Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

Again, I don’t know why the scribes and Pharisees follow Jesus around if they think he’s crazy, but of course here we find them at Matthew’s house during the feast that he (a publican and therefore sinner) is providing. They are accusing Jesus of spending time with sinners, but by default are themselves spending time with sinners, doesn’t make any sense. They are appalled by the group of people sitting and eating with Jesus and asked His disciples, “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?” Pretty passive aggressive. The disciples don’t have to answer them because Jesus hears them and answers saying, “They that be whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” The IM says, “Those regarded by the pious Jews as ‘sinners’ could have included not only people guilty of breaking commandments but also people who did not live in...

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell of what happens after the man with palsy is healed with almost exactly the same account. From them we learn that “after these things he went forth, and saw a publican, named Levi, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he said unto him, follow me. And he left all, and followed him.” The IM explains what a publican is saying, “The term publicans refers to men who were responsible to the Roman government for overseeing the collection of taxes in Israel, as well as to those who worked for them and actually collected the revenue. Tax collectors were required to pay a fixed amount to the government each year, but they were free to collect as much from the public as they could. Thus, in Jesus’s day, publicans were one of the most corrupt and detested groups of people among the Jewish populace. Jews who became publicans were often excommunicated. This concept was first explained to me while reading the Kingdom and the Crown book series by Gerald M. Lund. Th...

  I was thinking about Jesus healing the leper yesterday and it occurred to me that he didn’t just heal this man’s physical pain, but he gave him his life back, he let him go back to his family and a profession and abundant living. I thought, how is that man like us? Many times we have physical pain that might not be healed until the resurrection, but we are all spiritual lepers. We are afflicted with the sores of addiction, habits, loneliness, and our innocence falls away, we are cut off from God the same way that the lepers were cut off from society. Jesus can heal us physically, but that is subject to his will. But Jesus will heal us spiritually, and that is subject to OUR will. If we fervently pray for physical healing, he may or may not grant it to us, but if we fervently pray for spiritual healing, he always will grant it to us, always, every time. And really if you think about it, we don’t know how Jesus physically heals, he works some biological “magic” and it works ...

I’ve found that even though I’m stressed out with the move and everything, my days go better when I do a blog post, so I’m going to focus on doing this first then hopefully my other stuff will be easier. Jesus and His disciples leave the seashore and go into “a certain city, behold a man full of leprosy: who seeing Jesus fell on his face, and besought him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” I learned a lot about leprosy reading about it while researching for this topic. When I worked at the LA county hospital I rode the train and the bus every day to get there and to get home. One day I was riding home with someone who also worked at the hospital and she said that she works in the Hansen’s disease department. I was like “what? There’s a leprosy part of the hospital?” And she said that it’s an outpatient program. That was my first encounter with Hansen’s disease. I was under the impression it was contagious to the point that if you came in ANY contact with any...

Jesus has asked Simon to do something seemingly easy, go out a ways into the sea and throw out some fishing nets, but the implications are huge. Doing as Jesus asked Simon would be giving up any time to rest before the next night out fishing, and would have caused much more work for him because he would have to clean out his nets again. Looking at all that in the face, he clearly must have seen Jesus as more than a mortal man, he must have seen Him as a spiritually superior force because he answers, "Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net." The IM quotes Elder Jeffrey R. Holland as teaching, "After an unsuccessful night of effort, Peter's expert judgment told him a final effort was useless. But this was a man of genuinely childlike faith, and he lowered the net." I have to be honest I don't know if I would have done that, I would have assumed that I was the expert and I knew better and w...

I have been out of the blog for a while, about 3 weeks and it’s been absolutely insane in my life right now. Really, out of the blue I was offered a job out of state which I hemmed and hawed over but accepted, then bought a house, well trying to buy a house, I haven’t closed on it, am in the middle of planning a renovation of said house, getting the kids and things ready for the big move and enrolling them in school, and in the middle of all that am still working a full time job and went on vacation for 10 days. So it’s been a pretty wild ride and that’s one thing about Heavenly Father’s plans, he knows exactly how to let me know that there is a change coming, he tells me what to do in the perfect way, and he is so merciful. Luke isn’t super specific about what happens in the time between when the Savior healed Peter’s mother in law and the miraculous catch of fish, just that he taught and healed people. Apparently His disciples went back to their lives and families and responsi...