Cults No.2 Mormonism

...sent a delusion into this world. Men and women's minds are captivated by deviations from the truth. And when you look into the devil's arsenal, the possibility is that you can get hurt.

You can get hurt in many, many ways. The devil can make an inroad upon the life of anyone who's trying to expose teaching which is alien to the Bible. And believe me, in even preparing, and I'm not exaggerating, preparing this series, I have found great personal difficulty in just getting certain aspects of the material together.

The devil does not like anyone trespassing upon his province. Well, as I suggested to you, indeed, I forcefully pointed out to you at the beginning of this series, a lot of the cults, a lot of the deviations, owe their origin to the United States of America. There are some associations with America one way or another.

And perhaps in a class on its own, the Mormons illustrate this fact. It is a completely, 100% United States religion. Someone comments like this, the Bible of Mormonism came into being just outside New York State.

It proclaimed Zion first in Illinois and later in Utah, two more USA states. Its prophet's name was Smith. Its sacred history deals with North and South America, with landmarks familiar to us all, and not with events in far-off Judea.

Its exodus took place across the plains of our continent. Its Red Sea was the Mississippi. And when the last trump sounds, Jesus is coming, you guess, to America, to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Well, that's a comment by an American who's evaluating the Mormon faith. Let me break off and say the reason why you haven't got any notes this evening is not because I was so lazy as to fail to produce them, but when our printer came along, our dear brother Mr. Wiseman this morning, we had no electricity. And as a result of that, we couldn't work the offset light zone.

Notes have been prepared, they will be available on Sunday, but if you keep plugging into what I'm saying this evening, then you can do a little bit of revision when you get the outline notes of what I'm telling you this next Lord's Day. The Mormon Church is by far from a played-out force in the USA. The Mormons are a force to be reckoned with.

Across the administration of the United States of America, you come face to face with people who are adherents of the Mormon Church. More Mormons are listed in the celebrated volume Who's Who in America than any other religious group. You may remember the death recently of Howard Hughes, one of the most wealthy men in the world.

Well, he so trusted the Mormons that his closest associates, in effect, his bodyguards, all came from that community. Indeed, I did read, I don't know what the outcome of all this was, but the Mormon Church was contesting the will of Howard Hughes because the possibility was that they would be one of the beneficiaries. Not that they're short of a dime or dollar or two.

The Mormon Church knows billions of dollars flowing into its coffers, and if you were to catch a plane and go to Salt Lake City, you would see there evidence, abundant evidence, of the wealth and the material blessing that there seems to have been upon this particular sect. The Mormons, as opposed to the JWs, have an educational policy. They have a university, one of the best in America.

They have their own schools. The sect is directed towards families. Mom, Dad, and the children are all welcomed, and provision is made for them.

And because of this family orientation, coupled with the enthusiasm and the clean lifestyle of many Mormons, a lot of people are being attracted, are being sucked in, to the Mormon Church in this country. Some of you may have seen the rather lavish temple just outside East Grimstead. Well, the Mormons, perhaps not with as much success as the JWs, but running a close second, are making an impact in the United Kingdom.

And that, my friend, is one of the reasons why you should know something of Mormonism, and more particularly, have a mind that's immersed in Scripture, so that that clean-shaven, good-looking Mormon youth, who stands at your doorstep, shall be challenged as to his faith in Jesus Christ, and his experience of salvation. Because neither of those commodities does he know experientially at all. It is not, and I think if you were here last week, you would perhaps bear me witness to this, it is not my intention to force scorn upon the sect, or the adherents of these particular groups.

I have nothing but love and respect for the sincerity and for the members of every deviation from the truth. But when I tell you this, I tell you accurately, that in my studies, which have taken some time, not only recently, but as a lad in my teenage, when I was interested in the Mormon, as I have considered what the Mormon Church believes, I am prone to conclude that given the right environment, the right situation, you could get people to believe almost anything. It seems to me that the Mormon religion does not fall far short of Hans Andersen fairy tales being set in a religious category.

Now I say that not to force scorn on the individual Mormon, but to demonstrate what I believe is increasingly to be seen in this world, that the devil is abroad perpetrating delusions, the con man getting people to accept and to believe what is absurd, what is ridiculous. Headquarters of the Mormon Church, I told you, are in Salt Lake City, Utah, the state of America down there in the south, and from Salt Lake City, along with many other Mormon communities scattered around the USA, young Mormons in their thousands will come across to Europe for a two-year missionary program. Some ladies are involved, but they are in a minority.

Ladies don't seem to have such a privileged position as men in the Mormon Church. But thousands of clean-cut young fellows come to Europe and to South Africa and Australasia, and there they peddle the teaching of the founder of their sect, Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith is a man that we ought to know something about, and I want to spend a little bit of time just informing you concerning his life, his lifestyle, and his demise, how he died.

Joseph Smith, Jr. is famous or infamous as the founder of the Mormon Church. He was born in a place called Sharon, Vermont, obviously in the States in 1805. If you go to his hometown of Sharon, you'll find a 38-foot monument erected to the Prophet Joseph, and underneath it says some very complimentary things about him.

Far more complimentary than what the original townsfolk who actually knew him when he lived there had to say. Indeed, one of the facts that comes through with great power when you study the life of Joseph Smith is that it's very hard to find any positive, any commendation that was made regarding him by his contemporaries who were not adherents to his particular faith. Many criticisms were fired in his direction, and it seems to me with a great deal of justification.

Prophet Joseph was martyred on the 27th of June 1844. A lot, as I say, could be mentioned in respect to his life, but we'll have to trim ourselves this evening to just bringing out the salient features. His father was something of a visionary, and his mother, she seemed to have dabbled in the occult.

Father was a gold prospector, and young Joe, as he was affectionately known by his contemporaries, was following in father's footsteps. Not that they did very well looking for gold. In fact, they had no luck whatsoever.

Until, one day, when he was 14 years of age, someone appeared to him, and this was the first vision. I say someone, some two men appeared to him, or two divine beings. Joseph tells us later on in his own autobiography, that they were none other than God the Father and God the Son.

At 14 years of age, young Joseph wondered what church to join. This was his problem when he had this vision. And he was informed, supernaturally, that he was not to link up with any of the denominations at all.

But rather, he was going to make such an impact upon society, that his name would be known internationally, and he would restore the truth of Christianity back to the churches. Or, if they did not agree with him, he would form his own church. My name, says Joseph, in his biography, should be had for good and evil, said these divine personages to him, among all nations, kindreds, and towns.

Well, although he had this vision from God the Father and God the Son, it didn't seem to affect his lifestyle too much. Still continued partying around in the hills, past his village, looking for gold. But some three years later, when he was just 17, he had his second vision.

And this, perhaps, altered Joseph more than the first. For there he was told by a man, or perhaps more accurately described by an angel, whose name was Moroni, of where the gold really was, on the hill just outside his village. Moroni went on to say that hidden somewhere in this hill were several tablets, several golden plates.

And if Joseph would go and excavate, he would discover that on these plates was written, in hieroglyphics that perhaps he would not be able to understand, the history of America, which up to that time had been completely lost. Well, Moroni, this angel, encouraged Joseph two or three times during that night. So the following day, up he went to the top of the hill, and there he discovered these tablets.

Unfortunately, he wasn't very competent with languages, not even the English language, to be quite truthful. But conveniently for Joseph, there were attached to these plates an article or two articles which he referred to fondly as the Urim and the Thummim. Better explained is a huge pair of spectacles.

And when he done these spectacles, then this writing which was so difficult for him to understand became comprehensible. Well, the angel told him that he was not as yet at any rate to retain custody of this gold. So he had to hide it once more.

And once a year, for the next four years, he came back, just to check that they were there. And when the fourth year passed, he was actually allowed to take these tablets away from the spot. September the 27th, 1827.

And they were to be kept in his custody until the angel Moroni called for them again. Now, this language on these plates was referred to as Reformed Egyptian. If you say that you've never heard of Reformed Egyptian before, well, you suffer from the same difficulty as anyone else prior to the testimony of Joseph Smith.

For Reformed Egyptian has no other illustration in any document that has been preserved from antiquity. Well, what did Joseph do? He determined that he would decipher these tablets, and he managed to get the help of a man by the name of Martin Harris, who became his secretary. Perhaps not the best sort of secretary, because he was an ill-educated, though a well-meaning man, actually a farmer from New York.

Now, Harris was not allowed to see these tablets, although he did say that he'd seen them by faith later on, when he was given testimony. But I'll come to his testimony in a little while. What happened was that Joseph was in one part of a room, curtained off from his friend Harris, and he put the Urim and Thummim over his eyes, and he went to the tablets, and he recounted what was there, and the secretary wrote it all down.

Later on, Harris's services were dispensed with, and a man by the name of Oliver Cowdery, schoolmaster, so presumably a better secretary, took his place. And Oliver and Joseph were to know more divine honours, because the pair of them, one day when strolling by the Mississippi, came into contact with no lesser people than Peter, James and John, who ordained them to the Melchizedek priesthood. In 1830, the Book of Mormon knew its first edition.

Harris mortgaged his farm, and with the money, he was able to pay the Pinter, and the first of many thousands, probably many millions of copies of the Book of Mormon, came off the press, and were made freely available for those who would spend time to read what was contained therein. Not only in 1830 was this book published, but also in that same year, the first Mormon church was constituted with six members. It grew very quickly to 40, very quickly after that to hundreds, later to thousands, and now it can be numbered in millions.

Well, Joseph Smith ran into a lot of trouble. Wherever he went, he seemed to get into trouble. He moved further eastward, and rather, sorry, he moved further westward, and eventually, cutting a lot out of his life, his life story, he settled in a place called Nauvoo, which he believed was a Hebrew word, and alas, in Nauvoo, a journalist, a newspaper editor, started to write editorials against him.

This incensed Joseph, who excited or incited some of his followers to stop the production of the paper, destroy the press, and Joseph was put in prison with his brother as a result. He was carted off from there to a place called Carthage in Illinois, and there, some hostile people took their law into their own hands, and they killed Joseph Smith in a very cruel way. Those folks who were hostile to Mormonism actually gave it its first martyr, and the principle often is worked out that the blood of the martyrs is the speed of the organization, as it applied to the church, so it applies to the Mormon Church.

Joseph is dead, who will take his place? Well, there was a man by the name of Brigham Young, and Brigham Young became the second president of the Mormon Church. He still had to find a place where the Mormons would be accepted in the United States, and he was who led thousands of Mormons on a historic journey to Salt Lake City. When the railroad ran out, some 3,000 of them pushed their carts, their hand carts, a distance of about 1,300 miles, and they came to Salt Lake Valley.

Brigham Young pointed this out as being that tract of land that God had given for the Mormons. Well, Brigham Young was a great organizer, great encourager of mission, possessed an uncanny and also a very cruel nature. One rather ungainly period in his life, which many Mormons know nothing about, and those who do like to forget, he ordered the death of 150 non-Mormon immigrants who came towards Salt Lake City.

Not only did he leave a church which was to be numbered in tens of thousands when he died, he also left 400,000 pounds of his personal fortune. Let's get the number of wives right, 17 wives and 56 or 57 children. I've just forgotten, but it was one of the two.

He pronounced certain teaching which is a complete embarrassment to contemporary Mormons. But the poor fellow who knocks at your doorstep can't do very much about what Brigham Young had to teach, because he was a prophet, you see, like Smith. And what Young Smith said had the authority of God upon it.

So if you deny Smith or deny Young, then you are denying the Mormon Church and you will be put out of it. Perhaps there'll be a little time to touch on his teaching in a moment or so. But let's come to the heart of the matter, the Book of Mormon.

This book that I made reference to, which Joe Smith translated from these golden plates and more particularly from Reformed Egyptian. Now it's interesting when you read this book, and it takes some reading, believe me, I haven't managed to get all the way through it by any means. It's very wearying to the flesh, to the extent that Mark Twain, when he passed comment on the Book of Mormon, referred to it in terms of chloroform in print.

Well, perhaps he got some justification for saying that. Listen to 2 Nephi chapter 29 and verse 6. Here is an argument for this book alongside, and I would suggest over against, the Bible in Mormon theology. Thou fool that shalt say a Bible? We have got a Bible and we need no more Bible.

Have you obtained a Bible, save it were by the Jews? Verse 10. Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible, ye need not suppose that it contains all my words, neither need ye suppose that I have not caused law to be written. Well, here is the additional revelation, along with seven or so other books that left the pens of Joe Smith and also Brigham Young.

But the Book of Mormon is, of course, the seed book of the Mormon faith, and if you want to know more about Mormonism, it's to that book that you have to go. It gives an incredible history. This is quite fascinating if history excites your imagination.

An incredible history of the early inhabitants of America. There were two mass immigrations from Europe and from the Middle East to America. One occurred just after the Tower of Babel, when some thousands of people called the Jaredites came into America, to the central area of those two countries that we refer to as the Americas.

Unfortunately, this first wave of immigration, these first people, did not practice the teachings of the Lord God, or the Lord Gods, I would argue, because Mormons believed in more than one God, as we shall see. And as a result, they killed one another off. And probably that's the reason why, up to the time of Joe Smith's revelation, we'd never heard of the Jaredite before.

But later on, there was a second wave of immigration into the Americas in BC 600, just before the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. Jewish people, they came to America via the Pacific, if you please. They also had a compass to help them to get there, which seems to suggest that some of them were pretty good inventors, because the compass came along quite recently, as far as the historical timetable is concerned.

However, they made it to the modern land of Peru. And their leader was a righteous man called Nephi. So the people were referred to as the Nephites.

Unfortunately, they were to face the same problem of the Jaredites some 2,000 years previously, because they fell out amongst themselves. There were a group of people who split away from the Nephites. They were called the Lamanites.

And because of their dark and diabolical deeds, they turned black. Well, actually brown. But they didn't have a word for brown, apparently, in Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics.

So Joe Smith translated it as black. Brown would have been better, because these people were the Indians that one discovers in the Americas. Now these black or brown Indians wiped out the righteous followers of Nephi.

There was a tremendous battle fought, would you believe it, on the top of the hill, quite near to the village where Joe and dad used to go prospecting. The battle was fought in 428 AD. And you remember the angel who appeared to Joseph when he was 17? Well, he happened to be the last member of the Nephi Moroni.

And the last act before he died was to dig a hole in the ground. And yes, you guessed it, he put the plate which contained the history of the first mass immigration, and the precede history, incidentally, he summarised it himself, for which we're very grateful if you've tried to plough through the Book of Mormon, haven't helped us, it would have been longer than it actually is. And alongside of that was also the history of the second immigration.

So these golden tablets were kept concealed in this hill in New York State until 17-year-old Joseph dug them up. And then, as I say, having involved his colleague Harris, he started to translate them. Now Harris, although he was a farmer and an ill-educated one at that, he was pretty shrewd as far as the dollars were concerned.

And if he was going to mortgage his farm, he wanted to be quite convinced that what was going on behind the curtain, because, as I say, he never saw the plates apart from face by face. Nobody ever saw these plates apart from Joseph Smith. He wanted to be quite sure that he was investing his dollars in a bona fide proposition.

So Joseph, ever willing to oblige, his money was in the offing, gave him a sample of reformed hieroglyphics, of reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics, which Harris then allegedly, according to Joseph Smith, who wrote all this up conveniently afterwards, he took these characteristics to a professor of the Columbia University, New York, Professor Anton. And according to Joseph Smith, this learned gentleman was very, very impressed. He had never seen such accurate translation of reformed Egyptian before in his life.

And he also said that wrapped up with these characteristics was a little bit of Hebrew and Aramaic and one or two other ancient languages. But rather unfortunately for Joseph Smith, there was a contemporary of his who didn't quite believe that this learned professor exactly attested to the reformed Egyptian characteristics as being a pucker language. And so he wrote, Mr. E.D. Howe, wrote to this particular professor from the Columbia University, and I have in front of me here the reply from Professor Anton to this gentleman, Mr. E.D. Howe.

I can't read it all, though it's fascinating. I can't read it because it's too long. Dear sir, I received this morning your favour of the ninth instant and lose no time in making a reply.

The whole story about my having pronounced the Mormonite inscription to be a reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics is perfectly false. Some years ago, a plain and apparently simple-hearted farmer called upon me with a note from Dr. Mitchell of our city, now deceased, requesting me to decipher, if possible, a paper which the farmer would hand me, and which Dr. Mitchell confessed he had been unable to understand. Upon examining the paper in question, I soon came to the conclusion that it was all a trick, perhaps a hoax.

When I asked the person who brought it how he obtained the writing, he gave me as far as I can now recollect the following account, a gold book consisting of a number of plates of gold fastened together, etc., etc. In other words, what I have told you. And he goes on to conclude his letter by saying, I have thus given you a full statement of all that I know respecting the origin of Mormonism, and must beg you as a personal favour to publish this letter immediately, should you find my name mentioned again by those wretched fanatics.

And in the middle of the letter he goes on to say that these hieroglyphics added up to absolutely nothing at all. They just did not make sense. Now, it's also interesting to notice that other people have inquired about what this book has to say concerning these ancient civilizations.

Now, in the first civilization, on one occasion there was a battle in which two million people died. Oh, and I forgot to tell you that the first lot that came over from the Middle East also brought elephants and what have you to America. So, one would think that sooner or later you might come across some remains or some evidence of this ancient civilization.

Well, you might think that you'd come across it, but apart from Mormon archaeologists and anthropologists, no one has found anything to corroborate the history of the book of the Book of Mormon. Indeed, a letter was sent to the University of Columbia, the Columbian University, by a Methodist pastor not so long ago, just to ask if this particular university knew any historical corroboration at all for the Book of Mormon. Writing to the Methodist, one of the department heads says, pardon my delay in answering your letter.

The question which you ask concerning the Book of Mormon is one that comes up quite frequently. However, I may say that I do not believe that there is a single thing of value concerning the prehistory of the American Indian in the Book of Mormon, and I believe that the great majority of American archaeologists would agree with me. The book is untrue biblically, historically, and scientifically.

And so it goes on. There are other letters that I wanted to quote from this evening, but I'm going against, fighting against the time. The sum total of the matter is this, that when you read the Book of Mormon, you find something that's interesting to a degree, if you like, that sort of thing.

But there's nothing that has any historical corroboration at all. And when you deal with what perhaps is more important for us as evangelicals, the doctrinal, the theological implications of this book, well, it's enough to bring tears to your eyes. What Joseph Smith and the Mormon Church teach about God, salvation, marriage, racial discrimination, and the authority of the Bible, our Bible, is appalling.

Take for instance the Godhead. If you were to listen to an Orthodox Mormon talk, you would think that he believed in the Trinity just as you and I believe in the Trinity, not a bit of it. The Mormons, and I will publicly retract this statement from the tabernacle pulpit, if anyone can prove it otherwise, the Mormons are not monotheists.

They don't believe in one God. They believe in many gods. It was Brigham Young, the man that I referred to, who kept on embarrassing the Mormon Church, who went on record as saying this, when our father Adam came into the Garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his celestial wives, with him.

He is our father, and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do. The teaching of Smith and Young, and therefore the teaching of the Mormon Church down to 1978, is this, that God was once like you are, and I am, and we in turn can become by progression what God is. We will be divine as God is, or as the gods are, provided we remain faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the additions, all the modifications to that teaching on the part of Prophets Smith and Young.

The Lord Jesus, well he is our elder brother, and the virgin birth, again Brigham Young put his big foot in it, because he's embarrassed the church from the day of its inception, down to the 1970s, by saying that the principle in the conception of Jesus was not the Holy Spirit, but Adam. That means to say, the virgin birth too, goes out of the window in Mormon theology. Well do I need to spend time in correcting these erroneous notions from the Word of God this evening? Let me suggest those of you who perhaps have come in here out of interest, that you take our own studies on the doctrine of God, a folder of which I think you will find in the rack at the backs of the, in the racks at the back of the church, and work your way through those notes.

Salvation, what do they say about salvation? Well the gospel of Jesus Christ is a system of rules, and if you keep these rules, you will be saved. One or two other things I've thrown in to boot, but let's stop and make this comment, that they have taught down the centuries, that justify, or down the decades, let's not make it centuries, they're not that old, that justification by faith is a pernicious doctrine. Now here is Joe Smith, who claims that he has discovered not only the history of the early inhabitants of America, but the fullness of the everlasting gospel, coming along with a statement which is directly opposed to the Bible, for by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of work, not of work, lest any man should boast, says the Apostle Paul, and one could put a multitude of texts to buttress the orthodox, Protestant reformed position on the doctrine of salvation.

But you remember a moment or so ago, I said that dear old Joe reckoned that he had been given the fullness of the gospel, which had been lost for centuries. Well what happened to all those people who lived prior to the advent of Prophet Joseph? Well they would be in a very embarrassing situation if it were not for one thing, baptism by proxy for the dead. So what do you find underneath the hills, in magnificent underground vaults at the back of Salt Lake City? Some of the most remarkable ancestral records that there are in the world today.

The Mormons are famous for swatting up family trees, and you know what I mean by a family tree, not the one at the bottom of your garden, but who your granddad was, and your great-granddad, and your great-great-granddad, and your great-great-great-great-granddad. I'm not exaggerating, they've got millions of names microfilmed, and they're in those vaults, and before any name is added to the register, there's a baptism by proxy conducted in a Mormon temple for the person who will then know the blessings of the Mormon Church transferred to them. Well, this almost touches on the bizarre.

You see, I was not in any way exaggerating when I was remarking earlier that the Mormon Church and its baptism compels me to conclude that given the right circumstances, you can get anyone to believe anything. Marriage. Oh, I wish I had time to tell you a lot about Mormon marriage.

Polygamy within. Well, that's pretty obvious with Joe Smith. How on earth do you get 57 children without one or two helpers, and as I say, he got 17 along the road.

Marriage and polygamy went hand-in-hand with the early Mormons, until it was a question of the survival of the state of Utah within the USA Federation of States, or the rejection of that doctrine. And what happened was that it was suspended. But polygamy is still basic to Mormon, theology, and there are statements in authoritative Mormon books that our Lord Jesus was married to the women whose company he sometimes kept, whose names are listed in the New Testament.

That is blasphemy. There are celestial marriages which will continue in heaven, and I wanted to delve into these and show you all how all they came about, but anyone who is really hung up on marriage, come along afterwards and I'll point you to the juicy passages in the book of Mormon and other literature, so that you can know how to extend your marriage from earth to heaven indefinitely. Colour.

Well, there's an inbred racial discrimination in Mormon theology. There's bound to be. These black-brown Indians received their pigmentation as a result of their evil doings, and no black man can be a fully-fledged Mormon, can be admitted to the higher echelons of the Mormon Church.

And the Bible? Well, here our heart breaks. The Bible is recognized to be the Word of God in as much as, as Joe Smith put it, it was translated correctly. He started his own translation.

How he managed it, he didn't know Greek nor Hebrew, I don't know. One of the breakaway Mormon sects has got a publication of the Holy Bible, Joseph Smith's edition. The problem with the Mormon Church is, the problem with all the cults is this.

Many of them, and the Mormons particularly, pay lip service to this book, but it comes back to the illustration I gave you two weeks ago, and indeed also last week. They pour the teaching of the Bible into the sift of their own inspired books, and where the Bible runs contrary to what they teach, they reject it or they modify it in their approach and in their own preaching from the Word of God. They go wrong in their theology because they're wrong at the starting point.

They put their faith in Smith and Young and in the writings of Smith and Young, and when you go wrong at the source, it's obvious that you'll go wrong all the way down. And that is the factor of the Mormon Church that causes me great sorrow, particularly in the 1970s, when one has to admit to the sincerity and the winsomeness of many of the young Mormons that we find in the United Kingdom. These things need to be known.

These things need correction, and when the Mormon knocks on your door, following perhaps J.W., don't slam the door in his face. You have a responsibility to that young American, a responsibility to give him your testimony, to point him to the Word of God, to tell him that you have an assurance of salvation, which he actually does not have and cannot be absolutely confident of until the heavenly dimension dawns. There needs to be, these days, my dear friends, a missionary movement launched to the cults, and we have a responsibility to send that missionary movement on its way.

Let's pray. Lord, I thank you for your mercy on my soul, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my soul, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my soul, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my soul, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my soul, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my heart, for your mercy on my heart.