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LDS Visions or Revelations a Consideration for Their Danger as a Source of Authority for Everyone Else, Including Baptists
The visions or revelations of Joseph Smith came about in America at a time in this country when many others were receiving their own visions or revelations, paving the way for Smith’s and the acceptance of his by others. The United States was a land of equality, equal opportunity, and populism. It despised a king and state religion. It liked, loved really, democratic society, where everyone’s voice was heard, and it was, therefore, acceptable to get your own personal revelation from God as a part of your personal relationship with God. That spirit is still very alive in America. Americans distrust their own institutions and this is woven into the fabric of being an American. That includes the institution of the church.
In early nineteenth century, especially on the frontier, people operated in many unconventional ways, depending on superstitions in medicine, farming, and predicting the weather. It was not unusual to use dowsing to find water with a special, forked stick. People could see signs everywhere, giving them guidance from above or within. Snake oil salesman got their name in this era, literally selling snake oil, promising cures to almost anything, circumventing the conventional manner of tending to one’s health.
Joseph Smith was 14 years of age when he had his first vision or revelation from God, and the Smiths, Joseph Smith Sr. and mom, Lucy, weren’t members of a church. Joseph Jr. didn’t come up with the idea of getting visions. It was a thing to have. Only special people had them.
The Smiths couldn’t find a church they liked or agreed with, were still looking, and then Joseph ‘heard from God’ that there was no true church to join. Convenient. Churches have set beliefs and if you are a rank and file non-clergy, you might disagree, your opinion probably doesn’t count for much, and you don’t have a means of having your own in those situations. You might not want the church doctrines and practices imposed on you and also their financial obligations. You want a church where perhaps everyone could share, like is seen in the first church in Jerusalem in Acts chapters 2 and 5. That’s what churches should do, accept your way and then take care of you with little expectation.
On top of everything above, even though there was freedom, it was tough to navigate the new world, especially if you were not born into wealth, grinding it out to earn a living. Many made it through subsistence farming, sometimes succeeding, perhaps enough to invest in a cockamamie get-rich-quick scheme, lose everything and start over again. People still are very allured by the suggestion of some easier path to success, willing to subject themselves to whatever comes along that promises to work better, reinventing the wheel.
Joseph Smith lived in an environment, a culture, that someone could believe that God was talking to him directly. All of the new, astounding doctrines and practices of LDS came by this manner, contradicting doctrines and practices hitherto already established in the history of Christianity: the preexistence of human souls or spirits, God was once a man on another planet before being exalted to Godhood, celestial marriage, polygamy, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not the same being, God organized the world but did not create it from nothing, and proxy baptism for dead people. It was also revealed to him through a story that all of these beliefs were the original truth that had been lost and buried for 1400 years. On many occasions, Joseph Smith and then other Mormon leaders received revelations at a time that fit whatever it was they needed to hear from God to make a pronouncement to deal with that situation.
Matthew Bowman writes in The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (pp. 10-12):
The Smiths had unwittingly moved into an ideal location for a family with unresolved spiritual yearnings, the center of what one historian has called “the antebellum spiritual hothouse” and another “the burned-over district.” . . . . The optimism, instability, and freedom of the New York frontier were life’s blood to the eclecticism and experimentation always to be found at the margins of mainstream Christianity. The Shakers, for instance, so named for their physical worship services, had fled to America from a disapproving Britain under the leadership of Ann Lee, whom they believe to be Christ reincarnated. In the United States, they found fertile ground for both converts and settlement, and in 1826 they established a colony less than thirty miles from Palmyra. . . . North of Albany, the farmer William Miller sat by the fire in his home in Low Hampton, New York, feverishly working out the precise date of the Second Coming from the book of Daniel for his thousands of followers, who were convinced that they needed no trained pastors to interpret scripture for them.
But the Smiths had always been drawn — particularly Lucy — not to such visionaries but to the more mainstream ecstasies of evangelical revivalism. The force behind revivalism was the Methodists, who . . . urged potential converts to embrace Christ in a personal divine encounter. At Methodist camp meetings, itinerant preachers, though frequently uneducated and even unlettered, learned how to muse the Holy Spirit among their listeners. Between rousing and sometimes raucous gospel hymns, they offered not prepared sermon on doctrinal topics but emotional appeals, promising forgiveness, warning of hell, reaching their hands to the heavens, and pleading with the crowd to leave sin behind and walk forward to be saved in the arms of Christ. . . . “Men are so spiritually sluggish,” declared Charles Grandison Finney, the great revivalist of the age, “that they must be so excited that they will break over their countervailing influences before they will obey God.” Finney’s talents shone in a month-long revival in 1830-31 in Rochester, a few miles from Palmyra, in which he converted hundreds. . . .
The sort of spiritual manifestations the Smith family had already experienced were not new to most revivalists. Portentous dreams were common particularly among itinerant Methodist preachers, as were the type of healings and providential manifestations Lucy had experienced. . . .
It was in this atmosphere that Joseph Jr., then a young teenager, began thinking about religion.
The ecstasies and visions of revivalism were the seedbed or hothouse for Joseph Smith and the new religion. What makes this acceptable? Some might say, because what they revealed was not false. I don’t know that they can say, that what they’re saying is in fact true. How do you know it’s true, if it is? Someone could say, it’s scriptural. Well, then you don’t need a vision or a revelation from God. It’s already in the Bible. If cannot be proven to be false, then it is an acceptable vision or revelation.
If someone can hear revelations from God, how do those differentiate from scripture? If they are from God, that is equal to scripture. One cannot accept visions and revelations as from God. That opens up Pandora’s box. It’s not acceptable. And yet it is today. You really can’t question it. You’ve got to accept whatever version of it. How does a LDS today distinguish evangelical visions from their LDS ones? It really just buttresses the point of Mormon visions and revelations, that God is still talking to men. He’s still talking to Mormons.
LDS do not have a kind of closed canon of scripture. They have their continued visions, their continued revelations, even if they don’t like the LDS teachings, which many LDS has a problem with, and with their prophets. What has pushed LDS along is their continued revelations. I had a long talk last Saturday to an LDS man, coming out of the garage of his big house, a CEO of a small software company, and he disconnects from LDS doctrine, but he’s got his own testimony, his own experience, his own way of connecting with God, so he can pick and choose. LDS is fine with that. They encourage it. They might call it “the burning in the bosom.” Before Joseph Smith got his first vision, he prayed James 1:5, and that’s become the pattern of LDS since then.
I estimate that a majority of Baptists still get direct messages from God. They call it different things, but these impressions are authoritative, nonetheless, very often for some of the major decisions of their lives. When they give testimony to the important decisions, they don’t say, it was scriptural, my church was fine with it, so I had the liberty to do it, so I did. They say, I knew, God told me. Sometimes God also told the spouse, as a validation. Both knew. Both heard.
The one who questions the experience is the one who says he’s in authority, he’s a king, taking away from the egalitarian nature of receiving visions. Some kind of exegesis of an authoritative book is not sufficient for a genuine Christian experience. Obviously there are contradictions, because many have been excommunicated for contradicting the vision of someone in authority, Smith or Brigham Young. The acceptance of a democratic community fine with your receiving your vision or revelation is the level playing field. Revelations aren’t just for the elite few, but for anyone. This is the “antebellum spiritual hothouse” that we still live in.
The Required Specific Application of Non-Specific Biblical Commands
There are over 1,000 commands in the New Testament alone. Some of them are specific. Some of them, I’m calling, non-specific. You can easily find a list of all the commandments of the New Testament. I said “some” for the specific and “some” for the non-specific, but those two are far from equal.
Ephesians 4:28, “Let him that stole steal no more.”Ephesians 5:6, “Let no man deceive you with vain words.”1 Corinthians 7:10, “Let not the wife depart from her husband.”1 Corinthians 7:11, “Let not the husband put away his wife.”1 Thessalonians 4:2, “Abstain from fornication.”
Romans 13:14, “Make not provision for the flesh.”1 Peter 2:11, “Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.”Romans 12:2, “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”Luke 12:15, “Beware of covetousness.”2 Timothy 2:22, “Flee youthful lusts.”
Millennials Will Rue the Day They Despised Authority
Authority proceeds from God. When I write “authority,” I mean what the Bible says it is, and it is hierarchical (Romans 13:1-3). It doesn’t violate scripture. God created or originated authority. It is necessary to accomplish His moral will (God’s sovereign will is always going to occur). Authority orders the divine design of the world. It will only work the way God designed, if authority is respected.
I’m not saying that all millennials despise authority. I’m writing about millennials who do, and really anyone who does, but I focus on millennials because this is more characteristic of their generation. Millennials will still want authority now and especially in the future. They will need it. Right now in the short term it is convenient for them to despise authority.
Why should anyone do what these millennials tell them to do? If they do tell anyone to do, why should they expect them to do what they are told? Why should these millennials ever possess any authority, if they don’t believe in it themselves?
Many Christian leaders today decry the apostasy of the day. For all the possible causes, a perverted view of authority explains a lot. In a rudimentary way, it is the underlying problem. How? Why?
God is in charge. He uses under-authorities to be in charge. He authorizes institutions — family, church, government, etc. — to order the world He owns. Satan merely usurps that authority. The response to authority is obedience. The attack of authority undermines God’s institutions and then results in disobedience. Salvation itself comes through the obedience of faith. The faith is in God, Who is the authority. His under-authorities are still His authority. Someone who disobeys those, with the exception of violations of the Word of God, disobeys Him. They are not believing in Him, because this is how He works, just like He used men for the writing of His Word. In that sense, obedience to God is obedience to Moses, for instance.
All of society breaks down with the position of these millennials on authority, really just so they can have their own way, just like Korah and his band with Moses in Numbers 16. They will justify it or excuse it by saying that their authority is unreasonable or wrong or bad leaders. They know best about leadership, how it’s supposed to be done. In most cases though, they can’t even be challenged, these millennials. They offer no due process, no discussion, no defense. They are judge, jury, and executioner. Like Rehoboam of 1 Kings 12, they look to their contemporaries, their friends, other millennials, as proof or evidence that they are right, their cronies on social media.
No one who despises authority as a practice is a Christian. God is the Author of authority. Again, I’m not talking about so-called authority that teaches or requires something contrary to the Word of God. Just because millenials don’t like what they’re being told doesn’t mean that they can call it unscriptural, and that’s their simple, rebellious way out.
The despising of authority starts with not truly glorifying God as God. The despising of authority is an outgrowth of not glorifying God. You know someone does not glorify God because he despises authority. It is indicative of a reprobate mind.
The benchmark or the norm for someone aligned with God is subjection to authority. His instinct is to do what he is told. He listens. With God-ordained authority, he is swift to hear, slow to speak (argue), and slow to wrath (at what he’s being told) [James 1:19]. He is apt to do what he is told, rather than bucking it.
If you are millennial, and you despise authority, don’t expect your spouse to submit, nor your children. Why should they? You shouldn’t expect your employees to listen to you. You don’t listen, why should they listen to you? The culture that you spawn will be one that will break down because authority is necessary. Your disrespect will come back on you. There is no way that your world will work.
The millennial who despises authority won’t be in the kingdom of Jesus Christ, because Jesus expects obedience. He is the King. Your Jesus might be something more like a therapist, but the Jesus of the Bible, the only true one, will rule over the earth. You won’t like His kingdom and you won’t be in it. It is a kingdom of authority.
2 Peter relates despising authority to lust. Lust then relates to self, to me, me first. 2 Peter 2:10 says:
But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities.
They walk after the flesh. Their lives are characterized by flesh. Their music is fleshly. Their entertainment is fleshly. Their recreation is fleshly. Someone who lives according to the flesh doesn’t want the restraint of a authority, hence, he despises it. He is not afraid to speak evil of authority. When the authority arrives to restrain, like the Holy Spirit, the Restrainer (2 Thess 2:7), he tears down the authority.
Righteous men are very careful with their authority, especially in public. Righteous men don’t rebuke an elder, but intreat (1 Timothy 5:1). This is seen in the servant/master or employee/employer: “be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling.” “Fear and trembling” is a non-starter with most millennials today. It’s a violation of personal wellness and self-care.
Deuteronomy 5:1 says:
And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do them.
There are verses like that all through Deuteronomy. Moses says, these statutes and judgments that I speak, learn, keep, and do them. That is how authority works. Moses says something and everyone learns it, keeps it, and does it. This is especially the message of the Bible toward parental authority, that is seen again and again in Proverbs. This generation is even represented by Proverbs 30:11, “There is a generation that curseth their father, and doth not bless their mother.” The book of Proverbs reads very serious about this from God. I’m going to publish all of these just so that you have them all in one place:
Proverbs 1:8, My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:
Proverbs 4:1, Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding.
Proverbs 10:1, A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.
Proverbs 15:20, A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish man despiseth his mother.
Proverbs 17:21, He that begetteth a fool doeth it to his sorrow: and the father of a fool hath no joy.
Proverbs 17:25, A foolish son is a grief to his father, and bitterness to her that bare him.
Proverbs 19:13, A foolish son is the calamity of his father.
Proverbs 19:26, He that wasteth his father, and chaseth away his mother, is a son that causeth shame, and bringeth reproach.
Proverbs 20:20, Whoso curseth his father or his mother, his lamp shall be put out in obscure darkness.
Proverbs 23:22, Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old.
Proverbs 23:24-25, The father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice: and he that begetteth a wise child shall have joy of him. Thy father and thy mother shall be glad, and she that bare thee shall rejoice.
Proverbs 28:7, Whoso keepeth the law is a wise son: but he that is a companion of riotous men shameth his father.
Proverbs 30:17, The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.
Many, if not most, of these statements are axiomatic. A millennial may question them, but it’s like questioning the transitive property or some other axiom. They are just true. As you read them, millennial, you can question them or challenge them or just ignore them, but if they are you, then they are who you are.
You will notice that there is very little about the father and what he’s doing with his son, but it’s about the son and what he’s doing with his father. If the father is disobedient to scripture, and teaches that, that’s bad, but this isn’t the issue. There aren’t a series of verses that say, “Father, please thy son and make sure he gets to have his way and live like he wants. Don’t be too scary. You don’t want to hurt his feelings.” Your millennial companions might listen to your complaints and justifications, but in the judgment of God, you are still guilty. You won’t escape this judgment of God without repentance. It’s on you, no one else.
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