"The Inhabitants of the Earth are Asleep"

There is a wealth of information in the History of the Church volumes. I can turn to almost any page within each volume and find something new and enlightening that I have never come across. And I find that troubling.

I would like to think that at this stage in my life, at the very least, I would find no new Joseph Smith quotes. I understand that the Joseph Smith Papers are barely underway and there are still unpublished archives that are not easily accessible to the masses, so maybe I'm justified in not reading every possible document chronicling the early years of the church. However, the History of the Church volumes contain not all, but many direct, indirect, and transcribed words of Joseph Smith. These have been in my possession for several years, and growing up in an active LDS household, I knew at a young age exactly where these volumes were kept.

So getting that out of the way, I have no excuse to have not studied at least that which was available to me. But I'm also a bit troubled that many of these stories and experiences are available to all church members, yet I rarely hear many of them taught, even though I have sat in classes of instruction my entire life, totaling many thousands of hours. Almost unbelievably, I continue to find information from these early years of the church (i.e. the Joseph Smith era), even words of Joseph Smith, that are still new to me.

This is not a criticism of the church or the many volunteers who prepare lessons or give talks/sermons each Sunday. The purpose of talks and lessons is not to create historians, but rather to help us all live more Christ-like lives.

I think it's fair to say, however, that there are already very many revealed truths in the Restored Gospel that have yet to be revealed to many of us in today's church because of a lack of "feasting" on the word in its entirety, both the canon and the non-canon.

If you are LDS, think of the classes, lessons, and talks you have heard in your lifetime in the church. Consider the pool of scriptural verses, stories, and quotes that are drawn from in each talk or lesson that you have heard and see if this purely anecdotal data goes along with your experience.

• 25 Shakespeare or C.S. Lewis quotes
• 75 verses from scripture (see post on True Scripture Mastery)
  
• 100 scriptural stories (most taken from Book of Mormon and New Testament, fewer from Doctrine & Covenants and Old Testament, and I'll be generous, about four or five from the Pearl of Great Price)
  
• 500 conference quotes (or more since the Internet has simplified research). I have no problem with conference quotes, I use them and study them myself. My only issue with an over-abundant reliance on them is that the typical quote wraps everything up neatly in a soundbite, which is pleasing to the ear, but it deprives us the opportunity to come up with our own "soundbites" or pearls of wisdom derived from our own "toiling" in personal study. By the sweat of our brow...you get the idea.
• The remaining time in a typical lesson is spent on personal experiences and stories, along with challenges and invitations to better practice our religion.
  

All of this is well and good. My only concern is are we striking the right balance in our instruction. How many scriptures should be shared in a sacrament meeting talk? How many conference quotes? Of course, there is no quota. We will prepare based on our knowledge-base on the topic at hand.

Which leads me back to the History of the Church, and two quotes I recently found that I had never heard before.

#1
Joseph Smith (Vol. 5, p. 402):

"I could explain a hundred fold more than I ever have of the glories of the kingdoms manifested to me in the vision, were I permitted, and were the people prepared to receive them.

"The Lord deals with this people as a tender parent with a child, communicating light and intelligence and the knowledge of his ways as they can bear it. The inhabitants of the earth are asleep; they know not the day of their visitation."

Earlier in Volume 5, in an unrelated passage, I think Joseph Smith offers an explanation on how the "inhabitants of the earth" are likely asleep. I would include myself in that group, because I often feel "asleep" in spiritual matters. And I love the analogy of being asleep because there is a stark difference between being awake and asleep. I have felt awake in the spiritual sense but there are many times when my eyes are open yet I'm just going through the motions of life without realizing there is a greater purpose.

How do we awaken from such a spiritual slumber? Faith! The following quote will seem a little disjointed to the current discussion, but try to stick with me.

#2
Joseph Smith (Vol. 5, p. 218):

"Because faith is wanting, the fruits are. No man since the world was had faith without having something along with it. The ancients quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, women received their dead, &c. By faith the worlds were made. A man who has none of the gifts has no faith; and he deceives himself; if he supposes he has. Faith has been wanting, not only among the heathen, but in professed Christendom also, so that tongues, healings, prophecy, and prophets and apostles, and all the gifts and blessings have been wanting."

In the first quote, we learn that light and intelligence is withheld from the inhabitants of the earth only as they can bear it. The second deals with the concern that fruits of faith are lacking on the earth because faith is lacking.

Perhaps our faith can improve as we are given more light and intelligence through diligent study of all that is available to us, and then, we can be found bearing the many fruits that are available to those who have exercised the needed faith.

True Scripture Mastery

Most people in the world today simply do not have enough information to formulate an opinion on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Suppose you were one of those people. Maybe you knew one of the church's members but aside from rumors or a few facts you had heard about their church, the one thing that stood out was their belief in an additional volume of scripture they call the Book of Mormon. A copy ends up in your hands, and you decide to flip the book open and randomly read wherever the page lands. The verse you find reads:

But thou art the same yesterday, today, and forever; and thou hast elected us that we shall be saved, whilst all around us are elected to be cast by thy wrath down to hell; for the which holiness, O God, we thank thee; and we also thank thee that thou hast elected us, that we may not be led away after the foolish traditions of our brethren, which doth bind them down to a belief of Christ, which doth lead their hearts to wander far from thee, our God. --Alma 31:17

I've thought of that scenario when reading verses that don't describe official teachings of our church, but could be interpreted as such by lazy scholarship or dishonest individuals who oppose the church. ("See, it's in their Bible!") Hopefully that practice is rare. What is more common however, is when we in the greater Christian community rely on a single verse of scripture to teach a certain principle or doctrine. (Alma 31:17 describes a daily prayer offered by a community that had rejected Christianity.)

In the Latter-day Saint faith, we are living in the "scripture mastery" generation. Scripture mastery is a program within the church's youth seminary which is a class for high school aged Latter-day Saints. Scripture mastery offers about 25 sections of scripture (usually one or two verses) to memorize, learn, and apply. The goal is to learn the context, background, and other important points about that scripture. While scripture mastery is a great tool for young people to learn (there's even an iPhone app for it), the program cannot possibly replace hundreds of other excellent scripture verses, nor could it replace the importance of a multitude of discovered and undiscovered treasures contained around the verses.

For a long time I was guilty of what I will call a "one verse" method of approaching scripture. A verse in the Book of Mormon illustrates this point well. Out of all the lists that are out there of what we can do achieve a certain positive spiritual outcome, this one, to me, seemed to be the most simple and straightforward.

Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings, and he will direct thee for good; yea, when thou liest down at night lie down unto the Lord, that he may watch over you in your sleep; and when thou risest in the morning let thy heart be full of thanks unto God; and if ye do these things, ye shall be lifted up at the last day. --Alma 37:37

If I counsel with the Lord, praying night and day, following the simple formula outlined, will I then be, "directed for good," and, "lifted up at the last day," or saved? Adherents to the beliefs of the LDS faith believe there is much more to working out your salvation than simply offering a couple of prayers a day, even if those prayers are the most sincere in the world. I was guilty of misinterpreting the qualifier, "if ye do these things," which led me, in my one verse mindset, to believe that Alma was referring to the "things" listed in that one verse. Looking at it a little more closely, however, I found that Alma's, "things" referred to a much longer list of necessary actions and attributes that include the following counsel to his eldest son, Helaman:

• Learn wisdom in youth; learn to keep the commandments of God (35)
• Cry unto God for all support (36)
• Let all actions and thoughts be unto the Lord (36)
• And then verse 37 as summarized in the paragraph, all which result in salvation

But that wasn't the only counsel he was giving to his son. In fact, that counsel begins earlier when Alma says Helaman should go out and teach the people the following, "things," that would bring, "rest to their souls" (34):

• An everlasting hatred of sin and iniquity (32)
• Repentance and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ (33)
• To humble themselves and be meek and lowly in heart (33)
• To withstand every temptation of the devil (33)
• To never be weary of good works, but to be meek and lowly in heart (34)note how "meek and lowly in heart" is repeated twice in Alma's counsel

These verses together seem to point to qualifications that can lead one to salvation.

In five or six verses, we learn a great deal, however we cannot ignore Alma's words in chapters 36 and 37, where much more instruction and testimony is given that really brings the bulleted items above to life. Not only that, we can then compare the counsel Alma gives to his son Helaman to the counsel given to his other two sons. What is said to each son? What is to be meant by the brief counsel given to one son and a very lengthy counsel to the other? Why did he record counsel to all three to begin with? And then when reading of Alma's toils and troubles, preaching, miracles, political involvement, journeys, etc, a much more complete portrait is painted of the man Alma, from which we can draw many life lessons. Leaving Alma, we read more of Helaman's progress in the faith, and so on. Yes, those few verses in chapter 37 are powerful and insightful, but there is so much more!

If lists and doctrines were sufficient to bring us closer to divinity in this life and salvation in the life to come, the scriptures would be much shorter in length. We would study only the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and several other lists of commands, laws, and counsel. Instead we have before us thousands of pages of stories of individuals, families, towns, and civilizations that illustrate so many ways of broadening our understanding of the important commandments interspersed throughout them.

I have come to appreciate how the scriptures are meant to be read in their entirety, not just a verse here or a verse there. The Book of Mormon is a great example. The culminating event in the Book of Mormon is the literal visitation of the resurrected Jesus Christ on the American continent. So much can be learned from the words the Savior teaches, their placement and order and the various reactions of the people to His words. But we have to ask ourselves why the stories spanning a thousand years preceding and following this event are there (and add to that the Jaredite record). Are there not clear lessons that can be applied from those stories to our time, today?

There are many other verses in scripture that can either be taken out of context or not fully appreciated if we apply the one verse approach to our study and/or overall understanding of the Gospel. It is true there are many beautiful scriptures that consist of one, two or three verses a piece, but there is so much more.

I am convinced that our understanding of the Gospel is not only derived from the doctrines gleaned from individual verses, it is greatly enriched by the full accounts of those who lived long ago, recorded in scripture.