A thought on Moroni 10:4:
“And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you
that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these
things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent
having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power
of the Holy Ghost.”
As I was preparing for a talk on faith, I read this passage.
I thought it was odd that in order to gain a testimony of the truthfulness of
the Book of Mormon you were required to have faith in Christ. This passage is
used thousands of times every day to help others come unto Christ, even to
those that don’t have faith in Christ. This book is used as a tool to create
faith in Christ.[1]
So, why is one of the requirements of knowing whether or not this book is true
to have faith in Christ already? What does this teach us about the book itself?
Are we using it wrong? Is it a missionary tool, or is it a tool for the
covenantal member?[2]
Orson Pratt taught:
The elders were sent forth in the early rise of this Church,
saying unto the people, “If you will repent of your sins—if you will turn from
everything that is evil, if you will with all your hearts enter into a covenant
with the Almighty to obey the Lord of righteousness, to keep his commandments,
to do right all your future days, and will be baptized by the authority
that God has given from heaven, and also be confirmed by the laying on of
hands, God will give you the Holy Ghost, and by this gift of the Holy
Ghost you shall know that the Book of Mormon is a divine revelation, and that
this is the Church and the kingdom of the living God.[3]
If the authors of the Book of Mormon thought that this book
was a book that would be confirmed truthful to the reader AFTER the covenants
associated with baptism, how should we be using the book? How does this change
the way you should approach the Book of Mormon? Would it change the way we interpreted
some of the passages? All of the passages? To me, it greatly increased the
prestige, and importance of the Book of Mormon. Yes, it can be used as a
missionary tool, but it wasn’t written solely for that. It was written to help
the covenantal person stay true to their covenants, and maybe even increase
them.
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