Wednesday, February 24, 2021

The Plain and Precious Things

As I've read through 1Nephi 13, I have wondered, “what are the plain and precious things which were removed from the Bible?” You can't tell from just reading the Bible because you don't know what isn't there that should be, so how do you tell? The Book of Mormon helps, but it's still not a clear voice on what is missing. While I was pondering on this a couple of days ago, I came across a lecture by Hugh Nibley which he gave in 1964 at BYU. It does give some interesting insights. Here is a link to an MP3 audio of the lecture. Here's the print version.

In it, Bro. Nibley said the scrolls of Qumran and the books of Nag Hammadi Library give the answer to that question. The Dead Sea Scrolls as the scrolls of Qumran are also known, were written and collected by residents of a small community known today as "Khirbet Qumran". While it is not known for certain which religious sect they were, most think they were Essenes: they were Jews. They taught the Jews at Jerusalem were in a state of apostasy, so they were trying to get back to a more pure adherence to Jewish law and scripture. 


The residents of Nag Hammadi were Christians. It is located in Egypt on the Nile River about fifty miles north of Luxor. The documents in question are dated from about the first to fourth century after Christ.



What Bro. Nibley did is compare what was taught in the texts from these sites with what we have in the Bible today. He identified at least these four things:

1. The doctrine of literal resurrection of the body after death and marriage that transcends death. While Paul touches on it in 1 Corinthians 15, and the Savior often refers to Himself as the "resurrection and the life," the people of Nag Hammadi taught the doctrine much more clearly. They were branded by the church at Rome as heretics for this and other teachings.

2. The coming apostasy and loss of God's authority. According the Nibley, the people at Nag Hammadi were branded as heretics by the church in Rome for their beliefs. Nibley said they "buried" their records, as the people of Qumran did, in anticipation of a time when those records would be valued again. The Book of Mormon has its own version of this tragic loss of priesthood authority. Here we have two witnesses separated by vast distances of the same event.

3. The Savior’s post-mortal ministry (40 days) to the Jews at Jerusalem. If found this particularly interesting. The account Nibley cites gives additional insight into the Nephite's request to do for them what the Savior did in Jerusalem. See 3 Nephi 17:12-24. There's no way Joseph Smith knew of this in 1829, yet the close parallel is striking, even breathtaking.

4.    The "Church of Anticipation," or a group of people who were expecting a soul saving Messiah as opposed to a militaristic Messiah who would free Israel from bondage. This was the whole focus of the community at Qumran. The Bible doesn't mention any such thing, but that's the dominant theme of the Book of Mormon: a people looking forward to the coming Savior and His atonement for them. The community of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls are a clear Old World validation of this premise.

He touches on more than these items, but it is enough for me to answer the question: "what was taken out?"

Monday, February 8, 2021

Overcoming Bad Habits

 This is a new insight for me. I wish I could remember how I got into it, but I was reading Jacob 5, particularly where the Lord was clearing out the bad fruit to make room for the good fruit (v65). As I read that, I had the “ahah” moment that there is a personal application to this passage too. Namely, that the way to repent when you are changing behaviors or overcoming bad habits, is to replace them with something better.




For example: I love chips and snacks. I have a belly to prove it. My new weight-loss plan is to snack on celery rather than chips. I still get to munch, but rather than munch on high calorie, fat saturated tortilla chips, I’ll munch on a green food. I’ll get the satisfaction of chewing without the caloric impact. There are so many ways to apply this rule, I can’t think of them all. It’s good stuff.

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Mists of Darkness

It is surprising, though it shouldn’t be at how, with all our access to knowledge and information, we live in profound mists of darkness. How can two people or different groups of people see the same information and come to such completely different understanding of what has happened? How can both be right? Yet, there are times when both are right and wrong about the issue... at the same time. How does that happen? Even in our highly connected world, it's easy to live in darkness or ignorance of the truth.

How do we deal with it?

We must first understand what is actually happening: Another way to describe our circumstances is we choose, because of pride and mistaken assumptions, to ignore the voice of the Spirit. We listen only to that which we agree with and look with disdain on information, which true, undermines our closely held beliefs. To wit: we walk in the light of our own understanding. We do so, often glibly unaware that there is far more to every story we read about. Much of that additional context, if we knew it, would profoundly change our understanding and judgement of the story.

Our only real recourse is to rely upon Heavenly Father. But how do we do that? We deal with each situation as it arises by trying to learn both sides of an issue then thinking through and asking for confirming counsel from Heavenly Father. If we get it, we proceed. If we don’t, then we exercise the faith and humility to accept it and change our mind: to acknowledge, we are wrong. Only this way, will we learn to see things as they are.

Additionally, I have learned that while tweets and sound bites say one thing, the nuances of the story tell a profoundly different and more powerful accounting of the event. Sometimes the story, in ignorance, is exaggerated beyond it’s true accounting. Sometimes we think a person's motivation to act is malice even when ineptitude is the better explanation.

Again the only safe way forward is to live the Gospel: to live the principle of revelation. By doing so, when we hear of something, we also hear the whispering of the Spirit to give us the necessary context to accurately know what our role and response should be. Or not receiving that, we exercise patience and withhold judgement and say, to ourselves if need be, “let the Lord judge between me and thee.”