Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism.
What does the patriarch Noah have to do with Christmas? Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry.
With me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. The Mormon Church put out a Gospel topic essay simply titled, Noah. Now this Gospel topic essay is certainly not as well known, has not been given the notoriety as some of the other Gospel topic essays having to do with, I think, much more controversial aspects of Mormonism, such as race in the priesthood or plural marriage and Joseph Smith and Kirtland and Nauvoo, or even how the Book of Abraham was translated.
But it still has its own level of controversy. And that's what we want to talk about today, because what does the patriarch Noah have to do with Christmas? Now if you were to ask most Christians that question, they probably wouldn't have a clue. I think if you asked most Mormons that question, I think they wouldn't have a clue either.
They might not. Well, according to this essay, it starts off by saying, Noah was the son of Lamech, the grandson of Methuselah, and the great-grandson of Enoch. The Scriptures list him as the tenth patriarch from Adam.
At that sentence, I would probably say I agree with what I've read so far. But then it starts to go on to talk about how Noah was ordained to the priesthood when he was 10 years old by his grandfather, Methuselah. Now there's nothing in the Bible that even hints of this. This is all what Mormons call latter-day revelation. And if you've listened to this program for any amount of time, you probably know our opinion of that is that Joseph Smith can say just about anything he wants and Mormons are gonna defend it. They usually will never challenge him on these issues and they certainly don't seem to want to look for any type of biblical support or biblical evidence to back up a claim that Joseph Smith makes. And what you just said is so important because Thomas S. Monson could not probably get away with the same kinds of things that Joseph Smith was able to get away with. He has a special category in Mormonism.
Today, they would say that Monson only has prophetic authority whenever he's speaking with that authority at General Conference or doing something that God must have told him to do, but Joseph Smith said a lot of things that seem to be off the cuff sometimes and they're accepted as being fact. In this essay titled simply, Noah, it asks this question, what role did Noah play in the events surrounding the birth of Christ? And it says Noah was also known as the angel Gabriel and was sent to announce the birth of Jesus Christ, see Luke 1 19 and 26, also teachings of presence of the church Joseph Smith page 104. He was sent by God to tell Zacharias that he and his wife Elizabeth would have a son they should name John. This was John the Baptist who would prepare the way for the Savior, see Luke 1 5-23. Gabriel also visited Mary and told her that she would be the mother of the Son of God, see Luke 1 26-38, which we read yesterday, and it says learn more about the birth and life of Jesus Christ our Savior.
So Noah, it says, was known as the angel Gabriel. This goes back to the statement that I've made before and why it's so difficult for me as a Christian to hear Mormons tell the Christmas story. Living in Utah, hearing Mormons try to tell this Christmas story, it's troubling to me because knowing what Mormons believe regarding certain aspects of this story, I think taints the whole story for me, like even the virgin birth. We know that Mormon leaders have taught a story of the virgin birth that we as Christians would find abhorrent. Because if Mary was in fact a literal child of God in the pre-existence, you're having God, according to some leaders, coming down to earth with a body of flesh and bones impregnating Mary, who is his own daughter. Some Mormon apologists have actually wondered why that bothers us so much.
Well, if that's true, then we have what we call incest going on here, and certainly that would bother us. But when I hear also about the announcement that is given by Gabriel to Mary about the coming birth of the Savior, now I'm hearing, wait a minute, this is Noah, the guy that built the ark, showing up to Mary? Where in the world do you get that in Scripture? And you certainly don't get it from the verses they've given us. They give us Luke 1 19 and 26, has nothing to do with Noah, it has everything to do with Gabriel, and the only other passage that's used to support this idea, Bill, is D&C 128 21, section 128 verse 21.
This is what it says. I want to quote it because I've read it, I'm trying to figure out where Noah is as a part of this. It says, And again, the voice of God in the chamber of old Father Whitmer, in Fayette, Seneca County, and at sundry times and in divers places, through all the travels and tribulations of this church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the voice of Michael the archangel, the voice of Gabriel and of Raphael and of the divers angels, from Michael or Adam down to the present time, all declaring their dispensation, their rights, their keys, their honors, their majesty and glory, and the power of their priesthood, giving line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, giving us consolation by holding forth that which is to come, confirming our hope. I mean, I hear we have Michael talked about, Gabriel, both talked about in the Bible, Raphael talked about in the Apocrypha, which I have to ask that too, is if Joseph Smith is going to cite that Raphael was an actual literal angel of God and we only know about him through the Apocrypha, is Joseph Smith giving some kind of credence to the Apocrypha in this particular case? Yeah, D&C section 128, the preface reads this way, an epistle from Joseph Smith the prophet to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, containing further revelations on baptism for the dead, dated at Nauvoo, Illinois, September 6, 1842, and not once in that entire supposed revelation is Noah's name ever mentioned. I'm not sure why the church put out a Gospel Topics essay with the name Noah and brings out such, I think, an outlandish statement to say that Gabriel and Noah are the same person and yet they provide us verses that show us nothing at all.
You take that way out of its context to be able to come to that kind of conclusion. Well, it's kind of like the essay that also tried to give the impression that people in the Old Testament were actually commanded to practice polygamy, and what was the one reference they gave? Genesis chapter 16, and that there's nothing in Genesis chapter 16 that hints that God ever commanded Abram to take on another wife. And how many people reading this are not that impressed with footnotes, but they know they're there, but they would never look them up like you and I do.
It's not that this is a brand new idea, certainly, that's not the case. Orson F. Whitney was the son of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney and Horace Whitney. Helen Mar Kimball, of course, was the 14-year-old wife of Joseph Smith, and the church has admitted that now, so they've said it publicly, and if you don't know that as a Latter-day Saint, then it's not us making that up.
Your church has admitted to this. Well, Orson F. Whitney became an apostle in the Mormon Church, and in a conference message that he gave in April of 1927, he said, Noah, whose other name is Gabriel, the angel of the resurrection, how could we do without him? He holds the keys to bring us forth from the grave. He is one of our ancestors. His three sons re-peopled the earth after the flood. Shem, people in Asia, Ham, Africa, and Japheth, Europe.
We are from Shem, through Abraham and the house of Israel, though mixed with the children of Japheth, the Gentiles. Again, where does he come up with all this? He doesn't need any real specific Bible verses to support it. This is a part of the restored gospel, which is really code word for Joseph Smith just tells us whatever he wants to tell us, and we're supposed to believe it as being truth, which is certainly not always the case when we look at a lot of the things that Joseph Smith teaches and we fact check it. According to the Bible, we find that the Bible does not support what Joseph Smith is teaching. And it comes back to what we were talking about yesterday when we were talking about being an angel in Mormonism is really not that good of a thing when you think about how they became angels. I quoted part of Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball page 51.
I want to quote it again right now, Bill, if I could, and then I want to give the rest of the quote. It says, Those without eternal marriage may be angels. Now the angels will be the people who did not go to the temple, who did not have their work done in the temple.
And if there are some of us who make no effort to cement these ties, we may be angels for the rest of eternity. But if we do all in our power and seal our wives or husbands to us, then we may become gods and pass by the angels in heaven. Some might say, well, I'd be satisfied to just become an angel, but you would not. One would never be satisfied just to be a ministering angel to wait upon other people when he could be the king himself. So are we to assume that when Noah, as Gabriel, appears to Mary and Elizabeth, that he's not really happy at that point in his life?
According to Spencer Kimball, he's not supposed to be satisfied. He should want to become a god. And what we had read from Joseph Fielding Smith, the idea that you are eternally going to be an angel, doesn't seem to allow room for you to ever become a god. So why do you have to go and be a human and then become an angel unless you did something unworthy? Yeah, Joseph Fielding Smith, in the reference that you just made, Doctrines of Salvation, volume 2, page 73, said that these angels did not abide my law, therefore they cannot be enlarged, but remain separately and singly without exaltation in their saved condition to all eternity, and from henceforth are not gods, but are angels of God forever and ever. Now a Mormon might say, well yeah, but he's just singling out some of the angels out there.
And I have to ask, well how does he know this? How does he know to single out certain angels from other angels? It seems like if you become an angel, I'm giving the impression that you were not as good a human as you possibly could have been. Otherwise you would be God material, and as you have just cited, to be a god is really the goal of the faithful Latter-day Saints, certainly not to be an angel. Let's go to Moroni, who's considered to probably to be the most famous angel in all of Mormonism. I think that most Mormons lift him up to a high place. He actually was the last living Nephite, according to the Book of Mormon story. He compiled the plates that put them into the Hill Cumor for Joseph Smith to find, then he comes back and delivers them. He's the one that wrote Moroni 10-4, which says you're supposed to pray about this book.
If he was an unrighteous person in life, for whatever reason, then why should I accept Moroni 10-4 or anything else that he had to say? It does seem to raise the question that possibly there was something in these angels' mortal life that prevented them from moving on to godhood eventually, that they had to go through this particular stage. I want to reiterate though, we don't find anywhere in the Bible where it talks about humans becoming angels.
As I gave before the references Nehemiah 9-6, Psalm 148 and Colossians 1-16 makes it pretty clear that God created angels as angels. So in conclusion I would say that Noah becoming Gabriel is not a good sign for Noah. You would think so, but how would Mormons digest all that?
That's a good question. I don't even know if a lot of Mormons really thought about this. Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org, where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism. to MRN to help give us a much needed financial boost into the new year, your tax deductible gifts are much appreciated and will be used to further our efforts at Mormonism Research Ministry.
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