Transcript:
[00:00:15] 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 discussions and try to add a little insight and unique perspective. I am your host, Jason Lloyd, and here in the studio with me is my friend and producer, Nate Pyfer.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: What is up?
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Hey.
In this episode, we are going to be talking about how the works of God and his designs cannot be frustrated. There is also a lot to learn from the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon. We are going to look at some of the context to what was going on in Joseph Smith’s life at this time. Then we will take a quick peek at Doctrine and Covenants section four before we move on to the council that God gave to Joseph Smith and Martin Harris in Doctrine and Covenants section five. So sit back, enjoy. And here we go.
To begin, let me just open up the scriptures real quick so I can read it.
You can probably just edit that little snippet out.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Or maybe I won’t. Maybe we’ll all wait uncomfortably for you to do this.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Probably.
Okay. Doctrine and Covenant is section 3, verse 1. The works and designs and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated. Neither can they come to naught. And I think that’s a very comforting statement, but it’s a very cool statement. And what it reminds me of is JRR Tolkien when he wrote the Silmarillion. It’s a story. I don’t know if you’re into Tolkien or not, or followed much of his works, but this one is the creation account of how Middle Earth came to be. And so you’ve got your gods sitting here. You, your Aener is what they’re called. And the lead God here cues him up on a song like a choir director. And they’re all singing, and as they’re singing, it’s the creation taking place. And the most powerful of them, his name is Melkor and he’s a little bit discontent here. So every now and again he weaves in this. And you should appreciate this, Nate, coming from your music background.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: I’m ready.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: He brings in this discord is what they call it, where he tries to start singing a different song to just be a little bit rebellious encounter. And he starts singing it loud to the point where the other ones singing next to him start tuning into his song. And then the lead God’s kind of got to get him back on track and he changes the tune up a little bit and brings them all back together. And you’ve got this back and forth play almost kind of this Good and evil. And when the song is all finished, the head God pulls them all together and says, okay, I want to show you what you created in music. And he shows them the creation of the world. And he says, even when you try to frustrate me, when Melkor, the most powerful of all of you, tries to frustrate me by singing in the discord or adding in these bad notes or these bad tunes, trying to ruin the song, all he did was glorify my work even more. And he shows him the discord that Melkor was singing in there brought about the cold and the frigid temperatures, and yet God changed the tune and brought about the snowflake and the beauty that comes with the snow.
This kind of back and forth play goes out. I won’t tell you the whole story, but just showing you that even when Satan or evil or whatever the case may be is trying to frustrate the work of God, really all it does is play out to magnify or glorify it.
Go ahead.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: I never read any of that stuff.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: It’s an interesting read. I’m kind of excited to see the. You saw Amazon dropped a billion dollars on a new Lord of the Rings series. TV series.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: I just actually finished watching the Hobbit movies. Not the cool cartoon ones from when we were kids, but like the really terrible ones from when we were adults.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: I don’t think they were.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: It’s one of those things where it’s just like you’re so far into it that you can’t turn it off because you’ve already invested so much time that it almost feels like wasting you wasted time. I don’t know why we do that. As humans, we should be way more comfortable with saying, those are sunk costs. It’s time to move on. And there’s no reason I need to finish this terrible movie.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, that could open a can of worms. I’ve got plenty of bad movies I could talk about, but I’m gonna try to stop myself.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just took you. I just took you out of the vibe. Continue, Continue.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: You’re good. I was about to take myself even worse out of the vibe. I’m just gonna stop before I start. We have seen some doozies, but going back into this, God is saying that his plans and his designs cannot be frustrated. Then he is going to show that even long before the plates were pulled out of the earth and Joseph Smith started translating it, he had a contingency plan where Nephi made A record kind of going over the same information that Lehi had gone over so that nothing was really important was lost. There was continuity that kept going. Have to retranslate those pages.
Perhaps the greatest example of God’s plans not being frustrated, even though bad things are kind of getting weaved into the mix, is probably the atonement itself. When we look at Christ’s life, I mean, how many of us, if we could imagine ourselves in that setting right towards the end, as he is about to be crucified? What if we were in that crowd and not knowing what we know? Today we see this man that we loved, our Lord the Savior, and Pontius Pilate stands up and says, who should I release? How many of us would be praying and hoping that Christ would be released? Not Barabbas, right? Barabbas was a murderer. And when Christ is still going to be crucified, how many of us would not be hoping? We have got Passover coming.
What if they were to wait until after the holiday and then give Christ a chance to kind of escape and live and continue to teach us and to continue to grow? All of these bad things that happened, ultimately his crucifixion and the atonement itself, as bad as it seemed, and as much as we would have prayed for him as a loved one or him as somebody that we care about, wanting the best thing in that situation, would have frustrated the most important, greatest blessing that has ever been offered to mankind across the earth.
And that’s what happens in our life. As much as sometimes we wish we could avoid the thorns or pull away from the tribulation or the problems, some of those things end up being the greatest blessings to us. And those trials are really what make us who we are and make us great.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: I think that actually, like you said earlier, is comforting, because one of the questions that I still grapple with the hardest is, why do bad things happen to good people? And as simple as it is, and it’s sometimes easy to kind of dismiss it a little bit, or sometimes the dismissive answer is like, well, you know, because everybody has their agency. But it’s like, man, that doesn’t make me feel any better about that.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: And you know who got it was. Was Nephi. If you imagine that guy with his family, and he’s building a boat to cross the seas, to come over to a promised land. And before they board that boat, he has a vision where he sees his descendants and he sees them kind of fall away from the truth. And he sees that the scourge of Their existence are going to be the Lamanites, his brother’s children are going to be warring with them, fighting with them, and ultimately in the end destroying them. And yet when he comes away and walks away from that vision here he’s got brothers that just complaining and want to go back to Jerusalem. How easy would it be with him knowing the future to just say, you know what? Yeah, head back to Jerusalem, that’s fine, go and not take them on the boat with him, knowing what kind of opposition they are going to be putting to his kids. But yet those struggles, those bad things, as you said, that sometimes we wonder why they happen or why they happen to good people, are yet so important sometimes to bringing about God’s plan or his purposes.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: And it also just helps to remember sometimes too that like, we don’t have all the answers in the short term ever actually. And, or maybe, I mean, I shouldn’t say ever a lot of times we don’t really have the answers in the short term. And so many things are revealed later, even in our lives that give us an add perspective to the trials that we went through earlier. And there’s no way that we should ever dismiss people’s hurt and tribulation and the horrible, terrible things that do happen to people. We just have to understand, or at least try to understand that our perspective is so finite, our understanding of infinite things is still so finite. And like you said, there’s comfort in knowing that the Lord has told us that he will not be frustrated and that he’s going to make sure that his plan is still executed.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Yeah. When poor Joseph Smith’s in Liberty jail and he says all these things will be for your benefit. Right.
No, it’s wild.
As I was thinking about this and I was putting together these bad things that are happening or seemingly bad things that happen, or the opportunities for us to learn or to change just kind of chip away at us. I couldn’t help but think of an example example that you told me about instruments and guitar in particular, how it’s framed or put together or how that fits into this idea. Would you mind elaborating a little bit on that?
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Sure. I think what you’re referring to is I had to give a lesson one time or talk in sacrament meeting or something about the idea of us being instruments, you know, or God calling prophets to be instruments. And, and because of my, you know, day to day, you know, music stuff, that’s of course the type of instrument I think of. And as I was reading how the process of building a Guitar, you know, raw wood is basically cut and, you know, kind of roughly, you know, cut into slabs that will eventually become, you know, the body of the guitar. But to get them, to get that hard piece of wood to be able to form into the shape of a guitar, you know, you have to soak it until it’s pliable and bendable. And then you take that and put it inside of a frame so that when it hardens back again, it’s. It’s hardening back in the right shape. I think that’s what we’re talking about, right?
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
And some of those steps, you know, as you’re talking about, you know, soaking the wood, cutting it, clamping it and forcing it kind of go a different direction than what it would naturally want to. And yet it turns it into such a. I mean, you turn it into a work of art, whereas in before it might not have been much. Right. You’re adding utilization through the trials that you’re putting it through and to kind of give us a little bit of insight on some of the trials that Joseph Smith’s going through at this time. Right after he gives the 116 pages to Martin Harris, Moroni comes and takes the Urim and Thummim from him even before the pages are lost. And he’s got to be questioning right in the back of his mind. I have to think that he was worried because God had told him three times that he shouldn’t do this. But he was more worried about Martin Harris and making sure that his financial means, because Martin Harris was financially supporting this work that he was taken care of. I think this is a problem that a lot of people get into. We want to be people pleasers. We want to make people happy. And we get caught between rock and a hard spot trying to please everyone, where you say yes to too many people or, you know, you’re trying to do this. But Joseph Smith, so concerned for his friend, for making sure the work puts forward, and he’s got so much focus on this, he’s got to be beating himself up a little bit that he kept going to God rather than telling Martin Harris no, trying to convince God into making this happen. And if it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t stop there. Joseph Smith, Emma had just had a child right after this happened, right after they gave the pages, but before Martin Harris came back and told him that the pages were lost, Emma was expecting a child, delivered the child, and the child died. And not only did the child die, but Emma was on death’s bed. She wasn’t doing well.
And in fact, she was sitting gravely ill in her bed. And as Joseph was taking care of her and she was clinging on to life, she told him that one of her big concerns was those pages and asked him if he had called on Martin Harrison to find out what the state of those were. When Joseph Smith found out those pages were lost, he was so devastated. He thought that Emma, that the news would put her over into the grave.
And maybe he was beating himself up and thought that the loss of his child, potentially the loss of his wife, the loss of the trans. All of this was because, I mean, think of the lessons, of what he went through to get these plates out of the ground. And when he took his hand, you know, his eyes off of it for a second, the plates disappeared. Moroni said, you’re not trustworthy enough. I need you to do this. I need you to do this. And now all of a sudden, he felt like he betrayed that trust. He let God down. I mean, this, this was like the guitar going through the ring or getting clamped, whatever that process was to turn into who he ended up being at the end.
Just some interesting context there and some interesting look into what he was going through, not just the 116 pages.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: I think it’s pretty relatable, though. Again, I think that that’s a very relatable thing to us, even if it’s not specific, you know, those, those specific types of things or whatever. But I mean, if you think about it, what, what good or great thing in your life has come without pain? You know, what great thing that, what great thing can you look back on and say, oh, yeah, that didn’t take. That didn’t take a lot of either physical or emotional or, or, you know, mental pain and, and sometimes agony to then, to then either be taught something or to learn something or to be given something.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: A lot of times they become turning points for us, or at least big moments that we look back on for inspiration to help us get us through it. We know it’s not going to be pleasant getting through it, but when we’re on the other side, we’ve got that experience and we feel a little bit better because of it.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Look at every single one of God’s prophets or chosen prophets throughout the Scriptures. I mean, very rarely, very rarely, if any, I can’t think of off the top of my head that it was just like, you know, they were born and everything just went so smooth and they taught all this great stuff and they got translated or whatever. You know, they didn’t even have to die. It’s like, tell me, tell me any of those stories like the of the greatest prophets that didn’t have some sort of, you know, deep agony or trial, you know, the Lord, The Lord truly does shape his, his instruments.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Like the phrase, you know, the rough stone rolling, you’re just smoothing out the edges and turning it into a work of art by the time it hits the bottom.
Well, so that being said, I’d like to ask the question, why? Why was Martin Harris so persistent to get those pages? I mean, what was the big deal? Why, why couldn’t he just take no for an answer?
[00:16:17] Speaker B: I mean, I think I know the answer.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: You know, I think a lot of it. This poor guy was in a very similar situation to Joseph Smith as far as in the straits here. He is convinced that he is doing the Lord’s work. He is spending his money, he is spending his time. When he takes the trip up to New York to show the professor the writings and see if it is verified to get proof that what he is doing is right. This isn’t just an overnight journey. This is taking several weeks getting there. It is taking several weeks getting back. And the time that he is spending with Joseph Smith, it is an unusually warm year. They’re supposed to be getting the crops in. He’s a farmer and his wife’s worried because instead of getting the crops put in, instead of taking care of his family, he’s out going and visiting New Yorker, he’s hanging out at the Smith farm. He’s spending all this time not taking care of them. And she thinks that Joseph Smith is a fraud to the point where she is pressing charges.
She’s taking Joseph Smith to court and accusing of him of fraud.
And Martin Harris, caught between his wife and between Joseph Smith is trying to appease things, trying to get her to calm down. And how does he do that?
He doesn’t want to ruin his relationship with his wife, but he also wants to keep the Lord happy. So none of this is as clear cut or clean as it looks. Everyone here, it’s not like they were maliciously trying to do anything as much as just trying to please too many people and not trying to please God first.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Which is totally understandable. Yeah, I mean if we’re just being totally honest, there is a lot of faith that it would require to not, you know what I mean, not care about the at hand problems like your spouse, you know, the person that you’re living with and also commanded to, you know, take care of And. And do your best to uplift and make happy. So, yeah, I mean, that’s. I’m not. I’m not. I would. I definitely am not going to be throwing any stones is all I’m saying.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Right, right. And, you know, even though sometimes it might make sense or we might justify what we do, you know, at the end of the day, God still chasing them, right? At the end of the day, even though they were trying to make things work or they were trying to please people, the end of the day, they were wrong because they weren’t listening to number one, they weren’t listening to God.
President Monson used to say this all the time.
He said it a couple different ways, but he would say the wisdom of God oftentimes appears as foolishness to man. But the single greatest lesson we can learn is that when God speaks and a man listens, that man will always be right. And so sometimes it might be foolish that why wouldn’t you just show them the work? Or why wouldn’t you just. But God has a reason, or God has a purpose, and that’s what he’s trying to teach them here, that sometimes it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes you can’t just rationalize it. Sometimes, even though it sounds just a simple thing in your mind that you’re going to do it, really the simplest thing is to just listen to God. It might appear like foolishness, or it might not make the most sense, but if you follow what you feel and if you follow what God’s telling you, you’re always going to be right. And they also give a little tip here because they say that the designs and purposes of God cannot be frustrated, but they also give a reason why it can’t be frustrated. Almost kind of like a guideline for how we can make it so that our plans aren’t frustrated as well. I mean, that would be nice, right?
Verse 2, it says, for God doth not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand, nor to the left. Neither doth he vary from the path which he has said. So as I think about that, his plans can’t be frustrated because he’s not winding around, right? And I think that’s where we get caught in our trap.
When we start deviating or we start wandering away, it creates an opportunity for us to intersect or run into our own plans where really we’re the ones that are frustrating our own plans. Our deviances that we’re throwing into the mix is frustrating. What we do. If we are able to walk straight Like God, that is how we can do it without frustrating ourselves.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: Love it.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Okay, next up in Doctrine Covenants, Section four, this is something that all missionaries memorize over and over and over again.
And a lot of people are familiar with this. It is a very short section, and it’s a very short section. And I don’t feel like we should really spend too much time talking about it. But it is something that’s going to be repeated over and over and over again in the Doctrine and Covenants. And that message is that the field is white and now ready to harvest. And this is a message of revelation that Joseph Smith gives to his father, Joseph Smith Sr. One year before the church is restored. So even before the church is restored, the Lord is saying, the field is white and all ready to harvest. And we’ll talk about this a little bit more in some other lessons because, like I said, it does show up a lot of times in the Book of Mormon. But what I did want to take away from this is the idea that in the New Testament, you have a couple parables that are referring to the end of times. You’ve got this idea of the virgins that are waiting for the Lord, the groom, to come to the church. Well, here with the restoration of the Gospel, you have the groom that’s returning to the church, which is the bride, and restoring that. Where the church is now married or unified, joined to the Lord, the Lord stands at the head of his church. There’s now the church of Jesus Christ in the fulfillment of that prophecy. He also talks about another prophecy that in the last days, well, before we get to the last days, you’ve got the parable of the wheat and the tares where the sowers are out sowing the wheat all throughout the field. And then the enemy comes in at night and sows the tares among the wheat. And they say, well, what should we do? Should we try to separate it? And they say, no, don’t separate it, because you might damage some of the wheat in the process. Wait until the end, and when the field is white and ready to harvest, that is when you can separate the wheat and the tares. So that prophecy dealing with the end of times, the that when the wheat is matured, this is the Lord telling us we are at that time, the wheat is ready, the field is white and all ready to harvest. Just giving you kind of an idea of where we sit in our timeline according to New Testament prophecies. It is exciting. We are sitting right here towards the end in the next section, Doctrine and Covenant, Section 5.
I loved how the Lord is focusing Joseph Smith. He says, you have a gift to translate the plates, and this is the first gift that I bestowed upon you. And I have commanded that you should pretend to no other gift until my purpose is fulfilled in this. For I will grant unto you no other gift until it is finished. And I find it interesting that he says, pretend to no other gift. He’s saying, not only. He’s saying, I’m not giving you any other gifts until the translation is done. And seeing that you don’t have any other gifts, you’re not going to be practicing any other gifts. But I don’t even want you pretending like you have any other gifts until this is done. This is your work. I want the nostrils.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: You have one job to do.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: You have one job. This is it. Get it done. I love it. I love how he keeps him focused.
And really, the Lord is prioritizing here. Before the Church is restored, I need that Book of Mormon, I need it translated, and I need this to go forth with the restoration of the Gospel. Let’s put one foot in front of the other and keep ourselves focused.
A lot of times when you are at the beginning of a new project, you get really excited and sometimes you want to run in like 100 different directions to get this thing up off the ground. And I can imagine that he is very similar. He is excited. He is a young prophet. He has got this opportunity, this information that the Lord’s fed him. It’d be fun to just go around and, you know, get everything moving. But. But the Lord says, hold on, one thing at a time.
We also have in here talking about witnesses. He says that there’s going to be witnesses to the plates that they’re going to use when the Book of Mormon is translated. And we have that at the beginning. We have the testimony of the three witnesses. We have the testimony of the 12 witnesses. I just wanted to make one comment on that, that I find it fascinating that, you know, you look at the three witnesses, all of them were members of the Church, all of them witnessed to the plates, and yet all of them fell away. And even though all of them fell away, none of them denied their testimony or their witnesses to what they saw.
What more powerful witness can you get for something than somebody who turned enemy to it? Because it is not just somebody that was neutral, that was standing outside that maybe you could buy off or whatever. I mean, these are people that turned hostile to the Church that kind of went away and were kind of negative and had Bad feelings and hard feelings for the church. Yet as bad as it went and as much as they didn’t like it, they held true to the one thing that they believed that they saw. And they said, this happened. I know this happened. And I just find it fascinating that these are the people the Lord chose because I don’t think you could find any better witnesses than that.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Well, like we talked about too, again, like, the idea that sometimes conflict is, is the thing that, you know what I mean, like, can bring about some of the greatest purposes. It’s like, you’re absolutely right. And it’s something that I’ve always like, seen as obviously a divine decision. Right. Like, I, I don’t think that there’s any, I don’t think that there’s, that there’s anything but a deliberate choice in the people that were chose to be the witnesses. Because it makes sense.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: It does. And you know, going back to what President Monson said, sometimes the wisdom of God appears like foolishness to man. But in the end, not only it makes sense, but you know, and maybe this is why this is such a powerful verse. This is kind of what I want to finish on is where it says in Doctrine and Covenants, stop and stand still.
And I love those directions because we worry about a lot. Joseph Smith was worried about Martin Harris. Martin Harris was worried about his wife. We are worried about getting all of this work done. When the Lord says, no, I only want you to focus on this right now. We worry about so much in our lives and part of that worry is almost a distrust in God. But going back to last episode when we were talking about the patience that God had to wait for Joseph Smith to call on him rather than try to speed things up.
That idea of just be patient and stand still, know that God is there.
His wisdom, as much as it might seem like foolishness to us, is wisdom. His ways are not our ways. And if we trust and stand still and put it in him, his ways, like it says at the very beginning, his designs, his purposes cannot be frustrated. His purpose, his paths are straight. It will all work out in the end.
Well, that is all I have got for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Tune in next week we are going to be talking about the word of God being compared to a two edged sword and how it divides. So some reference there. We do talk a little bit more about harvesting wheat in the end.
And we will talk about Revelation, how God answers prayers. It’s Doctrine and Covenants, section six through nine. So thank you for joining until next time. We’ll see you later.
0 responses on "D&C 3 - 5 (2025)"