Scriptures: ancient and modern

After a period of 6 years reading the Book of Mormon from cover to cover but stopping when prompted to write a comment, I have a huge collection of commentaries on the scriptures that I have shared with my wife and children over the years via email. I am not going to post everything in this blog, but I would like to share my LDS mind with others.

These are my opinions of course. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints I can only speak for myself. The church has its positions on doctrine very well spelled out in the Church's website and you can go there to learn more. The Mormon Church or LDS Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) is an amazing church and I believe the key to its success is that it is a practical religion. We believe in prayer, but above all we believe in service. You cannot be LDS and just sit during service and go home and be good. We must be engaged in a good cause. We must serve in callings in the Church and not expect a pastor do be paid to preach to us. We are the pastors and we give talks in church when our times comes to give a talk (during service - we call them meetings.) Every man must have the priesthood and bless his wife and children and when called serve as a Bishop (which you may call pastor) but the merits of the Bishop is his integrity and his capacity to be inspired by God to help us out... not a diploma on his wall and he does not get paid to do that. My Bishop works full time and helps the people in our neighborhood during his free time besides spending time with family and friends as much as he can.

We believe in living prophets and we have more scriptures than just the Bible. The Bible we use is the King James version. I am studying the Old Testament after finishing a 6 year study of The Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon from where the nickname of the church comes, does not replace the Bible. To us it is more scripture, another Testament of Jesus Christ. It is weird to some that there should be more scriptures besides the Bible, but it is better understood if you think that the original Christians, who were called Saints (the Bible says "saints") did not have a Bible. The Bible came up about 300 years after the death of the original apostles and when there was no prophets around. Until then, scriptures was the writings of the Jews - The Old Testament (as Jesus was a Jew himself.) When the people that made the Bible decided to put one together, they chose which letters from the original apostles they would include there and we have the additions to the original Bible called the New Testament. But even before the first Bible was put together and after for a long time, people did not walk around with Bibles either, that is a thing of after the Dark Ages, when the powerful church that ruled who could have scriptures and who could not did not stop people from printing it and distributing it to the populus (many people died to make that possible because the church of the time would kill people who had Bibles in their houses.) Until then, a person had to know about God from what they heard but not really read about His dealings with men through prophets.

These are different times and people forget that the Bible is a collection of books and the fact that there is a collection is because God talked to prophets back in the days. When a prophet came and started talking in the name of God people would kill them based on the fact that they had scriptures. Scriptures have been used to discredit the power of God for a long time. People like dead prophets for some reason. But God would not stop, and they would kill one, and He would call another one. So, we have many books in the Old Testament due to that fact: that God was active in the lives of his children through his representatives. When Christ came they used scriptures to kill him. They would not accept prophets because there is always "the last one" that spoke. But killing Christ was a big mistake. Christ still appeared to Paul in the way to Damascus, and talked to Peter to let the Gospel be preached to the Gentiles (a big change from His ministry that was only to the Jews) and to say that circumcision was not necessary and other things that were additions to what God had said to the prophets of old. He was not called Rabbi because they wanted to flatter him, but because he followed the law of Moses and preached the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel (the one who said circumcision was a must.) But you see? Things got added and it was OK.

Unfortunately Christianity adopted the Jewish model of denying that any more prophets can be sent by God and they will tell anything to make any prophet look bad. God looks down and thinks: "What is going on? Don't they read the Bible? Can't they see how I work?" and wonders why people did not like His model of a church with Apostles and Prophets and with Him telling prophets what He wants to say today. They will tell you that God is mute, that those days are gone, that all you can do now is read about Him. Not in the LDS Church. We have more scriptures because we believe God is alive and He cares about us. We know He works through prophets and modern man are not less deserving of revelation than the ancient ones.

So, my comments are on the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price and the words spoken by the living prophets. Imagine that you live in 15 a.D. and you are in a church and Peter, James, John or Paul just walked in. You either believe that your contemporary can be a prophet like ancient Moses or you don't. Same thing when you go to the LDS Church. I hope you like my comments and I hope the explanation helped.