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Re: Was Joseph Smith a false prophet?

JOSEPH SMITH WAS DEAD RIGHT (literally) REGARDING TWO PROPHESIES

A VAIN PROPHET WILL BE THROWN DOWN: July 1828. D&C 3:4.

For although a man may have many revelations, and have power to do many mighty works, yet if he boasts in his own strength, and sets at naught the counsels of God, and follows after the dictates of his own will and carnal desires, he must fall and incur the vengeance of a just God upon him.
FULFILLED: On May 26, 1844, Joseph Smith made the following statement in a public sermon (Brodie p 374, HC 6:408-412):

Come on, ye persecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! For I will come out on the top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam. A large majority of the whole have stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. The followers of Jesus ran away from Him; but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet.

At this time Smith was secretly married polygamously to over 30 women, some of them wives of men still living. Many who knew of these secret marriages accused him of changing the doctrine of the church to satisfy his own carnal desires in violation of the Book of Mormon (Jacob 2:23-29, 3:5) and D&C 49:16.
Almost exactly one month after this boast, on June 27, 1844, Smith was killed by his enemies in a gun battle at Carthage Jail.
NOTE: For some reason, this prophecy by Joseph Smith, although it was fulfilled quickly and literally, is rarely cited by Mormons.

GLOBAL WARMING: Nov 3, 1831. D&C 133:26.

Those who are in the north countries... shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence.
FULFILLED: Smith's uncanny prediction of Global Warming resulting from hydrocarbons taken by smiting the rocks has been confirmed by no less of an authority than the Nobel Laureate AlGore.

JOSEPH SMITH WAS DEAD WRONG (literally) REGARDING DOZENS OF OTHER PROPHESIES

You can see a partial list of 50 or so of Smith's failed prophecies HERE.

The Nature of Prophets and Prophecy
by John A. Tvedtnes

The message of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that God continues to speak to mankind through prophets. It is the same message delivered anciently. But many have challenged this belief. Numerous anti-Mormon pamphlets have been published with the aim of proving that Joseph Smith is a false prophet. Several critics have compiled lists of dozens of supposed “false prophecies” uttered by Joseph Smith.

The typical critic makes light of the admonition of LDS missionaries that people should pray to know from God whether Joseph Smith was a true prophet. This, they insist, is not the “biblical” method of determining the truth. If this were true, however, the promise of James 1:5 is false, along with Jesus’ promise that those who ask will receive (Matthew 7:7) and that “all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive” (Matthew 21:22). Ironically, those who preach against praying for divine confirmation of truth often believe that one must pray and confess the name of Jesus in order to receive a witness that one has been “saved.”

The Biblical Test for Prophets
Joseph Smith’s critics typically cite Deuteronomy 18:20-22 as the biblical test for false prophets. The passage reads as follows:

But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

Here, the Lord describes both the false prophet and the false prophecy. A false prophet either speaks for false gods or attributes to the Lord things that the Lord did not command him to speak. The Deuteronomy 18 passage establishes two criteria for a false prophecy:

It must be uttered in the name of the Lord. This means that an off-the-wall comment by a prophet cannot be taken as a prophecy, pretended or otherwise, unless he declares that he is delivering the word of the Lord.
The prophecy must fail. But no timeframe is established for the fulfillment of a prophecy.
The Deuteronomy passage does not say that a man is a false prophet because his prophecy failed, only that the failed prophecy is false. This being the case, it is incorrect to conclude, as most critics do, that one false prophecy (even if some true prophecies are given) makes Joseph Smith a false prophet. The danger in so defining the Deuteronomy passage lies in the fact that there is a tendency on the part of non-believers to “explain away” the prophecy, while believers seek ways to defend it. Thus, the process of determining the truth or falseness of a prophecy becomes, to some extent, subjective.

Consequently, a critic of Joseph Smith can look at a hundred of his prophecies, find one that, in his judgment, is in error, and thereby conclude that Joseph himself was a false prophet. That this has, in fact, happened with true prophets is evidenced in the Bible itself, where we read Jesus’ statement about the stoning and rejection of the ancient prophets of Israel (Matthew 23:37). These men were undoubtedly stoned because, in the judgment of their contemporaries, they were false prophets. A good example of the rejection of a prophet is the story of Jeremiah, who was imprisoned and mistreated by the leaders of Judah, who refused to believe his message.

President Joseph Fielding Smith, commenting on the passage from Deuteronomy 18, wrote,

When is a prophet a prophet? whenever he speaks under the inspiration and influence of the Holy Ghost… When prophets write and speak on the principles of the gospel, they should have the guidance of the Spirit. If they do, then all that they say will be in harmony with the revealed word. If they are in harmony then we know that they have not spoken presumptuously. Should a man speak or write, and what he says is in conflict with the standards which are accepted, with the revelations the Lord has given, then we may reject what he has said, no matter who he is. ( Doctrines of Salvation 1:187)

The Double Standard
Based on the false premise that “all you need is one false prophecy to have a false prophet,” some critics have ignored many of Joseph Smith’s prophecies and have zeroed in on ones they consider to be false. But they typically identify unfulfilled commandments, opinions, and counsel as “false prophecies.” In doing so, they forsake the rules laid out in Deuteronomy 18:20-22, ignoring the fact that the passage defines a false prophecy as one uttered in the name of the Lord which does not come to pass.

The main problem is that the critics do not apply these same standards to biblical prophecies. And when we try to show that, by these standards, many of the biblical prophets fail the tests they have set up for Joseph Smith, we are accused of “Bible-slamming.” To those who ascribe more divinity to the Bible than to God, such a “sin” is worse than blasphemy itself. Honesty, however, impels us to submit the biblical prophets to the same tests as those applied to Joseph Smith.

For this reason, following the logic of the critics, we would have to conclude that Moses-to whom the revelation in Deuteronomy 18:20-22 is ascribed-was a false prophet. In Numbers 25:13, he said, in the name of the Lord, that Phinehas, his grand nephew, would hold the priesthood eternally. But if Hebrews 7:11-12 is correct, the Aaronic priesthood is not eternal. In this particular example, Moses fills the requirement for the test of Deuteronomy much more closely than does Joseph Smith in most of the examples of “false prophecies” cited by the critics. How, then, can Latter-day Saints accept both Joseph Smith and Moses as true prophets, regarding their prophecies as divinely-inspired? The answer lies in the fact that prophecy is typically conditional.

The Conditional Nature of Prophecy
It was the Lord himself, through the biblical prophet Jeremiah, who explained the conditional nature of prophecy:

At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them. (Jeremiah 18:7-10)1

Jeremiah himself exemplified the principle of conditional prophecy when he told king Zedekiah, in the name of the Lord, that he

http://www.fairlds.org/Bible/Nature_of_Prophets_and_Prophecy.html