -believing
57:59: Christians abhor racism, and the Mormons have obviously done a
58:06: PR job at trying to rewrite their history in this regard, but we're going to be back after these messages to explain more of the ramifications of that quote by Brigham Young, so don't go away.
58:19: We'll be right back with Pastor Jason Waller. Thriving Financial is not your typical financial services provider.
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59:07: Lending faith, finances, and generosity. That's The Thriving Story. We were made to thrive.
59:21: Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen in studio with my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor, and we are interviewing
59:28: Jason Wallace, the pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, as they prepare for an upcoming conference starting not this weekend, but the weekend after on Friday, July 15th through, is it through that Sunday?
59:44: Through Monday. Through Monday, and it's not only a conference, but it includes two dialogues featuring our mutual friend,
59:52: Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, who has written, among other things, is the
59:58: Mormon, My Brother, and also what every Christian needs to know about the
01:00:04: Quran. And both of those issues are going to be coming up at that conference as James White has a dialogue with not only a
01:00:11: Mormon, but also with a Muslim on two different days. And for more information, go to gospelutah .org,
01:00:20: gospelutah .org. And we're discussing right now the documentary that Jason has developed, which you could see in its entirety for free at lds .video,
01:00:35: lds for Latter -day Saints, dot video. And before the break, we were revealing some actual quotations of Brigham Young, which
01:00:44: I recorded for the documentary, that were revealing the vehemently racist roots, anti -Black roots of Mormonism, which is interesting because when
01:00:58: I brought that up to a Mormon missionary in my living room back in the perhaps the late 1980s, when
01:01:09: I responded to a television ad, would you like a book of Mormon hand -delivered by a Mormon elder to your home?
01:01:15: I'd called the 800 number and waited patiently in ambush for him and his friend from the church.
01:01:24: And they came and we had a very pleasant conversation until I revealed that I believed he had a false and damning religion.
01:01:33: And when I brought up this racist, irrefutable racist element of their origins, this young man says, well, who are you to talk?
01:01:43: You're a Baptist and there are Baptists in the Ku Klux Klan. And my response to him was, yeah, but I think that there will be many
01:01:51: Baptists in hell. We're talking about your prophets, your apostles, who spoke apparently, according to you, as oracles of God, right from the very lips of God to their ears.
01:02:07: There's something radically different, isn't there, between some idiot Baptist or idiot person professing to be a
01:02:16: Christian, evangelical no matter what the nomination, and their prophet. Isn't there a big difference?
01:02:24: Jason, are you there? Yeah, I'm sorry. There's sort of a show game that they play.
01:02:29: Oh, yeah. What you will hear today, since these things are becoming more easily accessible, what you will hear is we never claim that prophets are infallible.
01:02:47: And I mean, I had on my television program the husband and wife who the husband was the head of the black auxiliary, the official auxiliary of the
01:03:02: Mormon Church for African Americans. And I went through these quotes with him, and he said basically, well, no one's perfect.
01:03:16: There's another quote where he says that if the white man who belongs to the chosen race mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot.
01:03:32: This will always be so. And I said, you understand, he's proclaiming this as the mouthpiece of God.
01:03:40: He's saying that he's not just saying that this is his personal opinion. He's telling you this is the law of God.
01:03:47: And now your church repudiates that. How do you still think he's a true prophet?
01:03:54: And they just talked all around it. And these are bright people. The wife was a college professor.
01:04:02: They were bright people, but they were blind. And I asked him a question.
01:04:08: I said, by your standard, how do you tell a true prophet from a false prophet? And the husband looks at his wife and hesitates.
01:04:16: And he says, that's a good question. Yeah, there's a difference between something that Brigham Young may have said in a private conversation over lunch to someone and something that he was teaching dogmatically.
01:04:36: And it was actually the way that their religion had been structured accordingly.
01:04:43: I mean, you can't say that this is just a part of him being a mortal, sinful human.
01:04:50: Yeah. Because, I mean, we could quote some horrendous things, even from some of our Puritan heroes and people from the past.
01:04:58: Oh, yeah. I've had Michael Cervantes thrown in my face more times than I can count.
01:05:04: Right. And I try to qualify to them.
01:05:10: I don't look to John Calvin as my prophet. Right. And, I mean, the things that they want to attack him over,
01:05:20: I'll take him over and other guys any day. Right. But they're claiming that they're the restored church with a living prophet.
01:05:31: Part of what you have to get your mind around is that Mormonism is not a religion of any book.
01:05:40: And, to a great extent, it's not a religion of any past prophet.
01:05:48: What they end up promoting, to a great extent, is you have a burning in your bosom that tells you the church is true.
01:05:58: And the church may not always be right, but the church is true. You can't, the living prophet trumps all the prophets who've gone before and the scriptures.
01:06:12: This is a radically different mindset. There's no way you can correct the prophet of God.
01:06:22: It's somewhat similar to the old
01:06:28: Roman Catholicism, where you have the living pope who speaks infallibly.
01:06:36: Though the traditional Catholics are getting about to heartburn these days with Francis. Oh, yeah. But in Mormonism, it doesn't matter what the
01:06:46: Bible says. It doesn't matter what the Book of Mormon says. It doesn't matter what anything says. What matters is what the prophet says today.
01:06:54: Yeah. In fact, I don't know if you included that with Bruce McConkie. I believe that was one of the quotes
01:06:59: I read. I don't know if I said that to you. Well, we'll get to... I think I did, actually.
01:07:04: Okay. Well, let me play one more quote for now by Brigham Young. And sit back, relax, and listen to the voice of Brigham Young, Mormon apostle.
01:07:19: Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot.
01:07:33: This will always be so. Now, that is clearly not a personal opinion of a fallible man in regard to Mormonism.
01:07:43: Obviously, we believe that it's the personal opinion of a lost false prophet.
01:07:49: But these folks cannot say that this just has something to do with the fallible human nature of all men on this earth.
01:08:00: This was indeed a mandate being delivered that he said was already in place.
01:08:09: Yes, and I actually made up a meme to promote the video.
01:08:16: Big letters up top. The truth matters. Down at the bottom, www .ldsvideo.
01:08:24: And I juxtapose. On the right side, I've got a picture of Brigham Young with that quote.
01:08:30: On the left side, I have a picture of Mia Love, who is a congresswoman here in Utah who's
01:08:41: Haitian ancestry. Both her parents are from Haiti. And she's married to a white man.
01:08:47: And she has put herself out very publicly in support of the
01:08:56: LDS church. And underneath her picture, we have the quote from the current statement from the church where, let's see, today the church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse and that it reflects actions in a premortal life that mixed race marriages are a sin or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.
01:09:29: Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism past and present in any form. And I'm juxtaposing two official statements from the
01:09:39: LDS church that cannot be harmonized. Mm -hmm. They're throwing
01:09:45: Brigham Young under the bus. We're actually making... Not a bad idea. Well, but they're still claiming that there's still the curse through him.
01:09:57: And so we're actually doing a shorter video because there's just too much to try to get into this one.
01:10:04: Right. Trying to keep it under two hours. Right. I mean, I knew people didn't read anymore.
01:10:09: I didn't know that an hour and 58 minutes was too long for people to sit and watch.
01:10:15: Yeah, but people will have a pause button for crying out loud. Yeah, but we're going to chop it up into little pieces and put them out as teasers.
01:10:23: But we're doing a separate video called The God of Brigham Young and we show that just as they've rejected his views on polygamy and blacks, they've also rejected the
01:10:37: God of Brigham Young. Brigham Young, they used to claim that it was just being misunderstood and we show how they lied about it.
01:10:46: The sexual union between God and Mary? No, we actually touched on that one in the big video.
01:10:52: But no, he claimed that Adam was Elohim. Okay. Come with one of his goddess wives,
01:11:00: Eve, to Earth. And that Elohim fell so that we could then have mortal probation to prove our worthiness to become gods ourselves.
01:11:16: And so he had been misquoted.
01:11:23: Okay, we are back on the air, ladies and gentlemen. We're not sure why we went off the air.
01:11:29: Perhaps there's some kind of conspiracy against what we're doing today. But we are back on the air and we apologize that we lost you all for a moment.
01:11:40: Well, Chris, I think your computer needs to get saved. And going back to what we were saying before, that these quotes by Brigham Young could not be mistaken for the unfortunate ramblings of a man who shares a sinful nature with mankind and is still imperfect on this planet.
01:12:12: These were actually the dogmatic mandates and theological commandments regard to the theological and ecclesiastical framework of their entire religion on who was and was not to receive the priesthood and other things involved in exaltation to godhood and many other issues that the black race was being forbidden by the
01:12:41: Mormon prophets themselves. Yes, in fact, subsequent prophets validated that the first presidency wasn't just individual prophets, but the first presidency, which is the prophet and his two counselors speaking together, the most official statement you can ever get from the
01:13:01: Mormon Church. The first presidency up until 1978 was extremely clear.
01:13:08: This was a revelation from God. And then all of a sudden they threw it and threw it and they threw
01:13:14: Brigham Young under the bus. And so, you know, when we were going off the air there,
01:13:22: I was explaining that we're doing a new video to supplement this and also sort of a teaser to point people towards the bigger video called
01:13:32: The God of Brigham Young. And Brigham Young, they knew that he was quoted a couple of times as saying that Adam was actually
01:13:43: Elohim who came to earth with one of his goddess wives and that Elohim as a god committed sin to fall so that his posterity would be immortal and be able to prove their own worthiness for celestial exaltation.
01:14:02: And they tried to say that he was misquoted. The reality is he said it over and over and over for 20 years, over 20 years.
01:14:11: And so they've thrown what he declared to be the revelation of God in terms of polygamy under the bus, what he said about blacks under the bus, and about his own god, who he was a prophet of, they've thrown under the bus.
01:14:27: And yet they claim he was a true prophet and that they're a true church through him. Yeah, and it's interesting that the
01:14:35: Mormon missionary I mentioned earlier, who was in my living room in the 1980s, and he was affirming everything that I said about the
01:14:47: Mormon church, the things that I was bringing up that were somewhat of an embarrassment to them. In fact, it was interesting that the older man that was with him, who
01:14:57: I thought was going to be the brains of the pair, kept putting his foot in his mouth.
01:15:03: And he was very robotically saying to me, what you are saying does indeed sound strange, but you probably heard this from people who do not know the truth about the
01:15:14: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. And then the younger man was like, no, that's what we believe.
01:15:21: He did this like three times. But when it came to Brigham Young's teaching that Jesus was conceived through an actual physical sexual union, that's when he stood up and got mad and he said, that's a lie.
01:15:38: We don't teach that. And I said, well, go look it up. And he said, I'm going to look it up and I'm going to get back to you on that.
01:15:44: And he never did. Of course. I contacted him and wanted to get back together again with him, and he refused.
01:15:52: He was very polite over the phone, but I think that he probably found out that I was absolutely correct when he did some research.
01:16:00: But that is another thing that they teach, isn't it? Is it not? Yes, that is the historic teaching of the
01:16:07: LDS Church. And they don't teach it much anymore.
01:16:14: Publicly to the General Assembly, I'm assuming. Well, not even to the faithful.
01:16:21: Mormonism is not a theological system in the way that you and I would tend to think about it.
01:16:33: We have the Bible, the Word of God, by which we can correct our pastors, our elders, our whole denomination, if necessary.
01:16:46: In Mormonism, to a great extent, it's like communism. For the average person, it is shut up and do what you're told.
01:16:56: There were some comedies that were done 15 years ago or so by the
01:17:04: Mormons, where the storyline was fairly similar throughout, but basically, here's this
01:17:11: Mormon who's become disillusioned with the Church, and he makes cracks about the green jello with carriage strips and this and that and the other, and he kind of pokes fun at them.
01:17:24: But then he finds that his true happiness comes from basically shutting up and doing what he's told.
01:17:33: And so they have been trained not to think the way that you and I would tend to think about truth.
01:17:47: They were postmodern before postmodernism was cool. What's true for them, or what's true for you, may not be true for them.
01:17:56: Let me play another clip from the documentary that Jason asked me to record in the voice of Brigham Young.
01:18:05: So here it is. It should be vengeance is mine, and I have taken a little.
01:18:14: Now, what is that quote in the context of that quote? That's in the aftermath of the
01:18:20: Mountain Menace Massacre. The Mormons love to talk about how they were persecuted. Reality is that Mormons killed far more non -Mormons in the name of religion than vice versa.
01:18:33: The whole Missouri War, we touch on some of the issues there. The Mormons were threatening the
01:18:39: Missourians with extermination before the governor ever issued his extermination order.
01:18:45: The Mormons were basically an end times cult. We have a quote from one of their 12 apostles who says that if there's an unbelieving
01:18:56: Gentile left on this continent 50 years hence, and if they are not in a great measure overthrown within the next 5 to 10 years, the
01:19:03: Book of Mormon will have proved itself false. Sidney Rigdon followed that.
01:19:10: That was Pari Pratt. Sidney Rigdon, same time, was telling the people who were opposing the
01:19:17: Mormons, that if they harassed them, that it would be a war of extermination, and that one or the other side would be annihilated.
01:19:31: So you had the Missouri War. The Mormons flee
01:19:37: Missouri to Nauvoo. Smith's ultimately killed in Nauvoo.
01:19:44: And Brigham leads the people out of the United States entirely to what was then
01:19:51: Mexican territory with the intent of creating a state similar to Texas, the state of Deseret that will stretch from the western slope of the
01:19:59: Rockies to Southern California. But within 6 months, they find themselves back in the
01:20:09: United States again because the United States wins the Mexican -American War. Well, you—oh,
01:20:16: God, I'm sorry. So Brigham Young—there's still an
01:20:22: End Times cult, and Brigham Young basically chased under federal control, and just the federal officials end up having to flee here, and the president sends
01:20:38: Johnson's army to remove him. Into that scenario where you have literally thousands of troops marching to Utah to remove
01:20:50: Brigham Young as the territorial governor, a wagon train comes in from Arkansas, and Parley Pratt had just been killed by a jealous husband in Arkansas, and the jury acquitted the husband of murder.
01:21:06: So they were embittered already towards Arkansas, and then the rumors began to spread that some of them said that they were
01:21:13: Missourians who had been part of the group who had killed Joseph Smith.
01:21:20: That's very unlikely, but the Mormons had been working themselves up into a furor.
01:21:29: They were looking at burning Salt Lake. They were going to retreat to the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana.
01:21:36: I mean, it was wild, the things that they were talking about. They had introduced blood atonement.
01:21:44: They were killing people. It was really wild here. Into this scenario comes this wagon train.
01:21:53: Brigham Young expressly gave permission to the Indians to take the cattle.
01:22:00: We know that much. There's no evidence he directly ordered the massacre of the people.
01:22:06: These are just innocent pioneers traveling across the Utah territory, correct?
01:22:13: Yeah, but in the richest wagon train ever to head west to that point. Oh, okay. And so the
01:22:20: Indians attack them, but they're well armed enough that they're able to fight the Indians off.
01:22:27: And so then the Mormons join with them down in southern Utah and attack them, and the
01:22:37: Mormons get seen. They're dressed up as Indians, but they get recognized that they're white.
01:22:44: You know, it's clear they're white men. And so they end up deciding they just need to kill them all.
01:22:56: That's men, women, and children. What was it? Over eight? All children over eight or something like that?
01:23:01: Every child eight and up. Yeah. And so they killed somewhere between 120 and 150 men, women, and children, slaughtered them in cold blood.
01:23:13: They told the Fancher party that if they would lay down their arms, they would lead them to safety.
01:23:20: And they had no water, and their ammunition was running low. So they agreed, and they put the women and children into wagons.
01:23:31: They had the men lined up, and on a queue, the
01:23:38: Indians attacked the women and children, and John D.
01:23:43: Lee, the leader of the Mormons, adopted son of Brigham Young, member of the council of 50, says,
01:23:50: Mormons do your duty. And every man turned and shot the man next to him. This is after they confiscated their firearms.
01:23:57: Yeah, funny what happens when gun control. Yes. Yeah. And this, there seems to be disagreement over the exact number of those slaughtered at Wounded Knee, the
01:24:08: Native Americans, but this was certainly one of the most horrific acts of terrorism on American soil before September 11th, 2001.
01:24:18: And ironically, it also took place on September 11th. Yep. September 11th, 1857.
01:24:25: And there's a movie. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, September Dawn. What did you think of September Dawn?
01:24:32: I thought it was good. I mean, Chris Kane was very gracious to allow us to use footage from it in our video.
01:24:40: It's jarring. 99 plus percent of Mormons have never seen the movie, much less even heard of it.
01:24:52: And I was amazed at how they were able to hush it up. It was a good movie.
01:25:00: I mean, they introduced a fictional storyline into it to try to develop it a bit, but the basics, his story was dead on historical.
01:25:11: The quote that you gave is in the aftermath that the
01:25:18: Johnson's Army eventually makes it here, but they were able to negotiate with the Mormons that they would march through Salt Lake and set up their camp well away from Salt Lake City.
01:25:30: And they ended up being relieved by troops from the
01:25:38: California militia. They came over here to keep the Mormons in check.
01:25:44: Well, they started hearing rumors about a slaughter and they go down to mountain meadows and they find human bones all over the place.
01:25:55: And so they gathered them all up and they they buried them under a pile of stones.
01:26:01: They put this pile of stones up and on top they put a cross and they burned into the cross,
01:26:09: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay. And according to one
01:26:17: Mormon account, Brigham Young goes down there. This is by Dudley Leavitt, who was,
01:26:25: I think, great grandfather of our former governor, Mike Leavitt.
01:26:31: But Dudley Leavitt said, Brigham Young takes a look at it for a moment. And without saying a word, he raises his arm to the square in the
01:26:45: Masonic sign and they tore down every rock and basically destroyed the grave.
01:26:55: And didn't he throw his son -in -law under the bus as a scapegoat, taking the sole blame for that massacre?
01:27:04: Yeah, his adopted son. 20 years later, finally, he was the one who was made the scapegoat.
01:27:10: He was the only one ever prosecuted for the murder of these 120 to 150 people.
01:27:17: And Brigham Young was actually in attendance at his execution, seemingly approving of it.
01:27:24: I forget the details on that part. The quote you had was from another, this is from Wilford Woodruff's journal, who became prophet of the
01:27:34: LDS Church later on. So here's their own prophet quoting
01:27:41: Brigham Young as celebrating this massacre. We know he lied about it.
01:27:47: He blamed it on the Indians for years. And he celebrated the slaughter of these men, women, and children.
01:28:06: And 99 % of Mormons have no clue about that. We have to go to a break right now.
01:28:12: And before we leave, I want to play another clip of the documentary in the voice of Brigham Young that I was asked by Jason to narrate.
01:28:22: So before we go to the break, here's Brigham Young again. The birth of the
01:28:28: Savior was as natural as the births of our children. It was the result of natural action.
01:28:33: He partook of flesh and blood, was begotten of his father, as we were of our fathers.
01:28:40: And that is exactly what I was referring to before, the concept that Jesus Christ was conceived by an actual physical sexual union that Mary, his mother, was involved in.
01:28:54: But we'll have Jason reflect on that when we return from the break.
01:29:00: If you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. We thank
01:29:05: Tyler in Mastic Beach for waiting patiently for us to respond to his questions.
01:29:12: And if you'd like to join Tyler on the air with a question of your own, chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:29:21: Don't go away. We'll be right back. Lynbrook Baptist Church on 225 Earl Avenue in Lynbrook, Long Island, is teaching
01:29:27: God's timeless truths in the 21st century. Our church is far more than a Sunday worship service.
01:29:32: It's a place of learning where the scriptures are studied and the preaching of the gospel is clear and relevant. It's like a gym where one can exercise their faith through community involvement.
01:29:40: It's like a hospital for wounded souls where one can find compassionate people and healing. We're a diverse family of all ages.
01:29:47: Enthusiastically serving our Lord Jesus Christ. In fellowship, play, and together. Hi, I'm Pastor Bob Walderman, and I invite you to come and join us here at Lynbrook Baptist Church and see all that a church can be.
01:29:58: Call Lynbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402, or visit lynbrookbaptist .org.
01:30:07: That's lynbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today is
01:30:14: Jason Wallace. He is the pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is a congregation within the
01:30:21: Orthodox Presbyterian denomination. OPC, as it's commonly called.
01:30:27: And Jason is also the producer of a documentary on Mormonism that uses the words of the very heroes and apostles and prophets of the
01:30:37: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints to expose inconsistencies and lies and things about what
01:30:47: Mormons teach and believe in reality that many people in the public have no clue about, including many
01:30:55: Mormons. And the website for that video is lds .video,
01:31:01: which you can see absolutely free of charge, lds .video. Before the break, I don't know if you have anything further to add about Brigham Young's quote that you had me read where he was clearly identifying the birth of Christ as not a virgin birth, but something that actually involved sexual intercourse, dare
01:31:25: I say it, with Mary, the mother of Jesus.
01:31:32: Yeah, we spend the first 45 minutes of the video, it's specifically aimed at Mormons.
01:31:39: It's not so much a video about Mormons as it is the title simply, and earnest plea to Latter -day
01:31:46: Saints. And we deal with the first 45 minutes showing them the historical lies, things that their own church admits are lies, basically today, though they don't like to call it that and they dance around it.
01:32:00: The last hour and 15 minutes, we show them the gospel. And the quote you gave actually comes from the section, we deal with three lies.
01:32:08: First one is, these are theological lies that we test from the
01:32:14: Bible. God is an exalted man. That's the section that this came from.
01:32:19: The next is, Adam sinned that man might be, so they believe man fell upward, that the fall was one of the greatest blessings ever given to man.
01:32:29: And then the third one is that they preached a restored gospel. We try to show them the real God, the real nature of sin, and the real gospel.
01:32:35: Now, the quote you read by itself, it might seem as if we're over -interpreting it, and maybe it could be interpreted a different way.
01:32:47: But there was another quote that went with that that was actually read by our good friend Bill Shishko. He voiced
01:32:55: Orson Pratt. I was trying to find mean -sounding white guys from the
01:33:00: Northeast. Y 'all did a wonderful job.
01:33:09: And by the way, Bill is a very gregarious, wonderful, kind, sweet brother in Christ.
01:33:17: And OPC minister. That's right. But it's not just the
01:33:24: Baptists who sound mean. Well, I don't know if you're finished, but I wanted to go to a couple more of the clips.
01:33:33: Before you go to a clip, Chris, let me just say, first of all, it was a blessing and a whole lot of fun to record these things for you.
01:33:43: We had a lot of fun doing it. And just so people know a little bit of the inside stories.
01:33:48: First of all, sometimes after we read these things, I felt like we needed to wash our mouths out with soap. It was like,
01:33:55: I can't believe my lips just said this kind of stuff. But understanding that we were actually quoting them and that this is something that is to be used ultimately to reach people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, it was a great blessing.
01:34:08: And of course, I want to thank you for the opportunity to use us as to be part of this. And as I said, the recording was just great.
01:34:16: I don't know how else to put it. And John Taylor, who actually, I call him
01:34:22: Buzz Taylor, as most people do. In fact, nearly everybody that knows him calls him Buzz. But my co -host here has the name of an infamous
01:34:31: Mormon leader. Although Buzz did some voiceovers for the documentary, that was one he did not do because Buzz apparently could not master an
01:34:40: Irish accent. Well, I thought it was kind of funny, too, that we were told, you know, don't necessarily do a good job.
01:34:48: I mean, you know, Jason told me. But yours is just too bad. When Jason said, you know, it doesn't have to be apologies.
01:34:56: These guys are dry, so be dry. And I was really dry, and I thought, oh, this is terrible. And then he gets it and says, oh, good job.
01:35:02: I'm like, really? Yeah, well, yeah, Jason had to tell me to tone down some of my—because the
01:35:08: Mormons are notorious for not giving fiery sermons or speeches.
01:35:15: They're very low -key in their oratory, right, Jason? Yeah, general conference is generally sort of sing -song monotone, if you have that.
01:35:26: Well, I'm going to give you an example of that. After this Brigham Young quote, I'll play the
01:35:31: Bruce McConkie quote that I recorded, and you'll get an idea of that sing -songy thing that Jason was just mentioning.
01:35:40: But let me go to one more Brigham Young quote, the last one that I'm going to be playing today. It is true that the blood of the
01:35:49: Son of God was shed for sins through the fall and those committed by men. Yet men can commit sins which he can never remit.
01:35:58: There are sins that can be atoned for by an offering upon an altar, as in ancient days.
01:36:04: And there are sins that the blood of a lamb or a calf or a turtle dove cannot remit, but they must be atoned for by the blood of the man.
01:36:14: Now, that is the reason—I don't know if it's changed in Utah, but that is the reason why
01:36:20: Utah was one of the last states still using the firing squad for the death penalty. Our new governor brought it back.
01:36:28: Okay. And Gary Gilmore, perhaps people remember Gary Gilmore, a fairly notorious serial killer who—
01:36:38: Executioner's son. Yes, he requested specifically that he be executed by firing squad because he had to have his blood shed to have his sins atoned for, right?
01:36:48: Yeah. I mean, it's all—Mormonism is synergism on steroids.
01:36:55: Yeah. It is God helping good people save themselves. Yeah. If you deny yourself of all ungodliness and love the
01:37:03: Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you? By the way, the next time you come back, which
01:37:09: I hope is very soon, bring some of the—or bring some of the—that's a weird way of saying it. Email me some of the quotes that our co -host,
01:37:17: Reverend Buzz Taylor, recorded. But here's another one I recorded. This one is of Bruce McConkie.
01:37:24: Before I play it, tell our listeners who Bruce McConkie is. He's one of the 12, son -in -law of the prophet.
01:37:33: And he was—in the quote that we're having here, he's explaining how after vigorously opposing pressure from outside for years about allowing blacks to hold the priesthood, which is what every male member holds.
01:37:55: So basically, blacks could not be full members of the Mormon church. They couldn't go to the temple and get their endowment.
01:38:04: They did a sudden about -face in 1978. And so here, this is
01:38:10: McConkie, one of their 12 apostles, trying to explain how people were to deal with that.
01:38:17: Here we go. There are statements in our literature by the early brethren which we have interpreted to mean that the
01:38:28: Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. I have said the same things, and people write me letters and say,
01:38:36: You said such and such, and how is it now that we do such and such?
01:38:42: And all I can say to that is that it is time disbelieving people repented and got in line and believed in a living, modern prophet.
01:38:53: Forget everything that I have said or what President Brigham Young or President George Q.
01:39:00: Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation.
01:39:08: We have spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.
01:39:15: We get our truth and our light line upon line and precept upon precept.
01:39:21: We have now added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past.
01:39:34: They don't matter anymore. It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the
01:39:41: Negro matter before the first day of June of this year. Wow, you know,
01:39:46: I'm getting a flashback from Fahrenheit 451 there. Um, this is really like just total rewriting of history, blatant cover up.
01:39:56: I mean, you can't even use a better term than cover up. I mean, it's just blatantly obvious.
01:40:03: Oh, I guess my having six kids is showing through. I flashback to the
01:40:08: Wizard of Oz. Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.
01:40:15: That's that's great. Um, but, uh, the this is just utterly remarkable.
01:40:23: This and by the way, we we forgot to mention, I think that this was a very convenient change of doctrine in regard to the black race that took place because of pressure from the
01:40:41: United States government about the tax exempt status, I believe, just like the transformation of the
01:40:49: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints from a polygamist religion to a one that dismissed an outlawed polygamy because of government pressure.
01:41:06: Am I right? These are both things where a prophet conveniently had a revelation from God to change a position of theology, and it was merely obviously, patently obvious that it had to do with government pressure from the
01:41:23: American government, right? Well, with polygamy, no one will argue that. With blacks in the priesthood, unfortunately, there's enough stuff out there that they can kick up dust and confuse the issue, so I don't actually touch on that very much.
01:41:45: I try to focus on the fact that what's, once again, what's given is the eternal law of God is thrown out, thrown under the bus.
01:41:53: What was a revelation is now described as an opinion of man. But yeah, there was all kinds of talk about the
01:42:01: Carter administration bringing pressure to bear, like under polygamy.
01:42:09: And polygamy, they literally were locking up the church leaders, and they were confiscating church property and things like this, and so all of a sudden they got a very convenient revelation.
01:42:21: What I try to do in the video, there's stuff that you have a reasonable certainty of, but if you give them things that are open to any kind of wiggle room and competing opinions and things like that, they end up focusing on that, confusing the matter, and totally ignoring the major points that are undeniable.
01:42:49: So as best I could in this, I try to avoid the things that are, where there's some kind of deniability, and try to keep it official source versus official source.
01:43:08: And when you say that it's admitted by the
01:43:14: Mormons that they changed their polygamy laws because of the United States government, did I hear you correctly? Pretty much.
01:43:21: I mean, they'll say that they received a revelation, I mean, technically it was the
01:43:27: Manifesto, and they didn't even follow that for 10 or 12 years until they got found out, and then they had a second manifesto, and that's when it really did become official.
01:43:38: That, I mean, if you get found practicing polygamy now, you will be immediately put out of the Mormon Church. But when they did the first Manifesto in 1890, it was kind of a wink -wink, or wink -wink, nod -nod kind of thing.
01:43:56: They were still doing polygamy, they were doing it secretly, or they were doing it in Mexico, or they were doing it out on a ship.
01:44:05: That's why Mitt Romney's ancestors fled to Mexico, isn't it? Yep. Go ahead,
01:44:14: I'm sorry. But they do see that as something that, they try to tie it into being subject to the laws of the land, and they'll condemn modern polygamy saying that it's not following, or that, you know, we are subject.
01:44:32: Right. They're not lawbreakers as citizens of the United States. Unless they can get away with it, the way it used to be.
01:44:42: I mean, clearly it's the way it used to be. They murdered people, they were committing polygamy when it was illegal in Illinois, before they ever moved to Utah.
01:44:55: And they continued to practice polygamy. The general authorities were still adding wives after the supposed revelation of 1890.
01:45:06: All right, we're going to go to a final Bruce McConkie clip here, that I recorded for the documentary.
01:45:14: Properly understood, it becomes apparent that the fall of Adam is one of the greatest blessings ever given of God to mankind.
01:45:24: Okay, explain that one. Well, their view of God is that he is an exalted man.
01:45:37: He basically is like Thor, or Superman. This is not the infinite eternal creator of all things.
01:45:46: This is not the God whom the heavens and heavens can't contain. This is a
01:45:51: God who is subject to our pre -agency, and is one among a multitude of gods. And we can become a
01:45:58: God like him. One of their favorite statements is that Adam is, or excuse me, as man is now
01:46:05: God once was, as God is now man may be. That's Lorenzo Snow, right? Right.
01:46:11: So when you have this view of God, God's not that holy.
01:46:19: It's not surprising that sin's not that bad. They believe that Adam was given two contradictory commands, to be fruitful and multiply, and not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
01:46:30: He had to break the second in order to keep the first. And so you have their apostles describing the fall as the greatest blessing given to man, you know, as McConkie just said, or it was a fall upward.
01:46:51: They see it as a wonderful thing that it was a self -sacrificial act on Adam's part.
01:46:58: I mean, according to Brigham Young, it was Elohim who was Adam. But basically, it's a self -sacrificial thing that he had to become mortal in order to be fruitful and multiply.
01:47:08: And so he had to sin and break the second commandment to be able to do that.
01:47:14: And so he gives up all these wonderful things. I mean, it becomes Christ -like that he makes this great sacrifice in order that we should have mortal bodies.
01:47:24: And so they have no real concept of sin from a biblical perspective.
01:47:34: They tend to view sin as mistakes, as errors, weakness, but they don't see themselves as evil people.
01:47:46: Yeah, and for those of our listeners, there may be some Mormons who are eventually, they're either listening now or eventually, perhaps they're going to listen when friends tell them to listen to the podcast that is archived.
01:48:00: They're going to say, these people are mean and they're picking on our religion. But in this documentary that they can see at lds .video,
01:48:09: you will see modern day Mormon apostles and presidents really mocking the historically
01:48:20: Protestant and even just historically Christian understanding of the nature of God.
01:48:31: In fact, they were, one of them, I think it was McConkie himself, one of the clips where you actually have a film of him, he was mocking the
01:48:41: Westminster Confessions and he was teaching on God being a spirit.
01:48:47: And he was making it to be the most horrible of all doctrines that has ever been created.
01:48:54: Yeah, he says it's the greatest heresy devised by man. And he said the second greatest heresy is salvation by grace alone.
01:49:03: Mm -hmm. Yeah, so this is something that, in spite of the really successful or effective public relations job that the
01:49:15: Mormon Church is currently doing, they continue, in fact, on the mission field as your documentary brings up, they continue, especially with the
01:49:25: Mormon missionaries overseas or in South America and so on, uh, telling the story of how the
01:49:32: Presbyterians were false and so on, according to Joseph Smith. Don't they still perpetuate that, especially in the mission field?
01:49:39: Oh, most definitely. And, you know, you've got guys like Richard Mao, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary, now they're just lying for them.
01:49:49: I mean, I've stopped saying he's mistaken. He's lying. He's been correct and he doesn't care. Mm -hmm.
01:49:55: He insists that the Mormons aren't teaching what they put in their official manuals every day.
01:50:02: Mm -hmm. First Things had an article about, you know, are Mormons moving towards orthodoxy?
01:50:08: And Mao was arguing that they are, and they're not. They've changed their trappings, they've changed their public relations, but they've not changed their
01:50:17: God or their gospel. And we do have a very relevant question from our listener,
01:50:24: Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, who's been patiently waiting. He says, Do you think that many evangelicals have given into the heresy of ecumenicalism due to Joel Osteen, another wolf in sheep's clothing, and his view that we as orthodox
01:50:41: Christians worship in their false view the same God? Well, I don't think that you could lie the origins of that at the feet of Joel Osteen as bad as he is, because Billy Graham, unfortunately, was doing it decades before Joel Osteen was ever a pastor.
01:50:58: I mean, this has been going on for quite a long time, hasn't it? It just, it's been increasingly getting worse.
01:51:05: Billy Graham actually pulled Mormonism off the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association site.
01:51:11: He pulled Mormonism off as a cult. Wow. Well, they're comments. I mean, there's more details than that.
01:51:19: But yeah, I mean, Billy Graham, and we see it here. You know, there's the mainline churches, but most of the evangelical churches either ignore
01:51:28: Mormonism, or they try to woo them through singing pop choruses or something.
01:51:40: They think that they can out -emote them. But they don't really see them as having a different God, a different gospel.
01:51:49: Now, I believe I told you about my fairly recent encounter on the streets of Carlyle, Pennsylvania, where I now live, with a group of three young Mormons who were walking down the street, and I recognized their outfits as being that of typical
01:52:09: Mormon attire. And I called out to them, because they had the white shirts, the black name tags on their shirt pockets, and the black ties.
01:52:20: And I called out to them, are you Mormons? And they said, yes. And I said, hold up. And I had a chat with them and began to evangelize them.
01:52:28: And they robotically were giving me a very different pitch than I heard in the 1980s in my living room.
01:52:35: This pitch was, you've probably heard that the Mormons think that they're the only true religion.
01:52:41: That's not true. We believe that we're just another Christian denomination, just like you are.
01:52:49: And I had brought up the fact that, do you realize that no Mormon has ever believed that until maybe within the last decade?
01:52:57: I mean, this is really a revision of history, isn't it? Most definitely.
01:53:02: I mean, we've got current guys saying this in the video, that they are the only true and living church upon the face of the earth.
01:53:14: But they just lie. We've got Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who asked,
01:53:24: I understand that Gladys Knight, a world -famous singing and recording artist, a
01:53:35: Grammy -winning accordion artist, is a Mormon and is very much a part of this new movement to bring
01:53:44: Mormonism to the black community. I am amazed by this. Does she not know these basic facts of the racism of Mormon history?
01:53:53: I don't know if you are aware of what Gladys Knight... Yeah, I'm aware of her. What she knows,
01:53:59: I don't know. I would love to get the video in front of her.
01:54:06: I'm sending a card out to Glenn Beck to try to get him to watch it. Yeah, I mean,
01:54:13: I'm a midnight train to Georgia. I'm from Georgia. So this kind of hits close to home for me.
01:54:21: But at least the pips haven't gone Mormon. But at any rate, there's such ignorance.
01:54:27: Like I said, I interviewed the top black man, basically, in the
01:54:33: LDS church, and he had no clue. And his answer to these things was, well,
01:54:41: Brigham Young needed Frederick Douglass to help him straighten this stuff out.
01:54:50: But he claims to be a prophet of God. And he just looked at me like I was from another planet.
01:54:56: He could not put the two together. Now, was there any communication between Frederick Douglass and Brigham Young?
01:55:02: Or is that just a... Not that I know of. Okay, well, I thought maybe he was using that allegorically. Like... Yeah, he was basically...
01:55:09: Brigham Young just didn't have enough black people around him to help him be able to tell the truth.
01:55:15: And ironically, though, in the infancy of Joseph Smith's cult, there were black people in the priesthood, weren't there?
01:55:23: Uh, Elijah Abel was, I believe, given endowment.
01:55:31: And there might have been one or two others. But I mean, there were a few blacks that came in in a variety of ways in the early church.
01:55:40: But clearly, with the ascension of Brigham Young as prophet, that ended.
01:55:47: Well, I definitely want you to come back for another two hours, because we could do a whole series of programs on this.
01:55:56: Obviously, we just scratched the surface today. But... Yes, I will.
01:56:01: If you hang on after we go off the air, I'll open up my calendar and let you know. But I'd like you to close today's program with a summary of what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.
01:56:12: Well, long story short, the God who saves any sinner can save any sinner he likes.
01:56:20: William Carey labored for eight and a half years and saw one convert, Krishna Paul. And they asked him if he was ready to give up.
01:56:26: He said, God who saved one can save a continent. Mormons don't have a special demon.
01:56:33: They're unbelievers. They have a false gospel. And the similar language confuses and intimidates
01:56:41: Christians from really getting into it. They want to leave it to the theologians. We've tried to give you a video that you can just point them towards.
01:56:50: There's nothing deep and technical. It's just history and the Word of God. And share it with them and pray for them.
01:57:00: We try to give them a lot of the Word of God. We believe it's God's Word and His Spirit that He uses to raise a valley of dry bones to a living army.
01:57:08: Well, I just want to remind you once again that next weekend, starting on July 15th and continuing through the following Monday, Christ Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City is having this conference with Dr.
01:57:26: James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. And during that conference, he is going to be having a dialogue with a
01:57:33: Mormon apologist and a dialogue with a Muslim apologist on two separate days during that conference.
01:57:41: And for more details, go to GospelUtah .org, GospelUtah .org.
01:57:47: Thank you so much, Pastor Jason Wallace, for being on the program. And I can't wait to have you back so we can discuss these things in greater depth.
01:57:56: Thank you so much, Chris. We covet your prayers. And I want to thank my co -host, Reverend Buzz Taylor, for being with us again on the 4th of July.
01:58:06: And also for those of you who took the time during your holiday to listen in, and especially those who wrote in questions.
01:58:13: And I apologize to those who could not have their questions read on air due to lack of time.
01:58:19: But we will bring your questions up during our next broadcast, God willing.
01:58:24: And don't forget, tomorrow morning, 7 .30, Fox & Friends, my friend
01:58:31: Debra Antignano is on a panel discussing how political correctness is destroying our nation and putting all of our lives in danger.
01:58:40: And Debra Antignano's website is matteroftheheart .net, matteroftheheart .net.
01:58:45: She's a former Jehovah's Witness who has come to Christ and is a Christian recording artist. And she will be on Fox &
01:58:51: Friends tomorrow morning at 7 .30. And I want all of you to enjoy the rest of your 4th of July celebration.
01:58:58: I hope you have a peaceful and safe and joyful time with family, friends, loved ones, and neighbors.
01:59:06: I hope that you remain a true light of the gospel of Jesus Christ to all who are surrounding you during this time of celebration.
01:59:15: And I want you all to always remember, more than anything, for the rest of your lives, that Jesus Christ is a far greater
01:59:21: Savior than you are a sinner. Tune in tomorrow as Dr. Michael Hakin is our guest on Iron Sharpens Iron, world -renowned
01:59:30: Baptist historian and theologian. God bless, and we look forward to getting your questions for Dr.