[00:00:16] Speaker A: Welcome to the weekly Deep Dive podcast on the Add On Education Network. The podcast where we explore the weekly Come Follow me discussion and try to add a little insight and unique perspective. I’m your host, Jason Lloyd, here with my friend and this show’s producer, Nate Pyfer. What’s up? Hey. So in this episode, we’re going to look at what a great and marvelous work means, how that applies to today, and then also how we can be engaged in harvesting. We’ve talked a little bit about that. We’re going to hit it from a slightly different angle, and then we’re going to look at a powerful statement that Jesus makes about who he is and what his work means in these last days.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Sweet. So in Doctrine and covenants, section 14, to start us off, it says, a great and marvelous work is about to come forth among the children of men. A phrase I’m sure we’re mostly familiar.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: With because of the books that come out.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Excellent book. And it could fill a whole book. Is it one book?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Wait, what’s the books that, like, everybody used to read back in the 90s?
[00:01:12] Speaker A: See, I’m thinking of. You’re thinking of a marvelous work in a wonder.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Oh, dang it.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: I was thinking of the missionary library. They had like, seven books, Jesus to Christ. They had a marvelous working wonder there, too.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Okay. Those were actually. I mean, they were all good books.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Dang it.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: That came out wrong.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: They were good books. I’m sure Marvel is Working in Wonder.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Is great, too, because literally every person I knew in Logan, Utah, owned all 7,000 of them.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Oh, it was great.
I liked it. It was a really good dive on it. And we’re not going to be able to take a whole comprehensive dive the way they do. Essentially what we are talking about is the restoration of Israel. And when they talk about restoring Israel and the miraculous nature of doing this, I think we have got to look at it in context of how Israel was first gathered and then see how this is going to be even bigger. And the scripture that highlights that best for me is Jeremiah, chapter 16, verses 14 through 15. And it says, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said. The Lord liveth that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. But the Lord liveth that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands whither he had driven them. And I will bring them again into their land that I have given unto their fathers.
And it reminds me of, you know, sometimes you See, in those movies, like a person gets shattered and broken up into a million pieces, and all of a sudden those little million pieces start growing together and it unifies up into this one whole thing.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it’s creepy.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: It is creepy. But it’s much more significant that the Lord is looking for needles in a haystacks, gathered all over the place and pulling it together and unifying it. Because at the start, Israel was a family. They at least all geographically were located in the same location. To get Moses to pull them out of the land was very miraculous. You had the 10 plagues, you had the parting of the of the Red Sea, you had everything that was surrounded with their events of coming through, conquering the land of Israel and establishing a nation, which is fairly miraculous. But now you are talking about unifying a broken nation, taking a nation that was beaten down by the Assyrians and scattered, beaten down by the Babylonians, and then ultimately you had the Romans coming through and destroying them once more. And the Lord is going to take this people and build them back up.
And that is the harvest that he is talking about, restoring Israel, finding all of those pieces and rebuilding a broken nation. And when he says that he is going to take the gospel first to the Gentiles, the Hebrew word for gentiles is goyim, and it literally means the nations first. He’s going to go to all of the scattered nations and then unto Israel. Almost a different perspective here. Not that he’s necessarily going to the Jewish people or the people that were Israelite, but he’s going first to the scattered nation and then he is going to create this Israel. And we are going to kind of see this play out as we dive into this a little bit more.
Next, when it talks about harvesting thrust in your sickle, I know we’ve looked at that a few times, but after that, there’s also another verse that we’ve kind of ignored a little bit that I think we need to highlight in context. And it says, ask, therefore if you ask of me, you shall receive.
And a lot of times I read this verse, and this is one of the most repeated verses throughout all the scripture I once went through and highlighted. Every time I saw this, it shows up a lot. And the Lord saying, come to me. Ask and I’ll give you answers. And I always look at this in context of James 1:5. If anyone lack wisdom, let him ask of God. God’s going to give him liberally. Upbraideth not. But as I was reading through this, preparing for this lesson, it hit me a little bit differently this time. It’s not that you’re asking God for an answer to something that troubles you as much as you’re asking God, what can I do? Look at these revelations. All of these revelations are people that came to Joseph Smith and said, we’re excited about this work. We’re excited about this great and marvelous work and Israel being restored. What’s my part? How can I play into this? Ask and you shall receive.
Look for something to do, and the Lord will give you something to do. And it says, if anyone has desires to serve God, ye are called to the work.
Just simply desiring and wanting to motivates us. And you see here with the restoration of the gospel, a paradigm shift.
Up until this point, salvation was really on the shoulders of the preachers, the pastors, the clergy. And the idea was, you pay them for the ordinances, you pay them for a remission of your sins, or you go to church, you pay them for their preaching, or whatever the case may be, you pay them and they’ll take care of your salvation. They’ve got you covered. Their job is to make sure that you’re saved. Your job is to just rely on them and they’ll fix it for you. But now, all of a sudden, the Lord is saying, if you have desires to serve me, thrust in your sickle, do the work.
By working, by doing, we are becoming the ones that are the saviors. We are the ones that are participating, we are the ones that are changing ourselves. And that salvation, the process of salvation, isn’t so much a simple act of, yes, you are saved, done. It’s an act of converting ourselves, becoming more Christlike. And if we have desires to serve God, as we start to look and wonder, what is it I can do? And we ask God how to engage. And he gives us inspiration or gives us guidance, it allows us to be prepared and to serve Him. One of my favorite talks ever given in conference was while I was a mission in my mission, Culiacan, Mexico, 2003, Elder Eyring stood up and he gave a talk which he talked about his prepared children.
It was called A Child and a Disciple. And he says, the Lord trusts his two disciples. He sends prepared people to his prepared servants.
And as we have desires to serve God and we start finding these ways to engage ourselves, we participate in this work. But we’re also engaged in helping other people and other people come across our paths. And it all just ties together. And so I want to ask this question.
When we look at this work initially as it’s starting. You had Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery, and here we’re going to be introducing David Whitmer. We talked about Joseph Knight. All of these people, where did they come from?
It’s not like the Lord was holding elections here and said, hey, I need a scribe.
Let’s see who wants to try out to be a scribe. Maybe we’ll hold some auditions here.
We’re going to try and test these people. It’s not like the Lord even asked Joseph Smith to go find these people. The Lord didn’t say, hey, there’s a guy named Martin Harris. I want you to go talk to him and call him to be your scribe.
That’s not how this worked. This worked because there were people that were genuinely interested in serving the Lord. And they asked, and then they received. They asked, can I help? Can I? And they volunteered themselves. A lot of times we should not be waiting on the Lord to volunteer us. We should be looking for ways to volunteer ourselves and qualify ourselves for the work.
All right, there is another verse in here that I find fascinating. It is the end of the section, section 14 9. And it is Jesus Christ talking. He says, behold, I am Jesus Christ, the son of the living God who created the heavens and the earth, a light which cannot be hidden, darkness. Wherefore I must bring the fullness of my gospel from the Gentiles unto the house of Israel.
Now, when Christ was here on the earth, he kind of danced around the subject a little bit. I mean, he was the Son of God. But here we have a very bold declaration.
And when he says, I am Jesus Christ, the son of the living God, it’s not that God’s dead. It’s not that God’s an idol. It’s not that God is something that doesn’t exist. But he’s saying that he is living. And can we talk about this scientifically for just a minute? Can we kind of deviate a little bit and talk about what that means to be the Son of God from a science perspective?
If you’ve got Mary, and she’s female here, and in fact, the Hebrew name for Mary is bitter, which is kind of weird. Who names the sweet mother of God? Bitterness, Right? But this might come from a test back in the Old Testament, if you suspected a woman of having cheated on you or being unfaithful, and you wanted to know if she was still a virgin or not a virgin, you gave her what was called the bitter waters test. And so you’re taking this water and mixing it with some bitterness and she drinks it. And if she’s pure, then it doesn’t infect her. And if she wasn’t pure, she’s defiled. Then it’s going to make her really sick.
Just kind of this test in the Old Testament. And so here you’ve got Mary, who’s named after a test to prove that she is a virgin. So here you have this woman who’s producing a man. But I want you to understand, in the human genome, we’ve got 46 chromosomes, and females have two X chromosomes. So if a woman is going to be producing offspring, usually we create these cells, gametes, half. We take those 46 chromosomes, cut them in half, and we give 23 of those chromosomes to the next generation. So she can give an X chromosome or an X chromosome. So Christ being the daughter, excuse me, Christ being the son of Mary, can receive an X chromosome from her or another X chromosome from her. So if he only had genetic material for Mary to work with, then he would only ever end up with two X chromosomes, meaning Christ could only be a female if he was truly born of a virgin Mary. So where did that Y chromosome come from?
And the fact that Christ was born a male from. From a woman. To me, looking at the science, that Y chromosome comes from God. He is the son of a living God.
And we look at how we understand these genetics today.
And the father of modern genetics was born in this same time period, 1822. Gregor Mendel. And he’s got a story that kind of parallels Joseph Smith. It’s kind of interesting. Gregor Mendel is this monk.
So he’s a religious person living by himself. And he’s got pea plants, and he’s trying to study how these plants pass on their heritage, how they pass on their genetics and how this works, how you get Y from X.
And he does these studies and learns all about inheritance and traits. And we call him the father of modern genetics. Then he published his work, sends it out to 300 of the leading scientists at the time. In fact, the leading scientist himself, Von Nigelli. He sends not just his written work, his published work about these pea plants and how inheritance works and these traits and how it gets passed on. But he sends him seeds from the pea plants that he tested and invites him to confirm his work. Say, hey, here’s what I’ve done. I’ve done it with thousands of plants. Could you verify what I’m seeing? And Von Nigelli, the leading botanist at the time, sends him back hawkweed seeds.
And the reason why this is interesting is hawkweed Reproduces asexually. It only ever clones itself. You can’t learn about how different traits get passed on from a mother and a father in the next generation if you’re studying asexual plants. And to me, looking at this guy’s story, this religious guy who went to the scholars and the smartest people of his field at that time was absolutely rejected. His work went unnoticed. It wasn’t 100 years later when three scientists independently discovered through their experiments what Gregor had already, what Mendel had already discovered 100 years previous. And they go back and they find his work and they say he was right all along. And I look at this young boy, Joseph Smith, who’s doing these experiments and learning about the nature of God, learning that he is a physical being, he is the son of the living God. Then he takes it to the leading religious clergy at the time, and they mock him. And they come back and say, no, no, that can’t be the case. No, you’re delusional or no, it’s just kind of interesting to me to see that. And it’s interesting that that perceptive or the perception that we’ve. That we’ve learned from science to be able to come back and look at this and say, wait, it doesn’t take away anymore, but adds to the validity that Christ himself couldn’t have just been a mortal man. He had to have received that from somewhere. Here you had a virgin. You can’t just duplicate her DNA and end up with a new person. You’ve got this Y chromosome. Where does that Y chromosome come from? If she didn’t. If she didn’t lay with any other man? And he’s claiming to be the son of a living God. To me, science testifies to the fact that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.
All right?
Not only does he talk about himself being the Son of God, but he follows this up with, he’s the one who created the heavens and the earth. A light which cannot be hidden. Darkness. Wherefore for that reason, because he is the one that created heavens and the earth. I must bring the fullness of my gospel from the Gentiles unto the house of Israel. Why is he referencing his role as Creator? As a reason for why he must bring the gospel from the Gentiles to Israel.
And think about this. We’ve talked a little bit about creation in a previous episode. But creation for God was taking this chaos, this scattered chaos and organizing it and bringing it together. And this is something that Christ keeps referring to throughout his life.
The creation story is so important. It’s not just found in the book of Genesis. We find it in the pearl of great price. We find it in our temple ordinances. We find it repeated over and over and central to what’s going on. Jesus Christ himself, when he is sitting in the boat on the Sea of Galilee and the storm rages, they say, master, carest thou not that we perish? What does he do? He breathes upon the waters, peace, be still and the waters calm. That’s his role of creation. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, calmed the chaos, and he’s organizing. He is God from the beginning to the middle to the end. And his role is to look at the chaos that is the earth today and again restore order to it. Because he is the Creator. He must again create Israel. Take all of those pieces that have been scattered everywhere from the Gentiles or from the nations to now a new organized house of Israel. And he creates order once again.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: I like the. I like the imagery of that. And again, one of the. I remember again, one of the lessons we had when I was on a mission. Our mission president basically asked us. He’s like, what’s the. What’s the greatest gift that you could possibly have?
And he. He kind of turned it around into. And that is to be able to have peace, like in the midst of the storm. And the idea that, like the Holy Ghost, or. You know what I mean, Or. Or Jesus Christ, that is. That. That is the one thing that he can promise us.
He can’t promise us that we won’t have problems or. You know what I mean, that life won’t be chaotic. But the idea is, the most important thing is that if we do what we’re supposed to do, Christ can give us peace.
As the tempest is raging, I guess, or whatever.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: Oh, I so like that you referred to that. Not just at a national level, because what’s going on a lot of times in the scripture, this national example of Israel is really a symbol of ourselves as we turn away and we apostatize and we follow it. But the Lord will bring us back as we repent and he restores us just as much as he does Israel. This idea of creating Israel isn’t just about creating Israel. It’s not just about establishing order in Israel. But he’s giving us commandments. He’s trying to give us peace. He’s trying to give us comfort to our souls and put to bed the chaos that we feel.
And as we follow those commandments, as we start to measure up, as we’ve talked about before, that measuring up and that utilization, the Lord is creating something out of us. This creation that took place in the beginning isn’t a one and done deal. It’s a continual process. And the cool thing is, if you look at the name of the Lord in the Old Testament, and I’m talking about Jehovah, but Jehovah is not the name of the Lord.
In the Hebrew Bible, they had the consonants for his name, but when they vowed it because it was blasphemous, you could not say his name out loud. And to prevent anyone from accidentally reading the Scriptures and reading his name and saying his name out loud, they took the vowels from the word for Lord, which is Adonai. So the ao, the A ending and they put it J, ho, vah with the consonants. So Jehovah is a made up word using the vowels from Adonai, Lord, and putting it into the Lord’s name himself. And this name, the sacred name that they would never say out loud, that they would never speak.
If you look up the Brown Driver Briggs Dictionary lexicon of the Hebrew language, in it, it says that the Y prefix, the Y means he, third person, masculine, and it’s in a causative form. And the Havah is cause, excuse me, to be, to exist, to live. So according to these non LDS scholars, the name of the Lord, Lord God, Jehovah, Elohim. Elohim means gods.
Havah means to be, to create or to exist. And Yah means he will cause, he will cause the gods to be or God Maker was his name in the Old Testament. As he’s creating Israel, as he’s creating us, he is patterning us after his own image. And we’ve talked about this a little bit before. He became the lamb so that he became like us. We are like sheep that are lost. He is the shepherd, right? But he also became the lamb that sacrificed himself. And he as the sacrificial lamb or goat, we become the sheep or the goats that choose one way or the other. But then also we become like shepherds that are trying to gather this whole idea that he is patterning us after him and creating us into, into him.
And I think it’s cool when you look at if he received his, you know, going back to just the science reference, if he received his Y chromosome from God and X chromosome from Mary, it’s saying that God and Mary, it’s compatible. We are the same. We are God’s children. There is no difference. We’ve got to get that out of our heads. It’s not that we’re just going to be singing with harps on clouds forever. This is our race, our story, our family. And there is something more for us to be found.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: It’s incredible.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: And God’s trying to create us out of that chaos.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: Okay, going to the next two sections. 15 and 16. This will be kind of quick because the two sections are identical.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Oh, sweet. Do we get to talk about more thrusting in sickles into rice, into fields. Rice fields, wheat fields, whatever.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Now this one, we’re going to look at it a little bit differently because to me, this one’s always sound a little bit funny because they’re brothers.
And he says, I know what your desires of your heart were. You were praying really to know what I wanted for you to do. And this is what I want you to do. And I’m going to reveal to you something that was secret, that nobody ever knew. And yet he says the exact same thing to his brother. I’m going to show to you what was secret that nobody else knows. And the desires of your heart and your desires was to serve me. And here’s how you can serve me. And yet for something so unique and something that the secret desires. It’s a carbon copy, the same word for word revelation to both brothers.
And my takeaway from this, as I look at it, is that so many times we think that we’re unique, that we’re different.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Wait, I’m not different.
[00:23:40] Speaker A: And we are unique. We are different. We do have personality. We do. But we think that we are the exception to the rule, that when God’s speaking, he might not be speaking to us, that he doesn’t understand our situation. Or we might think that we are different in the way that.
I don’t know how best to say this, but maybe if I say it this way, when it comes down to it, as different as we are, at the end of the day, a lot of us really desire the same thing.
A lot of us are trying to make a go of it. A lot of us are trying to just be happy. A lot of us are trying to find that thing that will give us peace. A lot of us really do just want to make God happy. And so when the prophets are speaking to us in generalities and we say, oh, that’s great for the church, but it might not apply to me, really, we have a lot more in common with each other than we think. As we look at the example of these two brothers and what a prophet speaks to all, he really speaks to us. And oftentimes as we hear that general counsel which might be repeated from me to you, to everyone, to the whole world, yet somehow when we listen to it, the Spirit has a way of personalizing that message and making it unique to us, as if God was speaking to us only.
And really, God has a way of taking these passages which it would seem like foolishness if you were the prophet and just making this up and you’re going to say two people, you’re just going to write the exact same revelation to. It seems like foolishness. And yet God has a way of taking it, making it work, and personalizing it.
All right, the last little bit I want to hit on is the next section. Doctrine and Covenants, Section 17.
This is the revelation regarding the three witnesses.
And Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris and David Whitmer are going to be these three witnesses. And again, kind of how we talked at the beginning of this episode, it s not that God chose them as much as they were curious when they heard about these three witnesses and they wanted to feel the that role. And they asked Joseph Smith about it. If you have desires to serve God, you are called to the work. Ask and you shall receive. A lot of the times the Lord has a special role for us and he’s just waiting for us to ask to fill it. He’s not going to thrust it on us. He’s asking for us to thrust it upon ourselves. So as they seek the Lord, they’re called and chosen to be these three witnesses. And it’s kind of interesting. They’re not just witnessing to the plates. They’re going to see the sword of Laban, they’re going to see the breastplate, they’re going to see the Urim and Thummim. They’re going to testify to what’s going on. It’s going to take a lot of weight off of Joseph Smith as a prophet, because he’s not the only one. You’re not just taking his word for it. There’s other people that have seen it too. But as they go to have this experience, something different happens.
They’re kneeling down, they’re praying, and nothing happens.
Here you are, you ask God if going back to Oliver Cowdery, who asked to translate, he asked God to translate, he goes to translate, and then it doesn’t work out the way he thought. Now think again about Nephi. When they’re going to get the plates, they’re excited to go get it. Well, Nephi’s gonna be really excited to go get it. What he was excited about was when they got rejected and turned away. He remembered that he left all of their gold and silver and precious things at home and said, wait a second. Maybe there was a purpose in us doing this. Maybe the reason we left all of this behind was so that we could go and barter and buy these plates later. Like, it could have been perceived as revelation, as inspiration. And then you go and you take it to Laban and it doesn’t work. So here you’ve got these three guys. They’re called of God. They asked and they received, and they’re praying, and nothing. They don’t receive the revelation.
And after a while of this, Martin Harris says, it’s because of me.
I am not right. And remember, not too long ago in Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord called Martin Harris out and called him a wicked man. And what we see is not always the same as what God sees. So he stands up and excuses himself. After excusing himself, the heavens open, the angel comes. And Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer experience the vision with Joseph Smith.
They see the plates, they see the breastplate, they see it all. And then when it closes and it’s done, Joseph Smith goes over, finds Martin Harris, who’s by himself praying, and he prays with Martin Harris and helps him walk through this repentance process. And a lot of times, as we’re seeking revelation or inspiration, even if it’s something that was good, that we know we should be getting and that God wants to give us, there’s just something that needs to be fixed first.
When we turn our hearts and repent and turn to the Lord, then it makes it possible for us to receive those blessings that we’re looking for. And sometimes, even though we’re supposed to get it, we just need to make sure we’re right first before we do.
All right, thank you for listening. Tune in next week, we’re going to be talking a little bit more about Martin Harris and the path that he follows and how he plays a key role in getting the Book of Mormon to us today.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: All right, well, until next time, see ya.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: Sa.
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