Sunday Sermons
Mormon Beginnings - Part 1
The Environment
The family of Joseph Smith Jr. moved to western New York in 1816. Just before Mormonism emerged, Palmyra New York and the surrounding region were pioneer territory, and this tract of upstate New York was fertile ground for religious excitement, to the extent that it became known as the “Burned-Over-District”, because it was overwhelmed with one fire of religious revival after another. The traveling preachers working this area included Isaac Bullard, a believer in free love and communism who wore only a bearskin and taught that it was a sin to wash. Charles G. Finney, a revivalist similar in style to that of Billy Graham, began his preaching career in this area in 1824. There was also no shortage of new sects and communal experiments during the period that Mormonism arose. “Religions of every stripe seemed to flourish, from spiritualism to liberal rationalism to socialist utopianism to Swedenborgianism, with its concepts of eternal marriage and a three-tiered heaven” (Mormon America: The Power and the Promise, Richard Ostling, p. 21). Two other movements were also powerful during this time, first the expectation of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “’The first generation of United States citizens may have lived in the shadow of Christ’s second coming more intensely than any generation since’”, writes the historian Nathan O. Hatch. Revivalists and social reformers preached that people should prepare their hearts, their lives, and their society for the Second Coming. Best of all, God’s chosen people might build his kingdom, the New Jerusalem, right at home on American soil” (pp. 21-22). Another movement was the desire to restore the purity of early Christianity. Alexander Campbell, with his father Thomas, co-founded the era’s “Restoration Movement”. They rejected human creeds but did not devise their own novel doctrines as replacements. The first adherents to Mormonism, primarily from New England and the Middle Atlantic states, viewed Mormonism as the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.
The American Indians
The Book of Mormon claims to describe two ancient seaborne migrations from the land of Palestine to the Americas, by Hebrew peoples who are assumed to be ancestors of the Native Americans. The first migration, by the Jaredites, occurred supposedly after the Tower of Babel, and the later one around 600 B.C., just before the Babylonian captivity. In the second migration, Lehi, a supposed descendant of the patriarch Joseph, builds a ship. Guided by a compass, he eventually lands possibly in Central America. Two of his sons become wicked, so God curses them with a dark skin. Many American Indians (Lamanites) are supposed to have descended from these two wicked sons, and the Nephites are the descendants of Lehi’s faithful son. “Nephite history develops the story with faithful prophets, persecutions of the righteous, the construction of cities and temples, and Lamanite wars. The most crucial episode occurs in III and IV Nephi. After His resurrection in Jerusalem, Jesus Christ comes to preach His message to the Lamanites and Nephites, and to establish His true church in the western Hemisphere. A united Christian commonwealth flourishes in peace and prosperity for several centuries. Then comes sin and apostasy and a great division between the Lamanites and Nephites climaxing with a great battle. That battle, in which the Nephite forces number 230,000, takes place at Hill Cumorah in A.D. 400. Moroni, the last survivor and son of the great Nephite general Mormon, stores the golden plates that will be revealed to a latter-day prophet fifteen centuries later” (p. 28).
What many people do not realize is that when the book of Mormon was written, speculation about the Hebrew origin of the American Indians was a commonplace theory. One book that Joseph Smith probably knew was Ethan’s Smith’s View of the Hebrews, which had been published in Vermont in 1825. B.H. Roberts noted “It is often represented by Mormon speakers and writers, that the Book of Mormon was the first to represent the American Indians as descendants of the Hebrews: holding that the Book of Mormon is unique in this”. Then he cites that Ethan Smith, in the index to his 1823 (First Edition) of View of the Hebrews states that from pages 114 to 225 will be devoted “to promiscuous testimonies”, to the main fact for which his book stands, viz. the Hebrew origin of the American Indians. He then brings together a very long list of writers and published books to show that this view was very generally obtained throughout New England” (Studies of the Book of Mormon, pp. 323-324). Added to this, other problems also arise:
· If this supposed migration was such an important event, then why is it not found in the Old Testament Scriptures? Remember, Jesus viewed the Old Testament as being completely reliable and not missing any truth (Matthew 5:17-18).
· Why did Jesus give the great commission to go into all the world, and then go Himself? (Matthew 28:19-20)
· How do we explain Jesus’ appearance in North America when Paul said that Jesus has last of all appeared to him? (1 Corinthians 15:8).
· Seeing that the book of Acts describes the gospel going forth unto the remotest part of the earth (1:8), why are there no conversion stories from North America?
· Why would God have His people migrate to North America, seeing that they would not be able to worship at Jerusalem, the designated place of worship? (Acts 2:5-11; John 4:20-22).
The ignorant Joseph Smith?
Members of the Mormon denomination offer claim that Joseph Smith could not by his own wisdom have written the book of Mormon. Yet Joseph Smith’s mother, Lucy, in her Biographical Sketches of 1853, described her son’s youthful fascination with Indians in the years just prior to his translation of the Book of Mormon. She said, “during our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with very particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spend his whole life with them”. The reader should know that where Joseph Smith grew up are many burial mounds, and some had said during that time that the mounds contained evidence of a lost race.
The First Vision
We should also note that Joseph Smith’s father, Joseph Sr. also claimed to have had visions or mystical experiences. In the Mormon denomination’s canonized version of this first vision, written in 1838, two embodied personages appeared in a bright pillar of light in the ‘Sacred Grove’, now owned by the church in Palmyra. One of the figures, God the Father, pointed to the other and said, “This is my beloved Son. Hear Him!” Joseph then asked guidance as to what church to join, and he was told, “You must join none of them, for they are all wrong”. The reader should be aware that there is more than one version of this story. In 1832 Smith claimed he was in his 16th year of age, in 1835 he said he was about 14, and in 1838, that he was fifteen. There are other discrepancies as well. In 1832 he claimed that the Lord spoke to him, not two persons, but one. In 1832 there is no mention of him being told not to join any of the churches. In 1832 he says that before he ever went to pray, by reading the Bible, he had found no denomination was built on the gospel of Christ, but in 1838 he claims that the reason he went to pray was to find which of the churches was right and to join (For further reading see “Mormonism: A Way That Seemeth Right, by L. Aubrey Gard, pp. 15-19).
The Second Vision
Supposedly the second vision happened three years later, when the “Angel Moroni visited, identifying himself as a member of an ancient race and a messenger sent by God to tell the seventeen-year-old boy that there “was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the sources from whence they sprang”. This book said Moroni, had the “fullness of the everlasting Gospel”. Deposited with these plates were the Urim and Thummim, transparent stones in silver bowls fastened to the breastplate, which were to be used to help translate the book” (p. 24). There are obviously a number of biblical problems with this story:
· The New Testament specifically warns against receiving another “gospel” even if presented by an angel from heaven(Galatians 1:6-9 “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed”). At age seventeen, Joseph Smith claims that an angel appeared to him, telling him about a book that contained the “ fullness of the everlasting Gospel”.
· Why would God keep hidden His word for 1400 years while people perished without His truth? God never did that in the Old Testament nor did He do that in the New Testament, in fact, He wanted His word distributed far and wide (Mark 16:15; Colossians 4:16).
· In the Bible the Holy Spirit simply communicates God’s truth to prophets (2 Peter 1:20-21; John 16:13). There are no gold plates, and there is no translation process with transparent stones. The Holy Spirit simply speaks and prophets or apostles write (Ephesians 3:3-4).
· Why would God bring back the breastplate and the Urim and Thummim, which were part of the Old Testament system, and were a shadow of greater things to come? (Colossians 2:16-17).
More Claims
On May 15, 1829, Smith claimed that John the Baptist appeared to him and Oliver Crowdery (a new local school teacher who acted as Smith’s scribe), instructing them to baptize and ordain each other into what he called the Aaronic priesthood. Yet, from a Biblical point of view, this does not make any sense:
· Only Levites were allowed into this priesthood (Numbers 18:1-7).
· This priesthood was removed when the New Covenant was instituted after the death of Christ (Hebrews 7:11-28).
· These priests ministered in the tabernacle or temple that no longs exists, and is part of an obsolete covenant (Hebrews 8:13-9:6). In the Bible, when people simply assumed a role in the priesthood without Scriptural authority, they were condemned by God (Numbers 16:10; 2 Chronicles 26:16ff).
Shortly after this supposed vision, Smith claimed that Peter, James, and John appeared to initiate them into the Melchizedek priesthood and to instruct them on organizing a new church. Once again we are faced with some problems of Biblical proportion:
· Only Jesus belongs to the Melchizedek priesthood (Hebrews 7:15-17).
· The Melchizedek priesthood is based on the qualification of an endless life and Jesus, seeing that He is eternal, has no successors (Hebrews 7:23-24).
