Rev. David Holwick D Jesus and Other Faiths First Baptist Church (original date canceled by snow) Ledgewood, New Jersey January 31, 2016
I. First impressions. A. I can spot them a mile away. 1) Two young people, usually males, walking together. a) The giveaway - white shirts, dark ties, short haircuts, nametags on their shirts. (Elder such-and-such) b) They look like IBM interns from 1960. c) They are Mormons missionaries. 2) It has been a hugely effective endeavor. a) When I was born, there was around 1 million Mormons; today, 15 million. 1> They send out 115,000 missionaries every year. 2> They have a church on top of Mooney Mountain. b) They will soon be the third largest denomination in America, behind Catholics and Baptists. 1> They already outnumber the Jews. B. They are likeable. 1) Jehovah's Witnesses can be harsh and pestering - Mormons are nice, clean-cut and happy. a) Broadway put on a play that spoofs their beliefs. b) Mormons bought ads in the play programs and put a billboard on Times Square. 1> They know how to turn lemons into lemonade. 2) Mormons emphasize the importance of families. 3) They have strong values, values that Baptists would probably agree with but too rarely practice. 4) They are community-oriented and band together when natural disasters strike. C. They do have an edge... 1) You can admire someone like former presidential candidate Mitt Romney but what about jailed polygamist Warren Jeffs? 2) The recent violent confrontation at the occupied wildlife station in Oregon - the occupiers were mostly Mormons. 3) If you study long enough with those nice missionaries, you will find a lot of weirdness in their beliefs as well. D. What will you say when they come knocking? 1) Evangelical Christians are their easiest targets. 2) Do you know what they believe? a) Do you know what YOU believe? b) Would you be able to convince them of it? II. A distinctly American sect. A. The discovery. 1) Joseph Smith grew up on a farm near Palmyra, New York. In 1820, when he was 14, he went out to pray in a grove of trees, wanting to find God and know what church to join. Two beings appeared to him - God the Father and God the Son. They told him not to join any church because they were all corrupt. 2) At age 17, an angel visited him in his bedroom and told him of golden plates buried at nearby Hill Cumorah. He went to the hill with a peep stone he used to find treasure and located an underground box. But the angel would not let him take the plates. Each year he visited the hill on that date, but on the fourth year he went in black clothes, with a black carriage drawn by a black horse. (black magic) He found the box, took out the golden plates which were bound into a (heavy) book and took them back to his farm. The box also contained stones called Urim and Thummin that worked like spiritual eyeglasses. He put them into a hat and peered into the hat at the stones until words began to appear on the stones. As he read the words, a person in a nearby room wrote them down. They finished in 1830. The result was the Book of Mormon. #65047 Joseph Smith said the book was "the most correct on earth." The Mormons have since made around 3,000 changes to it. a) It contains the story of Hebrews (the Ten Lost Tribes) who fled to the Americas around 500 BC and re-established their kingdom in the New World. American Indians are the descendents of these Jews. b) In AD 34, Jesus Christ appeared to them after his resurrection. He told them Christianity had been corrupted in the old world and they needed to follow the true version. The Indians, who were white, evolved into two groups called the Lamanites and the Nephites. The Lamanites became wicked and so God gave them dark skin. The Nephites were still white and godly, but outnumbered. c) Four hundred years later, hundreds of thousands of Lamanites attacked the Nephites and wiped them out. The location of the battle was Hill Cumorah. Before dying, their leader Moroni compiled their story in Egyptian on the gold tablets and buried them on the hill. B. The journey. Smith showed the plates to other people, though it seems that most of them only saw the plates in a vision. This was the beginning of the Church of Latter Day Saints, the one true church. The group immediately faced opposition and moved to Ohio, then Missouri, then Illinois. They grew along the way and were highly organized. They practiced plural marriage and Smith had 40 wives. Smith was killed in Illinois and there was a crisis over who should succeed him. A man named Brigham Young took over and led the main group to Utah. Mormons were an important factor in the settling of the American West. Their idea was to establish God's Kingdom, Zion, in the American wilderness. Other Americans soon entered the area and the Mormons settled on becoming one of the United States - after they repudiated polygamy. C. The destiny. 1) When Jesus returns, his capital, the New Jerusalem, will be in Independence, Missouri. (near Eden, also in Missouri) III. Mormons have very distinctive beliefs. A. One prophet. 1) Joseph Smith not only translated the Book of Mormon but continued receiving revelations from God. 2) The church today is led by a group of twelve apostles, and the chief one is also considered a prophet. a) Significant prophecies: one in 1890 outlawing polygamy (though it will still be practiced in heaven). b) One in 1978 that allowed blacks to be part of the priesthood (though the Book of Mormon associates dark skin with God's curse). B. Four Scriptures. 1) Bible (King James, where translated correctly). a) Joseph Smith has his own distinctive translation of the Bible. b) It has an interesting quirk - it contains a prophecy that a future Joseph, the son of a Joseph, will present a new revelation. (Joseph Jr and Sr??) 1> So people wouldn't miss the point, the Book of Mormon contains the same prophecy. 2> His translation of the Bible also contains explicit references to Jesus Christ even in Genesis. 2) The Book of Mormon. 3) The Pearl of Great Price. 4) Doctrines and Covenants (ongoing revelations and doctrines). C. Many gods. 1) They do not believe in the Trinity. a) From the very first, they believed God the Father and Jesus Christ are separate beings. b) God the Father has a physical body. 2) We can potentially become gods too (at least the men). a) Not just god-like, but actual gods with our own worlds. 1> All your kids, and wives, will live there (marriage is eternal for Mormons). 2> This is one reason they believe in big families. b) Joseph Smith and Brigham Young believed our current God evolved from the man Adam. 1> (However, this is not official Mormon theology.) 2> Any Mormon can evolve into being a god as well. D. Universal atonement. 1) Mormons use lots of standard Christian terminology but they give it a different meaning. 2) For example, they believe in the resurrection of Jesus. a) They say it brought atonement to all humans. b) Atonement means they also will be resurrected - whether they repent or not. 3) Everybody gets saved, but there are different levels. a) The highest level, where you can become a god, is limited to committed Mormons. b) Others will inherit a more earthlike existence. c) Only the truly evil, like Satan, end up in hell (outer darkness). d) Even dead people can get saved to a higher level if a Mormon is baptized for them in a temple ceremony. 1> Typically, they will get baptized on behalf of a dead ancestor, which is why Mormons are so involved in genealogy. 2> Ever use Ancestry.com? It is owned by Mormons. 4) The cross is downplayed. a) Mormons don't display it on their churches, inside their sanctuaries, or wear it as jewelry. b) They say it is because they want to emphasize his resurrection instead of his death. 1> We do that with an empty cross instead of a crucifix. c) The real reason Mormons reject the cross is because they reject substitutionary atonement. 1> They argue our atonement happened when Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, not on the cross. 2> The Bible never teaches this. #17653 IV. It is not as nice and clean-cut as they present. A. Joseph Smith had some questionable character traits. 1) He was undoubtedly sincere in many of his beliefs but he could be deceptive, controlling and grandiose. a) Many of his contemporaries saw him as a con artist. 2) He believed in mysticism and as a young man was investigated for using peep stones to find treasure. Some of his neighbors felt they were duped by him. (He used one of his peep stones to translate the BoM.) a) Many occult and Masonic symbols and practices are incorporated into Mormonism. b) They even have special underwear called Temple Garments. B. The Book of Mormon is clearly a fiction. 1) Many early American novels had similar plot lines. a) "View of the Hebrews" was published 7 years before the Book of Mormon by Ethan Smith, a Congregational minister. It argues Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Even Mormons see many similarities between the books. One of Joseph Smith's closest associates grew up in the author's town and probably attended his church. b) An even earlier book was written (but not published) by an Ohio preacher named Solomon Spaulding. Several witnesses testified that the Book of Mormon seemed to be plagiarized from it. Spaulding's book also has Jews coming to America and forming two warring tribes, the Lamanites and Nephites. 1> Some Mormon scholars dispute this connection. 2> But even they admit that the themes of Jews coming to America and building the mounds were popular in early America. 2) Errors in the Book of Mormon: a) King James Bible passages are lifted. 1> Even when the KJV represents a faulty translation. 2> Some Bible passages (Malachi) are quoted hundreds of years before the prophet lived. 3> The Book of Mormon is a 5th century book translated by a 19th century man in 17th century English. A> "And it came to pass" is way overdone. B> Mark Twain said if you took them all out, the book would become a pamphlet. b) Animals like horses and cows and honey bees are mentioned, even though they did not exist in the Americas before Europeans brought them. c) Dozens of major cities are mentioned, but not a single one has been found. d) American Indians? DNA has conclusively shown that they are from Siberia, not the Middle East. #5831 e) Hill Cumorah itself was supposedly the site of a battle involving hundreds of thousands, but no evidence has been found by archaeologists. 1> Some Mormons try to say there must be TWO Hill Cumorahs, with one being in South America. 2> All professional archaeologists who are not Mormon characterize the book as a fanciful fiction. C. The clearest clue is "Reformed Egyptian." 1) The Book of Mormon is supposedly written in Egyptian (which Jews did not use). Smith transcribed some of the characters on the plates and sent them to an expert in NYC to prove its genuineness. The Pearl of Great Price says it was authenticated by him. The expert, Columbia College professor Charles Anthon, himself published a statement that said it was made-up nonsense. 2) The Book of Abraham reinforces this. In 1835 a man sold Joseph Smith four Egyptian mummies and some scrolls that had been found with them. Using the same mystical process he had used for the Book of Mormon, Smith translated the scrolls. One of them he identified as the Book of Abraham, a revelation from the founder of Judaism himself. It is part of the Pearl of Great Price, one of their inspired scriptures. Portions of the scroll were stored in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for 100 years, then rediscovered and returned to the Mormons. They let scholars analyze them. In one portion Smith translated: "Now this priest had offered upon this altar three virgins at one time who were the daughters of Onitah, one of the royal descent directly from the loins of Ham, these virgins were offered up because of their virtue they would not bow down to worship gods of wood or stone, therefore they were killed upon this altar." Egyptologist Klaus Baer translated the same passage as a single word: "the". Apparently Mr. Baer's imagination is not as fertile as Joseph Smith's. Scholars have determined that the scroll is a genuine Egyptian document called a Breathing Permit, a standard burial document for ancient Egyptians. It has nothing to do with the patriarch Abraham. Smith's translation is a fantasy. Dr. Hugh Nibley, a chief defender of Mormonism, admitted of all the problems facing the credibility of Mormonism, this is "the big one." #34881 V. Reaching Mormons. A. Show them the Bible is trustworthy. 1) Thousands of ancient manuscripts, including papyrus scrolls, have been located since the time of Joseph Smith. 2) Discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls show the Bible has been transmitted accurately, unlike the claims of Mormons. 3) Doesn't the Bible have issues, just like the Book of Mormon? a) Certainly there are events that cannot be proven yet - Noah's ark, the resurrection of Jesus. b) But the Bible is basically a historical document. 1> Where it describes cities, cities have been found. 2> When it describes people and events, they are often backed up by outside sources. The Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology has an official statement on "The Bible as History." In it they say, "Much of the Bible, in particular the historical books of the Old Testament, are as accurate historical documents as any that we have from antiquity and are in fact more accurate than many of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Greek histories. These biblical records can be, and are, used as are other ancient documents in archeological work. For the most part, historical events described took place and the peoples cited really existed." #31581 3> As 2 Peter 1:16 says, these are not "cleverly invented stories." B. Who will you believe? 1) A Mormon presents the challenge. Joseph Fielding Smith, the tenth president of the Mormon Church (1970-72), wrote: "If Joseph Smith was a deceiver, who willfully attempted to mislead the people, then he should be exposed; his claims should be refuted, and his doctrines shown to be false." #65047 2) The Bible give strict requirements for prophets. a) Moses says their prophecies must come true, and their doctrine must not lead to false gods. b) I believe Joseph Smith fails on both counts. 3) God has raised up a prophet like Moses. a) His name is Jesus of Nazareth. b) He died on a cross to take away your sins. c) He warned that many false prophets would come into the world. 4) Jesus gives one appeal to the whole world: Believe in me. a) Do you? ========================================================================= SOURCES FOR ILLUSTRATIONS USED IN THIS SERMON: # 5831 “Genetics Disprove Founding Claims of Mormonism,” Mark Wingfield, Associated Baptist Press, http://www.abpnews.com/abpnews/, January 17, 2003. #17653 “Mormonism: Gethsemane Or Calvary?” e-mail from Chuck Broka, July 17, 2002; Don Johnson Collection. #31581 “Mormons and the Bible (part 2 of 6),” Mike Licona, Baptist Press, http://www.baptistpress.org, December 1, 2007. #34881 “Archaeology and the Book of Mormon (part 3 of 3)” Mike Licona, Baptist Press, http://www.baptistpress.org, December 12, 2007. #65047 “Twelve Beliefs The Mormon Church Might Not Want You To Know About,” Valerie Tarico, adapting material by Dr. Tony Nugent, retired professor of religious studies; October 25, 2012; <link>. These and 35,000 others are part of the Kerux database that can be downloaded, absolutely free, at http://www.holwick.com/database.html ========================================================================= |
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