A God of Miracles (Real Mormon/LDS)

With Moroni of old, I believe in a God of miracles. Moroni wrote to the people of our dispensation, “Behold, I will show unto you a God of miracles, … and it is that same God who created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are” (Morm. 9:11). Moroni proclaimed that Jesus Christ did many mighty miracles, that many mighty miracles were wrought by the hands of the Apostles, and that a God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever must be a God of miracles today (see Morm. 9:18; Morm. 9:9).

Think of the miracles of the Old Testament. Remember Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. For all future generations of Israelites, the great miracles that led to their deliverance from Egypt provided undeniable proof of God’s existence and His love for them.

Many Book of Mormon prophets, including Nephi, pointed to the story of Moses to encourage faith and belief in a God who could deliver His people in their distress (see 1 Ne. 4:1–3). Other Book of Mormon prophets reminded the people that they themselves had witnessed miracles that should convince them of God’s power.

In the New Testament, the Apostle John shared his reason for recording many of the Savior’s miracles—namely, “that [we] might believe that Jesus is the Christ” (John 20:31).

In this dispensation we witness the great miracle of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the earth. It began when a young boy entered a grove of trees near Palmyra, New York, and poured out his heart and his questions to a God he believed could answer him—the God of miracles. And miracles have followed in this dispensation—mighty miracles—including the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, which is itself another testament of Jesus Christ.

Just as important as these “mighty miracles” are the smaller “private miracles” that teach each of us to have faith in the Lord. These come as we recognize and heed the promptings of the Spirit in our lives.

I am grateful for a teacher who encouraged his students to keep a journal of the whisperings or promptings of the Spirit in their lives. He directed us to note what we felt and what resulted. Little things became evident. One day I was frantically trying to complete some assignments and prepare for a trip. I had just been down to the laundry area of the dorm to move my clothes from the washer to the dryer. Unfortunately, all the dryers were in use, and they all had many minutes to go. I went back upstairs discouraged, knowing by the time those dryers finished, I had to be on the road. I had barely returned to my room when I felt prompted to go back downstairs and check the laundry again. Foolishness, I thought—I had just been there, and I didn’t have time. But because I was trying to listen, I went. Two of the dryers were empty—and I was able to meet all my commitments. Could the Lord possibly have been concerned about smoothing my way in such a small but, to me, important matter? I have learned since through many such experiences that the Lord will help us in every aspect of our lives when we are trying to serve Him and do His will.

I believe that all of us can bear witness to these small miracles. We know children who pray for help to find a lost item and find it. We know of young people who gather the courage to stand as a witness of God and feel His sustaining hand. We know friends who pay their tithing with the last of their money and then, through a miracle, find themselves able to pay their tuition or their rent or somehow obtain food for their family. We can share experiences of prayers answered and priesthood blessings that gave courage, brought comfort, or restored health. These daily miracles acquaint us with the hand of the Lord in our lives.

My mind has been much on this topic because of an experience our family has had in the last few months. Our daughter and her husband took a while to find each other and then, though they wanted children with all their hearts, over a number of years had difficulty realizing that dream. They prayed and they sought priesthood blessings and medical help, and eventually were thrilled to learn they were expecting twins.

Things did not go smoothly, however, and three and a half months before the babies were due to arrive, the mother-to-be found herself in the labor and delivery section of the hospital. The doctors at first were hopeful that they could stop the labor for a few more weeks. Quickly, however, the question became, would they even have the 48 hours necessary for medication to prepare the babies’ immature lungs to function?

A nurse came in from the newborn intensive care unit to show the couple pictures of the machines the babies would be hooked up to if they were born alive. She explained the risks for eye damage, for lung collapse, for physical impairment, for brain damage. The couple listened, humbled yet hopeful, and then, despite all the doctors could do, it was obvious that these babies were coming.

They were born alive. First the baby girl and then the baby boy—weighing less than four pounds together—were rushed to the intensive care unit and put on ventilators, with umbilical tubes and intravenous lines and constant attention. They can’t have too much light, they can’t have too much noise, their chemical balances need constant monitoring, as the hospital, with millions of dollars of equipment and many wonderful doctors and nurses, attempted to replicate the miracle of a mother’s womb.

There are multitudes of little miracles every day: a collapsed lung heals and then, despite the odds, continues to function properly; pneumonia is beaten back; more deadly infections invade and are overcome; IV lines go bad and are replaced. After two and a half months, the baby boy has gained two pounds and can breathe with an oxygen supplement. His ventilator is gone, he learns to eat, and his grateful parents take him home with monitors attached.

The baby girl keeps pulling her ventilator tube out, setting off alarms across the nursery. Maybe she wants to keep up with her brother, we think, but her throat closes off each time, and she just can’t breathe on her own. Her throat is so inflamed that at times the respiratory therapists have great difficulty reinserting the tube, and she almost dies. Her normal progress is stymied by her continued dependence on the ventilator.

Finally, after her baby brother has been home for two months, the doctors feel they are forced to suggest surgery for her—a surgery that will allow her to breathe by opening a hole in her throat, a surgery that might solve the stomach problems by opening a hole in her side, but a surgery that will impact her little body for many more months and maybe for the rest of her life. As the parents wrestled with this decision, a beloved aunt sent a message to all the family. She explained the situation—the critical issue of timing, the importance of getting off the ventilator—and suggested that we join our faith once again, and in prayer and fasting ask for one more miracle—if it was the Lord’s will. We would culminate our fast with a prayer the evening of December 3.

Let me read from a letter that was sent to the family the morning of December 4. “Dearest Family, Wonderful news! Blessings from the Lord. Our heartfelt thanks for your prayers and fasting in behalf of our little girl. Yesterday morning she came off the ventilator and has been off for 24 hours at this writing. To us, it is a miracle. The medical staff are still guarded about predicting the future, but we are so grateful to the Lord and to you. We are praying that this will mark the beginning of the end of her hospital stay. And we even dare to hope that she’ll be home for Christmas.”

She did make it home for Christmas, and both babies are currently doing “just fine.” Our family has had its own “parting of the Red Sea,” and we are prepared to testify that there is today, as there was yesterday and will be forever, a “God of miracles” who loves His children and desires to bless them.

Now, we know, as you do, that all petitions to the Lord and all fasts do not receive this same hoped-for answer. Our extended family also has faced the death of loved ones, serious illness, the trial of divorce, and children who are choosing another path. We do not always understand the reasons behind the tests that come with mortality. But our faith has grown, and perhaps yours has too, as we have watched loved ones, friends, and people we know only by reputation endure with faith in the Lord the most severe trials. They, too, know the God of miracles and witness in their extremity that whatever the future holds for them, the Lord knows them and loves them and is blessing them. They are sealed to Him and to each other forever, and they are willing to submit their wills to His.

How have they come to such a point? How do we access the quiet miracle that the Lord works as He transforms us, His children, into worthy heirs of the kingdom of God? I believe it is made possible because “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). I believe it comes as we yield to the enticings of the Spirit, put off the natural man, and are filled with the love of God (see Mosiah 3:19). “Through the Atonement of [Jesus] Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel” (A of F 1:3). All mankind—that includes me, that includes you—we can each have part in the Atonement, the greatest of all God’s miracles.

God did part the Red Sea, and He did give us the Book of Mormon. He can heal us of our sins, and He can and will bless us, His children, in our daily lives. I know that He lives and loves us and is today a God of miracles, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

So PD....explain the following..in your own words. Can you answer the 5 questions? Will you? I will await your answers. In your own word of course...no links. Thanks-

Brigham H. Roberts

The Disappointment of B.H. Roberts

Five Questions that Forced a Mormon General Authority to Abandon the Book of Mormon

Brigham H. Roberts is revered in Mormon history as one of the Mormon Church's greatest theologians and historians. His six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church is still one of the most respected works of Mormon history. Roberts was a General Authority, member of the Mormon Church's First Council of the Seventy, a group which is second only to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. In 1898 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, although he was never seated because he was a polygamist.

As a young missionary in Tennessee, Roberts began to formulate his defense of the Book of Mormon. Upon one occasion he debated a Campbellite minister on the authority of the Book of Mormon. That debate was the beginning of his reputation within the Mormon Church as a leading defender of the Book of Mormon. In time he became recognized as the expert Book of Mormon apologist. In 1909 he published his chief defense of the Book of Mormon, entitled, New Witnesses for God.

The Doubts Begin

In 1921 an event occurred which forever changed Roberts' life. A young Mormon from Salina, Utah, William Riter, wrote to Apostle James E. Talmage with five questions challenging the Book of Mormon. Riter had been asked the questions by a man from Washington, D.C. who was investigating the claims of Mormonism. Talmage was too busy to answer the questions, so he sent the letter on to Roberts until his death in 1933. The study deeply challenged his faith in the Book of Mormon and ultimately changed his opinion of divine origin.

Roberts' personal struggle with his waning confidence in the Book of Mormon is recorded in three documents he produced in the last years of his life. None of these works was published during his lifetime, but they are now available. A comprehensive study of these documents was published in 1985 as Studies of the Book of Mormon by the University of Illinois. This book is edited by two Mormon scholars: Brigham D. Madsen edited the manuscript and Sterling M. McMurrin wrote an introductory essay. Roberts studied the questions for four months without replying to William Riter, Riter finally wrote to him, asking if he had completed his response. On Dec. 28, 1921, Roberts wrote back saying he was studying the problems, had not yet reached a conclusion and would soon respond. The next day Roberts wrote an open letter to President Heber J. Grant, to Grant's counselors, to the Twelve Apostles and to the First Council of Seventy, rquesting an emergency meeting with all them to discuss the matter.

Roberts told the General Authorities: "I found difficulties (raised by the five questions) more serious than I thought.. it is a matter that will concern the faith of the Youth of the Church now (and) also in the future."

President Grant responded immediately to Roberts' request for an emergency meeting of the Church's top leadership. Within a week the brethren assembled for an intense two-day conference at which Roberts delivered a 141 page report entitled, "Book of Mormon Difficulties, a Study." Robert appealed to the collective wisdom of the brethren and said he was seeking the inspiration of the Lord in order to answer the questions.

Disappointed

It is fair to say the General Authorities "stonewalled" Roberts at the meeting. After two days, he came away disappointed and discouraged. In a letter to President Grant four days after the meeting he said: "I was greatly disappointed over the net results of the discussion.. There was so much said that was utterly irrelevant, and so little said that was helpful."

Roberts continued to discuss the matter through letters with President Grant and continued for some months to meet with a committee formed out of the larger group comprised of one of Grant's counselors, Talmage, and Apostle John Widsoe. But, Roberts never was satisfied with the response of the brethren.

As his investigation continued, he became more and more disillusioned with the Book of Mormon; and he always resented the response he received at the two-day seminar. Two months before his death he told a friend, Wesley P. Lloyd, former dean of the graduate school of BYU, that the defense the brethren made for the Book of Mormon might "satisfy people who didn't think, but (it was) a very inadequate answer for a thinking man." He said Apostle Richard R Lyman did not take the matter seriously and the others "merely one by one stood up and bore testimony to the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. George Albert Smith - in tears - testified that his faith in the Book of Mormon had not been shaken by the questions."

Roberts told Lloyd "in a Church which claims continuous revelation, a crisis had arisen where revelation was necessary."

Concerning the Five Questions

Of the five questions, Roberts was most concerned about the linguistic problem. However, he also discovered new problems. He told Lloyd he saw literary problems in the Book of Mormon as well as geographic problems. Of the geographic problems he asked: Where were the Mayan cliffs and high mountain peaks in the Book of Mormon? The geography of the Book of Mormon looked suspiciously like the New England of Joseph Smith!

The Five Questions Roberts Couldn't Answer

B.H. Roberts asked the General Authorities to answer these five questions:

1. Linguistics: Riter asked - if the American Indians were all descendants of Lehi - why there was such diversity in the language of the American Indians and why there was no indication of Hebrew in any of the Indian language?

2. The Book of Mormon says that Lehi found horses when he arrived in America. The horse described in the Book of Mormon (as well as many other domestic animals) did not exist in the New World before the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors.

3. Nephi is stated to have had a "bow of steel." Jews did not know steel at that time. And there was no iron on this continent until after the Spaniard conquest. 4. The Book of Mormon frequently mentions "awards and scimeters (scimitars)." Scimitars are unknown until the rise of the Moslem faith (after 600 A.D.).

5. The Book of Mormon says the Nephites possessed silk. Silk did not exist in America in pre-Columbian times.

Joseph Smith Did Not Get the Book of Mormon from God! Roberts eventually concluded that ;Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon himself - that he did not translate it from gold plates. Smith produced it, Roberts said, by drawing upon his own natural talent and materials like Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews (published near Joseph's home a few years before the translation of the Book of Mormon).

Roberts Reaction

Roberts became convinced that View of the Hebrews was "the ground plan" for the Book of Mormon. Roberts, the man who had started his missionary career defending the Book of Mormon and became its staunchest apologist, had to admit the evidence proved Joseph Smith was a plagiarist.

One must empathize with the elderly Roberts as he came to realize he had spent a lifetime defending something which he now knew was a fraud. It is heartbreaking. It is perhaps, this fraudulent perpetration of the Book of Mormon that is the most heartbreaking aspect of Mormonism. Millions of Mormons base their faith in Mormonism upon this book which is no more than the invention of Joseph Smith.

Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt correctly identified the essential question concerning the Book of Mormon when he declared:

"If true, (the Book of Mormon) is one of the most important messages ever sent from God to man. If false, it is one of the most cunning, wicked, bold, deep-laid impositions ever planned upon the world, calculated to deceive and ruin millions who sincerely receive it as the Word of God, and will suppose themselves built upon the rock of truth, until they are plunged, with their families, into hopeless despair."

What was the final resolution for Brigham H. Roberts? No one can say for sure. However, I am afraid for him. I fear that this giant intellectual, who could stand against the president of the Church and call the Apostles to task, committed intellectual suicide. In a conversation with Wesley Lloyd, just two months before his death, Roberts showed him what he called "a revolutionary article on the origin of the Book of Mormon." In Lloyd's opinion, Roberts' work was, "far too strong for the average Church member." What Lloyd saw was "A Book of Mormon Study," a 300-page document in which Roberts sets forth his reasons for concluding that the Book of Mormon was not of divine origin. In the document, Roberts investigated the documents (including View of the Hebrews) which Joseph Smith could have consulted in writing the Book of Mormon. He investigated "the imaginative mind of Joseph Smith." He quotes Joseph's mother who recalled how Joseph would give "amusing recitals" in which 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 every particular, their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship." All this, Roberts acknowledged, "took place before the young prophet had received the plates of the Book of Mormon."

Roberts suggests that Smith became caught up in spiritual "excesses" out of which he imagined prophecies and manifestations:

"His revelations become merely human productions. .. Morbid imagination, morbid expression of emotions (were) likely to find their way into the knowledge of Joseph Smith and influence his conceptions of spiritual things."

The Gold Plates Didn't Exist

Roberts, according to Lloyd, concluded that Smith's visions were "psychological" and that the gold plates, "were not objective" - that is,, they didn't really exist! They existed only on a "spiritual", or subjective plane.

Conclusion

God was gracious to B.H. Roberts. God let him see the overwhelming evidence of Joseph Smith's fraud. We cannot be sure what his final conclusions were because he died before he could resolve these issues. However, the evidence indicates that B.H. Roberts was so steeped in the deception of Mormonism that he was unable to escape its spiritual hold. In his last conversation with Lloyd, with only two months of life before him, Roberts indicated that he had not yet given up on Joseph Smith. He said that although the Book of Mormon was of obvious human origin, perhaps the Church was still true. Perhaps he could yet establish the divinity of Joseph's call. If the Book of Mormon failed him, perhaps he could find divinity in the Mormon Church's secondary book of scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants!

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