8 - Mormonism, Part 1

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of World Religions.

We are in our class right now going over an introduction to the major western world religions.

As we are going through this, we welcome any new students. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity.

You can find out more about Striving for Eternity at strivingforeternity .org.

My name is Andrew Rappaport. I am today's instructor. We're going through lessons that you can get at Striving for Eternity at our store at strivingforeternity .org,

The Study of the Major Western Religions. It is a syllabus you can pick up if you want to get a copy and follow along.

You will find it valuable because you're going to find a whole lot of things in the syllabuses that, well, we don't always have opportunity to go over.

And it's going to just be good to get things, keep things together and organized. Now, another resource that's going to be very helpful is a book that I wrote called

What Do They Believe? It is a systematic theology of the major western religions.

And so, that book is available at the store, store .strivingforeternity .org

or on Amazon. You can get it at either of those two locations. So, enough of that.

Let us jump into the lesson that we have for today. We're in lesson number four in our syllabus,

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And we're going to go through, as we have been going through, the six major doctrines.

What's their authority? What's their view of God, specifically the Trinity? What's their view of Jesus Christ, specifically

His deity? What's their view of sin, man's spiritual condition? What's their view of salvation?

What's their view of end times? And so, those are going to be the six major doctrines that we are going to look at within this lesson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Yeah, it should be easy for me to say, but I guess speaking is a new thing for me.

All right. So, let's begin. Now, one of the things I want to do is, and I'll say this again, we've tried to be nice to the engineer.

I have less slides this time to put up for those who are watching on YouTube.

But those who watch these classes, you get to see a little bit less slides this time because, well, it's been a problem trying to keep up with some of them.

So, there's been some confusion. But I'm going to give you some things that you can see.

These are the Articles of Faith. And I'm going to give this to you, but I want to state right off the bat. When we see that the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has gone through a transformation. And so, you have what used to be known as Mormons.

And many don't hold that title anymore. That becomes an important distinction, actually. If someone says they're a member of the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints versus saying they're a Mormon, because, well, Mormon is much shorter and easier to say.

But Mormonism has gotten a really correct rap. Yeah, it's not a bad rap.

It got a correct one. Mormonism got exposed for what they taught. And so, many were trying to get away from that as being a cult.

And so, what you end up seeing is that there's actually two, really two views. And one of the things

I'll ask when I speak to Mormons is I'll ask them if they're Mormon. If they correct me and say, we're a member of the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to me, that's very clear code words, code language for we're going to try to deceive you.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was supposedly formed by Joseph Smith because God needed to restore the

Church. And this is the pattern I've said. We saw this with Catholicism. We'll see it again with Jehovah's Witnesses.

But where the Church fell away, we needed this, well, not so much in Catholicism they would say it fell away, but Jehovah's Witness and Mormonism, the

Church fell away. But now, these groups are trying to be Christian. They want to say, no, we're just like Christians.

And so, the Mormons went through a radical change. I'm going to give you quotes from their website. You're going to see that some of those things are not on their websites anymore.

And same when we get to Lesson on Jehovah's Witnesses, they've kind of cleaned up the website to sound more

Christian. And so, what you're going to find is they will often use words that Christians hear and go, oh, we believe the same thing because you believe in a trinity.

Wait a minute. You're going to need to learn to ask them what they mean by that. And this is the thing.

They're going through this transformation where they want to seem like they're Christian, not a cult. And therefore, they want you to believe that they believe just like you.

And we're going to see, if you understand Christian doctrine, and we're going to go through what Mormon doctrine is, and you're going to go, that's not like us.

And so, if you hear someone that says that they make this distinction between an LDS, and I'm going to use

LDS to be shorter than Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. The Latter -day

Saints is the idea that the Church fell away, and in the 1800s, Joseph Smith was commissioned by God to restore the

Church and bring it back to its beliefs. Now, let me give you a quick, real quick history of the

Church. We're going to look at some of it as we go, but I want to just give a background for you because this may be completely new to you, and you may not understand some of the history of the

LDS Church. I said I was going to use the shorter one. I'll use it. So, the LDS, basically what happened was that Joseph Smith supposedly got these gold plates from Moroni, which is the son of Mormon.

Mormon was a prophet, supposedly, in the Americas. So, what the history as they see it is that the 10 tribes, the 10 quote -unquote lost tribes, in other words, in case you don't even know

Israel's history. So, there was a split within Israel. The tribe of Judah kind of was the major tribe, but there were two tribes that stayed in the line after Solomon died, stayed under that, under Rehoboam.

And then the 10 other tribes, the northern tribes, became Israel, and the southern two tribes became

Judah. And that became a split, a division in Israel's history. And those tribes had differing histories as they moved on.

Eventually, Assyria came in and basically removed most of the 10 tribes.

Many of those Israelites moved down into Judah, and so they remained in the land.

But the idea in Mormonism is that those 10 tribes were not really lost.

They were lost to the Middle Eastern world. They came to America. I've never really gotten a clear understanding of how exactly they got here, but all 10 tribes got here.

And so, after Christ preached the gospel in his day and age in the

Middle East, afterwards, he came to the Americas and preached the gospels to the 10 tribes of Israel here in America known as Native American Indians.

And so, he was preaching to them. And eventually, it was written down in these golden plates.

Joseph Smith got a hold of those golden plates and was able to basically translate them.

There are, well, we'll get into that, but it's basically what we know as the Book of Mormon. So, I'll get into what that is in a moment.

But this history is important to understand. So, they believe that the church fell away. Joseph Smith was restored.

One of the things, just some background on Joseph Smith, you have to understand, this is documented fact.

Joseph Smith, before he became the leader of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith was arrested several times for being a con artist.

I think his character gets called into question when we look at what happened with religion. It's not that God can't regenerate a con artist and use him for his glory.

God can do that. But if you're going to start a religion, I would just say if you have these golden plates that God reveals to you, everyone should be able to see them as evidence and be able to look at it and do translation.

We'll get to there in a moment. And I'm going to give, in this case, there's some ministries to make note of.

If you are looking at Mormonism, you want to learn more, a couple resources. One is you can look at my book,

What Do They Believe? I mentioned already, you can take these classes. One of the other resources, some other resources

I'm going to recommend to you, I don't have a slide for it, but you can look at CARM .org,

Christian Apologetic Research Ministry. They have a lot of material and they're friends with Striving for Eternity, good ministry there.

So you can go there and find a lot of resources. You can go to Mormon Research Ministries, that's

MRM .org. They have a lot of materials specifically on Mormonism.

I was influenced greatly by a lot of material by Sandra Tanner. She was a

Mormon, grew up that way and came out of it. And I mean, I don't know anyone really who's got more documents, just different ways of looking at things.

And I think the reason I'm so intrigued by her is her critical thinking skills are similar to mine and she likes to seem to ask similar questions like I do.

And you're going to see some of those. I'll try to reference what things that, where that happened.

So there's some resources you can go to. All right, let's dive in. What does the LDS Church believe?

This is from, used to be on their website. I don't know if it still is after their purging of material.

But this is their Articles of Faith. I think this should be up there. So I'm just going to read this to you.

They have several Articles of Faith here, 13 in fact. And so the

Articles of Faith say this, we believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the

Holy Ghost. Okay. I think we would say that we understand that, but we're going to,

I would argue that we're going to have differing views. The Eternal Father and His Son are different.

It seems almost like it's explaining a trinity here, but we'll see that when we get to the section on Godhead that it's different.

Number two, we believe that men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam's transgression.

That should send up a red flag if you understand anything about headship. And actually, the very next point of their

Article of Faith says this, we believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the

Gospel. Oops, some red flags there. Let me give you the first red flag. The first red flag is really tied to that Article 2.

If we are not under the headship of Adam in his sin, then we are not able to be under the headship of Christ in His Atonement.

That's made clear in Romans 5, 12 and following. So, the other thing is clearly in the area of salvation.

For any of us who know the Bible's doctrine of salvation by grace alone, not by works,

Ephesians 2, 8, 9, Titus 3, 5, it is not by works that we are saved.

You should have an issue when you hear the by obedience of the laws. Alright, let me keep reading, otherwise

I will never get through this lesson. Alright, number four, we believe that the first principles and ordinance of the

Gospel are First, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Second, repentance. Third, baptism by immersion for remission of sins. Fourth, laying on hands for the gift of the

Holy Ghost. Alright, so here, the baptism is necessary for salvation to remove sin.

Hmm, we'll get to that. Yeah, I'm sure that might bring up some red flags, but the laying in on hands of the

Holy Ghost. We're going to get to this in Article 7, but for those of you practicing charismatics out there that are believers in Christ, you think that the gifts of tongues and all these are unique with you?

It was not common place in the Christian church until 1905,

Azusa Street. You could check it out. In history, there were some rare cases of people speaking in tongues, but it was not the norm.

But 1800s, it was the norm with the Mormons. So, we see the cults that have these.

Let's keep going and we'll get to it in Article 7, but that is requirement for salvation.

Number five, we believe that a man must be called of God by prophecy and by the laying on of hands for those who are in authority to preach the gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof.

Number six, in their Articles of Faith, we believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive church, namely apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth.

Number seven, we believe in the gifts of tongues. Sorry about that.

We believe in the gifts of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, interpretation of tongues, and so forth.

So, this was taught very much before Azusa Street by the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. So, how do you distinguish that?

But the issue here is you see that they were believing in revelation. I think that becomes important because they're accepting of new revelation.

We're going to get to that when we talk about their authority. Number eight, we believe that the

Bible is the Word of God. Note this. We believe the Bible to be the

Word of God as far as it is translated correctly. We also believe the

Book of Mormon to be the Word of God. So, right there, you see that some of that we're going to talk about in their authority, their view of the

Word of God, as long as it's translated correctly. Some have recently have seen changes where it says interpreted correctly, interpreted by their authority.

So, number nine, we believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that there will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the

Kingdom of God. So, you see, revelation is continuing. Number ten, we believe in the literal gathering of Israel, in the restoration of the ten tribes, that Zion, the new

Jerusalem, will be built on the American continent, that Christ will reign personally upon the earth, and that the earth will be renewed and receive

His paradisiacal glory. Number eleven, we claim the privilege of worshiping

Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and we allow all men the same privilege.

Let them worship where they may. Number twelve, we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates in obeying, honoring, and sustaining law.

That's actually the opposite with Jehovah's Witnesses who don't see themselves under law. Number thirteen, the last one of their articles of faith, we believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, victorious, and in doing good to all men.

Indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul. We believe all things, hope all things, we endure many things, and hope to be able to endure all things.

If there is any virtuous, lovely, or good report, or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.

So, there you get what they've summarized, thirteen articles of faith, what they believe.

If you come upon Mormons, you're going to find that they try to live a very moral life because of the way they live being that they really do stay to other

Mormons, and so outwardly they seem very moral, very much focused on family. There are many who

I've spoken to that come out of Mormonism more so that will tell about an inner struggle of trying to live a perfectionist lifestyle, to be seen as being perfect.

It is difficult, it's actually impossible to live a completely moral life according to God's word, but they're trying and that becomes an issue for many.

So, let's look at number one. Let's look at what is their authority, all right?

So, what is the authority in the Mormon Church? Well, the first authority that they hold to, and we already saw this in their articles, is the

Bible. Their eighth article states, we believe the Bible to be the word of God as long as it is translated correctly.

We also believe in the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. Now, the acceptable translations that they accept is the

King James translation and the Joseph Smith translation, which maybe not too many of you have.

That's right, I meant to do that. I was going to bring up, I actually have multiple, if you go on like eBay and things, you can sometimes find and use bookstores,

Joseph Smith translation. You can also find multiple years of Book of Mormon, which is their second.

The Book of Mormon, thank you, Book of Mormon is really an authority that they hold to.

The reason it's important to look at different years of the Book of Mormon is because there were changes that occurred.

Why is that important? Well, the reason it becomes important to see that there were changes is because they believe that the

Book of Mormon is, well, we'll get there. What was that? The Book of Mormon is going to argue that it is going to be the most correct book in history.

So, the Book of Mormon, if you look in your notes there, the Book of Mormon claims to be another witness that Jesus Christ really lived, that he was

God's son. It claims to contain the writings of ancient prophets. Some of those prophets led a small group of people from Jerusalem to the

American continent, about 600 BC. Now, if you understand something of what I just said with Israel's history,

I just want to point this out. The people that were in Jerusalem were the two southern tribes,

Judah. The northern tribes, their capital was Samaria.

So, when you see them talk about going from Jerusalem to the Americas and the ten tribes, it shows, because I'm going to tilt my hand here,

I think Joseph Smith was making this up with the Book of Mormon. I'll make that case throughout.

But one of the things that you end up having there is, I think that we look at this and Joseph Smith is making it up and doesn't have a real good understanding of biblical history.

And so, he doesn't realize that the ten tribes were not in Jerusalem. Okay, that aside,

God continued to call the prophets among these people. The Book of Mormon is a collection of writings of these prophets, the record keepers.

It is named after Mormon, the one of the last of these ancient prophets. These prophets knew about God's plan for His children and the mission of Jesus Christ.

They recorded that Christ appeared after His resurrection to the people in America, taught them

His gospel and furthered His church among them. The book claims to contain the teachings of Jesus Christ, testifying of His atonement and His love.

The messenger of God named Moroni told

Joseph Smith by eight revelations to find gold plates that was the history of the people that lived in America.

And the Latter -day Saints believe that these people were the ten lost tribes of Israel.

The Book of Mormon claims to be more correct, that is your blank if you have a syllabus, more correct than the

Bible. That's an introduction to the Book of Mormon. You'll see that and in History of the

Church Volume 4, page 461.

And so, what you have is, and this is where Sandra Tanner, I mentioned her earlier, one of the things

I liked is she actually went through the Book of Mormon and noted that examining

Elizabethan English, which is what the King James uses and what the Book of Mormon uses, that we don't know the thee and thou is a more precise way of speaking than the, we say the, but thee and thou talks about how, the subject.

And so, they are a different way of usage. And the irony is that Elizabethan English is more precise than the

English that was used in the 1800s. And so, the irony and one of the things that Sandra Tanner had brought to my attention, you know, in her research was basically the only time that it seems that the

Book of Mormon gets the English correct, you know, the one that's supposed to be more correct than the Bible, is when it's quoting the

King James. It seems that when Joseph Smith was translating into this older English that wasn't spoken in the 1800s, but it sounded more biblical because that was the language people spoke because when they'd speak, they'd like, want to sound more spiritual.

You get people like now, even today, I mean, I hear people when they suddenly pray in Elizabethan English or attempt to.

And so, Joseph Smith is writing in an English that's older than the English spoken at the time. And he's, it was interesting that she had pointed out that it seems that he can only be right in his usage of the these and thous and all the precision in that Elizabethan language when he was quoting the

Bible. Other than that, he seemed to get it wrong. So, it's one of the things, though, this is the idea that you see there was eight revelations.

I think that what you end up seeing here is that when he got this, being a con artist,

I think, and we'll see this in a little bit, but this was developing over time.

And as it developed over time, he told one person a story, another person a story, and I think what you have is you end up having where they have to try to, you know, basically bring these stories together and explain how you have differing, conflicting stories.

And so, you have differing ages when he got, he had these visions. And so, there's these different visions he has different to basically make up for the different stories

I think he told. I'm saying that to say this, that if you go and you get a Book of Mormon, or if you get my book,

I actually quote the supposed witnesses to these golden plates and where he tries to explain these different visions and reconcile them, all right?

That kind of becomes important. But if this is the most correct book it's inspired, remember, the

Book of Mormon does have changes. That's why I have multiple copies of the Book of Mormon from earlier years.

I mean, I have some that date in the 1800s, early 1900s, and then some today.

And you see changes. Those changes would not be required if this is the most accurate.

Now, here's the problem I have. The changes are changes that occur in areas of doctrine.

Now, we know that there's variances within the manuscripts we have of the Bible, but one of the things we know is that they never affect any area of doctrine.

There are variances that occurred, but God preserved the doctrine and teachings of the Bible. Where in the

Book of Mormon we do see changes, variances, and those affect doctrine.

That's a major problem. Furthermore, the Book of Mormon should be noted that these changes occurred after the

Gutenherr printing press. Why is that important? Because copyist errors occur when people are making copies, when they're handwriting copies, and in that they make an error.

But when you typeset and you have the printing press, those errors are less likely to occur because you're printing off mass quantities of the

Book of Mormon. And therefore, we would not expect to see copyist errors to happen.

So, since the invention of the printing press, there would be no need for copyists. Therefore, the human errors would not occur the way they would in copying.

The Book of Mormon does not contain LDS doctrine, by the way, though. It's more like Christian doctrine.

And this was his first revelation. This is the first book that Joseph Smith is using to start this new religion of Mormonism.

And he's going through and you have him seeing what he writes in Book of Mormon.

And this is why this is an introduction that many Mormons will give to Christians is, read the

Book of Mormon. And you read the Book of Mormon and you're not seeing it having that much different doctrine. You're going to see some things in a bit that you're going to go, this is way off.

But in the early stuff, no, it's not way off. No different when we looked at Islam. Early Islam, very supportive of Christianity and Judaism.

Later Islam, very different. You're going to see the same thing here. And so I do find it interesting that they all want to tie themselves to the truth and then say they're different from the truth to separate themselves later and say that the true teachings of God have been corrupted and then they now have the truth and then they want to be like Christians.

So I give you, and this is something you can get in my book, What Do They Believe?

And so I don't have a slide here for this but I'm going to give you some differences between the Book of Mormon compared to Mormon doctrine.

The teachings, the doctrines of the Mormon church later. So one, in the Book of Mormon you see that there's only one

God. Where in Mormon doctrine you see Mormonism teaches that there's many gods. And I'm not going to give all the references.

I recommend you get my book to see all the references there because we don't have time to go through that. But the

Trinity was one God in the Book of Mormon. In later doctrines you end up seeing the

Trinity as three separate gods. In the Book of Mormon, God is unchanging.

Later we see in other documents in Mormon teaching,

God is increasing in knowledge. In Book of Mormon, God is a spirit.

Mormon doctrines teach God has the form of a man. In the

Book of Mormon, there's an eternal hell. In Latter Day Saints teachings and their doctrines, hell is not eternal.

In the Book of Mormon, polygamy is condemned. Later as they evolved, polygamy was taught and practiced.

So 12 essential doctrines not found in the Book of Mormon. So if this is the most correct book on earth, as it says in History of the

Church Volume 4, 461, if it's the most correct on earth, why are these 12 essential doctrines missing?

Like the church organization. I'll give you a chart on that in just a moment. But the plurality of gods, the plurality as wives doctrine, different than what you see in the

Old Testament because it's tied to what I'm going to say in number 6. But number 4, the word of wisdom.

God is an exalted man. Number 6, the celestial marriage that's tied to the plurality of wives.

Men becoming gods. The three degrees of glory. Baptism for the dead.

Eternal progression. Their views on the Aaron's priesthood and the

Melchizedek priesthood. So there's some differences there. Those things are not in the

Book of Mormon. So the Book of Mormon is kind of like the intro to get you started. And what you end up finding is it's not going to be that far off until you get to the next book.

The next one is Doctrine and Covenants, D &C. Doctrine and Covenants.

And so Doctrine and Covenants now, and in my book, What Do They Believe?,

I give you some explanatory notes right from Doctrine and Covenants. If you don't have a copy of that, you can pick that up.

And what you're going to see with this book is that Doctrine and Covenants claims to be a collection of divine revelations, that's your blank there, a collection of divine revelations and inspired declarations given for the establishment and regulation of the

Kingdom of God on earth in the last days. The Book of Doctrine and Covenants is one of the standard works of LDS.

However, Doctrine and Covenants is unique because it does not claim to be a translation from some ancient documents, but it is one of the modern, modern being 1800s, the modern origin and claims to be given of God through chosen prophets for the restoration of His holy works and the establishment of the

Kingdom of God on earth in these days. Now, here's one of the problems I have with this. When you look at these things and they say, this is inspired of God, but their doctrines change.

Some of the things we're going to get to, but one of the things is they had a view that black people were people that rebelled against God, spirits that rebelled against God with Satan in this war that happened in heaven.

And those spirits come to earth as black. Those that sided with God come back as white.

You want to take a guess what color Joseph Smith was? Just saying. And then those that didn't choose sides come back as, you know, as yellow people, or, you know, they have a problem with saying red people because who would be the red?

Oh, that would be the Native Americans. Those are supposed to be the Israelites, right? So the Israelites were

God's chosen people, yet they were the souls that didn't choose sides. Yeah, that's a problem

I would see. One of the things with the Book of Mormon, actually, that was very interesting. I had written a computer program years ago to calculate birth rates and I allowed for different things like the birth rates before the time of Noah to calculate how many people would have been alive during the flood, things like that, and calculate basically the population growths that would occur.

I ended up using that same calculations and I applied it with the Book of Mormon that I read.

Here's the thing I discovered. You have more people dying than could possibly be born at the birth rates and the life expectancy at the people during that time period.

That becomes a real problem. I understand that the Mormon Church says they have all this archeology that supports

Mormon doctrines hidden away. Well, if it's hidden away, no one can see it and verify it.

You see, when the Christians, when we get documents or we find new evidence, we put it out there.

2 Corinthians 13 .8, you can do nothing against the truth but by the truth. We have the truth, so we can put that stuff out for all to see.

We don't have to say, hey, hey, we got it hidden. It's so sacred, no one can see it. Just pick our word for it.

Those are the words of deceivers. Christians put all those documents out there and say, let's examine, let's study.

When we found the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's out for people to review. There is careful handling of it because it's fragile, but they try to get ways that that could be photographed without ruining it so that it could be widely spread.

This is the difference. When you get to the pearl of the

Doctrine and Covenants, it is an introduction to their later works.

So, you end up seeing they have corrections. These blacks could not be priests and priesthood is very important in Mormonism.

They couldn't be priests. But then in the 80s, that changed and even their documents changed to allow that.

You end up seeing that if this is from God, all of a sudden, God changes.

He never needed to change until kind of recent when that was frowned upon to have this.

And so, again, if this is God's word, there shouldn't be changes in it like you'd have after the printing press.

You wouldn't need those changes. However, there's changes due to cultural changes that we had, such as blacks in the priesthood, which led some to conclude that the

LDS God is a God who changes. So, how can you trust a God who says he's never going to change and this is true today, but not true tomorrow?

All right, let's see if I can at least get through the rest of their authority. I thought I'd get further. Pearl of Great Price, that's the next one.

The Pearl of Great Price. But in here, what you have is a

Pearl of Great Price is a selection of choice materials touching on many significant aspects of faith and doctrine of the

LDS. This is an important product by Joseph Smith published in the church periodicals of his day.

Now, here's the reason this becomes really important. When you have this sort of material, where you're saying you have these other documents, we already said most of the doctrines of the

LDS are found in Pearl of Great Price Doctrine and Covenants, not in the Book of Mormon.

Therefore, if the doctrines are based out of these other works, and these other works are the ones that define really how to live life and correct the older things and give the guidance, then which one really becomes the authority?

It's not the Book of Mormon, which is supposed to be the most accurate. It is Pearl of Great Price and Doctrine and Covenants.

They become the authorities. And they become the ultimate authorities because those are the things that are going to be used to interpret the

Bible and the Book of Mormon. Then, therefore, the thing that you hold as the ultimate authority is the thing that you're using to interpret the others.

It ends up, just like when we talked about Roman Catholicism and we showed how Roman Catholicism uses the church structure, the church leadership, and their traditions to interpret the

Bible, therefore the church and their traditions become the ultimate authority over the

Bible. In this case, it's Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price that become the ultimate authority over the

Book of Mormon and the Bible. Now, the Church of Latter -day Saints actually becomes an authority as well.

The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter -day Saints states that it is, quote, the only true and living church upon the face of the earth.

Do we have, I think, well, it should be the first slide. That's it.

There we go. The only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth.

Oh, I didn't, oh, that's nice. I didn't rename the slides for you. Okay, that'll be fun. Sorry about that.

It just says slide 171. Sorry, I will try to correct that for you for next week.

Alright, so the LDS church states that when Jesus Christ lived on earth, he organized his church so his people could receive his gospel and return one day to live with God.

After Jesus Christ ascended to heaven, his apostles continued to receive revelation from him on how to direct the work of his church.

However, after they were killed, members of the church changed the teachings of the church and he had established, while many good people and some truth remained, this apostasy, or general falling away of the truth, brought about the withdrawal of the church on earth.

Okay, so they believe that Peter prophesied that Jesus would restore his church in his second coming.

They believe this out of Acts 3, 19 -21. In addition, that Jesus Christ began to restore his church in its fullness on earth through Joseph Smith in 1820.

It's grown to become a worldwide organization of over 11 million members and it claims it's one of the fastest growing religions.

I think Islam has taken that over. But what you end up having here is an issue.

A. Jesus Christ said in the Bible that his church would not fall away.

And so again, you see the same thing we saw with Islam. That you end up seeing that they have to argue that the church fell away, that the writings were lost, that the truth was lost, that we didn't quite have everything and it needed to be restored by this new prophet, whether it be

Muhammad or Joseph Smith. So 1800 years we had to wait for the truth to be restored.

Wow, that's a long time, right? I mean, you end up seeing that this,

I believe, if the Mormon church is true, then Jesus Christ is a liar because he said the gates of hell will never prevail against the church.

The church would never fall away and yet the Mormon church is based on the church having fallen away and needing to be restored.

All right? And that's a real problem. Boy, oh boy, I wanted to get through so much more.

Let me at least, there's at least the slide that has the hierarchy, if you can put that up.

All right, so here we have the hierarchy of the church, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

Saints. Now, the issue, the reason I bring this up, put this up here, is you can see how much hierarchy they have.

They say they follow, if you remember, I said they say they follow in their articles the hierarchy that's in the

Bible. Do you, if you, I don't know if you could read that, but you see the top one is the first presidency or prophet.

Presidency wasn't in the Bible. That's something that's from America that came up with president.

So he's a president or a prophet, but then there's two counselors and those counselors under them is a quorum of 12 apostles and under them is the 70 quorum, right?

So you're seeing some notions, the 12 apostles, the 70 are the 70 that were sent out. Then you see stakes and the stakes are area presidents and then you see wards that are under those states and then under each of those there's a bishop and those bishops then are over, each bishop is over the congregational members.

I only remember the Bible talking about, you know, pastors and deacons.

Yes, there was an office of apostle. I would say they don't exist anymore, but there's an apostle, there's prophets, there's an evangelist.

I don't think we have most of those anymore. I think we have pastor and deacon, but even so, you don't see all these others.

You don't see a quorum of 12 that made, or sorry, a quorum of 70, the stakes.

We don't see that. I mean, all this hierarchy, this is just, I mean, this is like how the Roman Catholic Church formed hierarchy.

And so you end up having, there's no way

I'm going to get into the next one on God. Wow, I was hoping to do this in two lessons, but you end up having some differences.

So since I'm not going to be able to finish, let me go back and go through some things that I skipped over in my notes just so we can finish on the

Book of Mormon or the Mormon doctrines. So one of the things that we have is that when we compare a record of the volumes of scripture with the

Bible, you're going to see, their scriptures, I mean, with the Bible, you're going to see that there's some

Book of Mormon. There's some similarities. It's supposedly written to the Indians. It's going to argue that it's a complete writing of, it's like a companion to the

Bible. One of the issues is that an interesting thing, again, Sandra Tanner brought out that I really found fascinating.

I think she called it, was it a black hole or a theory or, but basically it was that when

Joseph Smith was translating these things, and there's different ways he was supposedly translating this in this

Egyptian hieroglyph that we don't seem to know existed. So it seems to be a unique thing.

But one of the things that was interesting was that there was one of the guys, and I forget who it was, but he wanted to convince his wife, who was not believing

Joseph Smith, thought he was just a con artist and taking all of her husband's money, and he wanted to convince his wife.

And so it took a lot of pleading, but he convinced Joseph Smith, please would you let me show my wife these, you know, these volumes that were translating, because he was involved in helping in the translation, and let me show her the originals that we have, you know, the translation so she could see it's true.

And so he let her have it for, I think it was three days, and then the way the story goes, we've never found those copies.

She did something with them, no one knows what. And so the argument that was made was that he probably was nervous.

I mean, if it was from God, he could just translate them again, right? If it's from God, God would know what he said the first time.

But instead, Joseph Smith ended up saying as a judgment on her unbelief, you know, he was going to only summarize what was said, and therefore you don't have the full account.

Now, being that my position, I would think that he did that because he couldn't remember what he said, and he probably was very much afraid that she was hoping he would try to do that again, and translate it word for word again, and she could pull those documents out and go, see, he's a fake.

That's my thinking of why he didn't do that, and just summarized it, but made it sound like it was from her.

I would say if you want, you know, contact us, we could try to contact

Sandra Tanner and get more on that, but that was a fascinating information.

If you do want to contact us, we're going to continue, we're going to look at their view of God and Jesus Christ next week, but if you want to contact us, you can email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

If you want to pick up my book, What Do They Believe?, you can pick up that or the syllabus for the class at store .strivingforeternity

.org. If you want to contact us, please do so. One of the things that we'd love to do is come into your church if you want, and do some, other than talking about world religions, we'd like to talk about how to interpret the

Bible. It's a seminar we have, Bible Interpretation Made Easy, and we can come into your church, teach you how to interpret the

Bible, teach you the rules of interpretation that you can even apply to the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price and Doctrine and Covenants and see why there are so many errors in them.

All right, so one way you could also support us at Striving for Eternity is on Amazon Smile.

If you'd like to buy things on Amazon, go to smile .amazon .com. Search for Striving for Eternity as the ministry you want to support.

Striving for Eternity Ministries, and it will come up. Amazon will actually give a percentage of everything you buy to us.

We greatly appreciate it. We've been getting checks from Amazon on a quarterly basis, and it helps us fund the things we do.

It's just another way, if you would rather give us monthly support, we'd totally appreciate that.

So, we're going to ask, as we wrap up every week, we always try to wrap up with encouraging you to encourage some brother or sister, because we know that most of us need encouragement.

All of us need encouragement. But unfortunately, you know what? The most encouraging things that are ever said about us are usually said when we're dead.

That's right, funerals, you hear the most encouraging things about people. I want to encourage you to encourage people today while they're alive.

Let them know how much value they place, they are in your life. And so what we do is we highlight a different person, a brother or sister of encouragement, and they're called a

C -Bro or C -Sis, a Striving for Eternity Brother or Sister of Encouragement. And so if you would like to encourage someone, we encourage you to let us know.

But this person that we're encouraging is a sister, Christina LeBron. She just gave birth to her first son.

She's got two girls. It was difficult. I won't go into details, because I'm going to let her explain whatever she wants to make known publicly.

But she's having some difficulties. And so the child is having some difficulties as well.

Very hard. And they have a child, their middle child now, who has food allergies, makes it really difficult, has some skin conditions.

So it becomes a greater difficulty when you're bringing in a new child that takes all the attention, and you have children that still need special care.

So I encourage you to encourage her. She continues to try to do what she can for the

Lord. And she is a sister that is always encouraging other people. And so she really is someone who

I've had the opportunity to watch her grow in Christ, in the knowledge of His Word, and just seeing how she takes

God's Word, and is very quick with understanding His Word, and how to properly apply it to things.

So would you encourage her this week as she is having with her newborn child, just a new stage of life.

And so encourage you to encourage her. And until next week, I want to encourage you to remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.