Welcome to Passion for Christ, the radio outreach of Utah Partnerships for Christ, a mission outreach bringing the true gospel to a great unreached people group right here in the United States. The Latter-day Saints, also called Mormons. Imagine a place where people believe that God the Father was once a man like us. and one day men will become gods like him. Imagine a place where less than 5% of people are Bible-believing Christians.
Imagine a religion that teaches that the purpose of God is to bring about the Godhood of man. That's what LDS doctrine teaches, and that's why we need. Passion for Christ. Welcome to Passion for Christ. This is Russ, your host.
On this episode, we're going to just kind of do something a little bit different. We'll get back to some interviews with people who have come out of the Mormon church and come to Christ and have. put their faith in what he did on the cross for us. uh and and made Christ their Savior. Um But today I thought what I'd do here is Open up a Particular magazine that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has put out for a long time.
This is an edition from February 1987, and it's called The End Sign. And I'm just going to open it up right here. I'm going to just share with you just to give you some ideas of what kind of things the Mormon people have read across, you know. The the the whole nation The cross, probably the world, this publication. This is a publication that has educated and informed a lot of those who are Mormon.
This particular article here, it's called Ezekiel's Sticks and the Gathering of Israel. It says, Ezekiel's ancient prophecy of the two sticks or books does more than foresee the Bible and Book of Mormon. It marks the coming of the Book of Mormon as the beginning of the great Latter-day Gathering.
So, to help us understand some of the reasons why Mormons believe what they believe, I think looking at this article is very helpful. As I read on in this edition of the En Sign, it says, Many critics have long frowned upon the Latter-day Saint interpretation of sticks in Ezekiel's prophecy, Ezekiel 37, 15 through 20, as two books of scripture, the Bible and the Book of Mormon. They insist that sticks, either scrolls or tallies, do not make scriptures, and that even if they do, Latter-day Saints are taking the prophecy out of context. Chapter 30. 37 as a whole discusses the gathering of Israel, not books of scripture.
They suggest that stick really represents a scepter, a tribe, or one of the divided kingdoms of Judah or Israel.
However, then it goes on, it says, However, new light shed on ancient scribal practices by a Mesopotamian archaeological discovery sends us back to this fascinating prophecy for a closer look. And it goes on to say: the translation of stick, a correct interpretation of this prophecy depends primarily on the meaning of the Hebrew word. et, translating stick in the King James Version. Hebrew words, like words in any language, tend to have a general meaning as well as a variety of specific meanings depending on their use. In English, for instance, fire shouted on a rifle range means something different than fire shouted in a hotel.
Idiomatic usage also affects meaning. Have a heart, want her heart, and never lose heart, all use heart in different senses. In each sentence, In each instance, the context determines how the word is used and provides its meaning. The general meaning of ets is wood, as Jewish translators of the Greek Septuagint showed in 259 translations out of 300 uses of ets. Stick is merely one specific meaning used by King James translators.
Others include tree, timber, hell, plank, stock, staff, stock, gallows. A tree isn't a plank, a plank isn't a gallows, and a gallows isn't a stick. But true. Tree, plank, gallows, and stick are all wood. Context in each instance determines the way ets is translated.
Okay. The problem with what they're doing here, they're trying to make it this attempt to show that this chapter and this verse in Ezekiel is showing how in Ezekiel 37, 15 through 20, it's the coming together of the Book of Mormon and the Bible. But if you just look at that whole section of Scripture, you'll see that it's telling you what it is. It's telling you that it's talking about the northern and the southern kingdoms. Of Israel and Judah, and that they will come together.
So, this is all that that is having to do with. And so, all they're talk about. the use of That word is fine, but The context of it is found right in the passage. It's told right in the same chapter. It tells you what these things are.
So to go on and try to rationalize and say, well, no, it means the Book of Mormon, that's really. Stretching it so far out, it's not even funny. It's just, it's just not, it's not. It's not accurate. There's a picture, they have a picture of Ezekiel writing this out in the magazine, and it says: It now seems clear that the prophet Ezekiel was referring to wax.
Writing boards in his prophecy about the sticks of Judah and Joseph. Wooden or worry boards were filled with wax, inscribed with a stylus, then bound together to protect the writing surfaces, and so on and so forth. And they're trying to make this case that this is a prophecy. Of the Book of Mormon and the Bible. And so you might hear that from Mormon missionaries.
And so. Don't be fooled by that. Don't, you know, be kind to the Mormon missionaries or whoever you might be talking to that might try to purport that Ezekiel 37 is a prophecy of how that the book of Mormon and the Bible will come into existence and they'll work as one kind of a Yeah. A unit together to express God's truth. That's just not the case.
That's not the context of that passage of scripture.
So I'm just thumbing through and I'm seeing a lot of like hieroglyphics and various things about writing boards back in the times of antiquity that they have here as I'm going through pages like eight and nine and so forth in this edition, again, which is February 1987 of the Insign magazine.
So they really go to great lengths to try to make this case. And then it talks about how it says the Bible alone is inadequate to affect the gathering.
So it says to understand the need for the joining and how it fits with the crucial. Spiritual gathering, we must know something about the conditions of latter-day Israel. As effective as the Bible is in leading people back to God, it needs divine confirmation. Learned men and spiritual guides, having only the Bible, debate which words are divine, what authority biblical words have for modern man excuse me, and and what a person must do to walk the straight and narrow way to God. They contend over the nature of God, the characteristics of His plan, and the purpose of earth life.
Consequently, while they need decisive answers to their questions, They are divided over what the Bible says. The source of this difficulty began, as explained in Joseph's book, when many plain and precious parts of the gospel were deliberately taken from the Bible to pervert the right ways of the Lord and to blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the children of men. That's from 1 Nephi in the book of Mormon, chapter 13, verse 27. This has led to contention over the simplest aspects of faith. Wow, that is a mouthful.
That is a lot. We've got to stop and just talk about that a little bit. This is really kind of embedded in this whole article. about Ezekiel 37 This is really putting a Kabosh on the Bible and saying that it needs to have a divine confirmation because there's so much confusion. You have to have another book, some other authoritative power to bring down the hammer as to our understanding of what the Bible teaches.
And so. This is on page 11 of this magazine.
So, you know, remember. How that this is influenced Mormon thinking for ages. We hope you enjoyed today's Passion for Christ with Russ East, Executive Director of Utah Partnerships for Christ. Please join us at this time every week on this station as Russ and his guests share their hearts for those who are trapped in Mormonism, never hearing about a God of love who brought salvation in his Son, Jesus. This program is made possible by the loving gifts of listeners.
If you would like to help, you can donate directly on the website upfc.org. Maybe you'd like to chat with Russ about training and bringing a group to Utah for a mission trip. you can call 801-645-7433. That's 801-645-7433. Jesus loves the people of the LDS Church and we want to bring them out of darkness and into the amazing light of Christ.
Join us on that adventure at upfc.org or right here next week for another conversation on the radio with Passion for Christ. Welcome to Passion for Christ, the radio outreach of Utah Partnerships for Christ, a mission outreach bringing the true gospel to a great unreached people group right here in the United States. The Latter-day Saints, also called Mormons. Imagine a place where people believe that God the Father was once a man like us. and one day men will become gods like him.
Imagine a place where less than 5% of people are Bible-believing Christians. Imagine a religion that teaches that the purpose of God is to bring about the Godhood of man. That's what LDS doctrine teaches, and that's why we need... Passion for Christ. 1 Nephi is the first book in the Book of Mormon, chapter 13, verse 27.
And It's just it puts so much doubt. On What the Bible is, how God has preserved His Word, and how you notice there's nothing in there that talks about how we can be students of the Bible languages, and that many people before us have gone on to create tools and resources. Um Going way back to the 1500s, going past the Latin Vulgate, translating the Hebrew and the Greek into Latin and then into English. And there's things if you want to. Have fun and look up this word.
It's the Complutensian Polyglot. It's a city in Spain, and it was in conjunction with a university, and it was three or four different languages of the Bible, all put on a page, kind of like a parallel Bible or just like a multi-language. uh a multi a Bible of with multi multiple languages. Polyglot, glossia, glossia mean language, poly mean many.
So, It's a resource. It was back in the 1500s, and people like Erasmus and other people that started putting the Bible. Into into modern English. These would be resources you could draw from in order to understand the meanings and context is so important.
So, again. This article is is really lengthy and it's really trying to Boy, look at the header. It says, The Bible alone is inadequate to affect the gathering. And so. It's making one really doubt the Bible.
Doubt our ability to understand it, to be able to apply it. It's putting much doubt into people's minds that says that people contend over the nature of God, the characteristics of his plan, and the purpose of earth life.
So, when we talk about that, you know, we've talked about that on this program before, just the nature of God. That God is not, that the Father is not an exalted, glorified, resurrected man who. Was a man just like Myself, who lived on a planet somewhere in the cosmos. And then he grew and followed the plans of the God before him. And then just this myriad of gods.
I mean, that's more closely resembling Greek mythology than the way that Isaiah 43:10 describes the nature of God. But you see these Mormon people Have been They've bought into something that is not accurate. It's not what the Bible teaches. And it's banking on, and it's depending on this idea of a need for modern prophets. And the idea of Hebrews chapter 1 that God has spoken to us through his Son and that.
You know, that John the Baptist, it says, In one of the Gospels, I can't think of the passage right now, but it says the prophets ended at John the Baptist, basically. See? And so. And so there's this concept that we have to depend on a church. And this kind of goes back even to Catholicism.
And that the emphasis is on the church. And it's not on God's Spirit, God's Word. And so. Are we to have a local church, an ecclesia? Yes.
Are we to respect our rulers? Yes, but. What has happened in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is they have strayed away from these things about the characteristics of God's plan and the purpose of earth life. Yeah. I don't think you're going to find a wording that says to give God glory.
I don't think that's going to be the purpose of life on earth, according to Mormon claims. Sadly, it's more about you becoming exalted, you becoming a God yourself, and becoming like Heavenly Father. And that would be the way they would describe it. And so these are some things that are in this magazine. I'm going to keep flipping through here.
We've got pictures of the Mormon missionaries, and they're just sitting in somebody's living room, and they're dressed nicely, and they're presenting these things about the fullness of the gospel message. And so we see that. And then we keep on turning, and then we see an article on links in the chain of good. Activation work is missionary work among the saints, says President M. Allen Christensen of the St.
Louis, Missouri Stake. And so there's an emphasis on good behavior, of doing good. And so we see this throughout. We see this throughout Mormon life and and We have to admire this this desire to be good and to do good things But we have to remember that the motivation for this, sadly, has to do with a personal. Progression.
And it's it's all about Being worthy of God's grace, being worthy of His. His his his love, his um This kind of exaltation that is yours to achieve on your own merits. They would say that it's because of what Jesus did, opens the door for you to carry this process out.
However, it's still your valiancy, it's your worthiness. And we find from looking through the book of Romans. and even understanding what James talks about. There's showing people that you have faith, and then there's having the type of faith that is. Which is purely trusting in the work of Jesus, what he did.
So It's very important to understand this. Joseph Smith looks at love and self-righteousness in the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son.
So here's a whole article on Joseph Smith, his teaching on those biblical topics.
So you're going to get that from Joseph Smith. Who in Doctrine and Covenants 132 said that he's done more for the salvation of man except for Jesus Christ?
So read Doctrine and Covenants chapter 132. Read the whole chapter and you'll find that. You'll find things about the new and everlasting covenant, this idea about. But uh polygamy. And how this is this law, this the new and everlasting covenant.
And, you know, it's just sad, you guys, that. That this kind of Teaching is out there and And we're not just picking on this particular group, but but so many groups Whether it's Jehovah's Witness or Islam or Buddhism, it all reverts back to yourself or another. Kind of a strata of authority other than just simply Opening the Bible, looking at the context. looking at the Old Testament and the New Testament and and understanding what what it says. Looking on in this in this magazine, you see a a Article and it's about Orson Pratt, who was a leader in the Mormon church, and it says, Gospel seeds in Scottish soil.
So it's got an illustration of him preaching, looks like in Scotland. And so he was, it says, Elder Orson Pratt and Elder Samuel Mulliner put forth a prodigious. Missionary effort in Edinburgh. They preached every night in the streets and seven times each Sabbath. By the end of the summer, twenty three had been baptized.
So yeah, there's a a book called The Seer by Orson Pratt, and you can learn more about Mormon thinking by looking at that book. But this whole article Is giving a history of missionary work up in Scotland by Orson Pratt. And it goes on quite a bit. Then there's another article. It says, I want a dad too.
The widow's young son needed a father for the outing. Who would remember him?
So this is more of a contemporary kind of a story. Maybe it's based on something true, or maybe it's based on like a. there's a fictional story or something or ba based on some facts or something, but just kind of like a little fictional story here, like a just a two page. And then you turn the page more and and you see uh it says sand and sea and the gospel net. And uh we just see the work that the Mormons have done.
It looks like in Tonga and Samoa and Fiji. And wow. Yeah, it's strong over there. It's strong over there in the islands. And so.
Pray for the people over in Hawaii. There's a work going on in Oahu to try to reach the people on the North Shore. And We've been given an opportunity to speak at a church in Honolulu, and we had a mission team come out from Honolulu about nine years ago.
So it'll be fun to go back there in April and to connect with some people there and speak at some gathering and at a church there in Oahu and to try to encourage the work that they're trying to do up in the North Shore near BYU, Hawaii, and near the Polynesian Cultural Center and the Temple on Oahu.
So there's that article, and it goes into some. Details there of missionaries. And their work on the islands.
So it looks like they have put in quite a bit of effort on the islands.
So I figure if they can go there, hey, if the Lord's opening the door for me to go there, And then I should go if the Lord's opening that door.
So if you'd like to help just continue to pray for our ministry and and I don't go to Hawaii all that often.
Okay, this is this is pretty unusual, but um There's a lot of Mormons out there, and they're making an impact, and so. Anyway, send me an email, russ at upfc.org. That's russ at upfc.org. And if you need help talking to Mormons, if you need some context understanding where they're coming from, you know, if you'd like me to come out to your church and do a workshop, I'd love to do that. Love to do a QA session on Zoom with your youth group or with your.
You know, your church family or a small group or something like that. I've done that before, and that can be really fun, and that kind of opens up some.
some doors for ministry to help people in your church reach the Mormon missionaries more effectively.
So give me a call if you'd like, 801-645-7433. Send me an email, russ at upfc.org. That's russ at upfc.org. Our website is just the acronym for Utah Partnerships for Christ. It's www.u is in Utah, P is in Partnerships, F is in Force, C is in Christ.org.
Appreciate your prayers and any financial support you can send our way. We'll see you again next time here on Passion for Christ. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah. We hope you enjoyed today's Passion for Christ with Russ East, Executive Director of Utah Partnerships for Christ.
Please join us at this time every week on this station as Russ and his guests share their hearts for those who are trapped in Mormonism, never hearing about a God of love who brought salvation in his Son, Jesus. This program is made possible by the loving gifts of listeners. If you would like to help, you can donate directly on the website upfc.org. Maybe you'd like to chat with Russ about training and bringing a group to Utah for a mission trip. you can call 801-645-7433.
That's 801-645-7433. Jesus loves the people of the LDS Church and we want to bring them out of darkness and into the amazing light of Christ. Join us on that adventure at upfc.org or right here next week for another conversation on the radio with Passion for Christ.
