Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

2:13 - You know when you watch tv and a “religious” sermon comes on and people are hollering and rolling on the ground and making a scene? My reaction is always an eye roll and for those who don’t believe, the Apostles speaking in tongues might have looked like this chaotic scene as well. Some unbelievers standing around “mocking said, These men are full of new wine” or basically, “these dudes are drunk.” I would think that there would be a difference between the Apostles speaking in tongues by the power of God and those others who just make a scene. In fact I remember studying the “shaking quakers” in the Doctrine and Covenants, and while I can’t seem to find it now, there is something in there that says basically that the gifts of the Spirit are not manifest in brash or unusual ways. Specifically with the gift of tongues, it isn’t just a bunch of gibberish that someone is spewing loudly that means nothing, the Apostle...

It has been 50 days since Jesus was crucified and we know that most of that time has been spent with Jesus teaching his now Apostles how to run the church without Him physically present. On this day of the Jewish Feast of Weeks, the Jews celebrated both the end of the wheat harvest and the receiving of the Torah by Moses on Mount Sinai. The Apostles and I would assume many of the disciples, were gathered together “with one accord in one place and suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like of fire, and it sat upon each of them.”  This is a sudden and surely unexpected event, but one they were clearly ready for and I feel like so many of our own spiritual experiences are like that. I know for me, there were several times when I learned something significant that I wasn’t expecting but that I was ready for. The appearance of “cloven ...

To understand what is coming next, we need a little bit of background on what “Pentecost” is. I didn’t know what the day of Pentecost was until recently, like within the last few years, and after I found out, I just thought that the event referenced by “Pentecost” was to commemorate the day that the Holy Ghost was poured out on the people, but I was wrong in such a splendid way. In ancient Judaism, there were “Three Pilgrimage Festivals,” Passover (Pesach) which commemorated God freeing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) which “commemorates the forty-year period during which the children of Israel were wondering in the desert, living in temporary shelters. Agriculturally…it celebrates the gathering of the harvest,” according to Wikipedia. The third Pilgrimage Festival is Pentecost (Shavout) which “has a double significance. It marks the all-important wheat harvest in Israel, and it commem...

1:16-20 - Peter stands before the congregation of 120 disciples of Christ and explains why they are here. And like we noted yesterday, Peter is not there to inform them of the new Apostle, he’s there asking for their prayers and the input of the other ten Apostles. It unclear to me how Peter feels about Judas now that everything is done, but he does begin by reminding the people of the prophecy Judas fulfilled saying, “this scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake before concerning Judas, which was guide to them that took Jesus.” It almost seems like he’s saying “he was just fulfilling prophecy guys, he was taking one for the team.” The whole time that Peter is speaking about what happened with Judas, there is almost a detached tone, meaning that he’s not vengeful or angry, it’s just very matter of fact. Verses 16 to 20 are Peter describing what happened but he only uses Judas’ name...

Just a footnote on what we discussed yesterday that I found interesting, when Christ commissioned the Apostles to take the gospel to the world, the IM details how they did just that saying, “Peter ministered in Romer (referred to as Babylon in this verse). According to traditions found in other sources, John ministered from Ephesus; Andrew preached the gospel in the region of modern-day Ukraine, Romania, and Russia; Matthew in Ethiopia; Philip in Syria, Turkey, and Greece; Bartholomew in India; Simon Zelotes in Britain and Persia; Thomas in India; and Mark in Rome and Egypt.” I really thought that it was interesting that they didn’t just stay within the Roman empire where there was relative political stability, but they went to deserts, jungles, islands, friends, enemies, and everywhere in between to bring other people the hope and peace in the Gospel. 1:9-11 – After commissioning the Apostles with their duty, Jesus “was taken up; and a cloud received him...

1:1 - Because the book of Acts is supposed to pick up exactly where Luke’s Gospel ended, I went back and read the end of Luke and went right into the book of Acts. I had read it theorized that Luke and Acts might have actually been one whole work divided later by scribes, but because Acts begins by readdressing “Theophilus” about “the former treatise” Luke wrote, it seems to me to be two separate records by the same person to the same person. While Luke’s Gospel was about Jesus’ time on earth as a mortal, the overarching theme of the book of Acts is how Jesus establishes and runs his church from a distance. The IM quotes Elder Jeffrey R. Holland as teaching, “A more complete title for the book of Acts could be appropriately be something like ‘The Acts of the Resurrected Christ Working through the Holy Spirit in the Lives and Ministries of His Ordained Apostles…’ The direction of the Church is the same. The location of t...

As we move onto the book of Acts, there are a few things that I have to understand beforehand. First, I learned that Acts was written, almost undisputedly, by Luke, so I had to go back and look at who Luke was. It’s hard for me to remember that just because Luke wrote about the daily ministering of the Savior, that he never actually saw Him. It never occurred to me that not all four of the authors of the Gospels walked with Jesus during his mortal ministry. The IM gives background of Luke, saying, “Luke was one of Paul’s ‘fellowlabourers’ and Paul’s missionary companion. Because Luke did not claim to have been an eyewitness of the Savior, but rather to have gained a perfect understanding from those who were ‘eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word,’ it may be presumed that he was converted to Christianity at some point following the Savior’s Resurrection and Ascension.” So while the Gospel of Luke was a second hand account of w...

While still in Galilee, “the eleven disciples went away… into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, the worshipped him: but some doubted.” It’s interesting to me that just as an aside, Matthew says “but some doubted.” Did some doubt that Jesus was resurrected before they saw him? We know that they all saw him while in Jerusalem before they ever went back “a fishing” in Galilee. I guess my question is who doubted what? Maybe it was the people of Galilee that didn’t believe that Jesus was resurrected when the disciples told them, assuming that they did. Whatever it was, Jesus taught them several important truths while there, the first being that “all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” This seems to be pretty obvious, which made me wonder why he said it. It’s obvious to me because we are 2,000 years out from this event and the Lord has enabled miracles of great magnitude durin...

Peter more clearly understands his role in God’s kingdom now, he’s not meant to simply go home and live out a peaceful existence, he is to preach the gospel and accept whatever consequences come with that. I think about Peter’s family who probably miss him, and the fact that they had to sacrifice their husband and father for the sake of the kingdom, and maybe they had to work in different ways to make ends meet, maybe sometimes they had to go without. But because of their sacrifice the gospel of Jesus Christ went out into the world and changed history and as much as I wouldn’t want them to suffer, I’m grateful that they were willing to do so for the rest of us to have the good news. The Savior adds in a little tidbit at the end of teaching Peter to “feed my sheep” and I read this over and over and I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about and the interpretation that John gives, I don’t understand how that’s what it m...

After the Savior appeared to all the disciples, including Thomas, “many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.” It’s kind of like in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, how the rich man asks the angel to allow Lazarus to go back and warn the man’s five brothers to repent and the angel said “they have the scriptures and the prophets, if that is not enough to convince them, then nothing will be.” John is kind of saying, “if what I’ve given you isn’t enough to convince you, then nothing else I have will be.” When the women were at the empty tomb, the angels told them to go tell the other disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee. I wonder why Jesus told them that he would meet them in Galilee when he met them earlier th...

Another aspect of the mortal wounds staying on Jesus’ resurrected body that I hadn’t considered comes to us from the IM which quotes Elder Jeffrey R. Holland saying, “Even though the power of the Resurrection could have- and undoubtedly one day will have- completely restored and made new the wounds from the crucifixion, nevertheless Christ chose to retain those wounds for a purpose, including for his appearance in the last days when he will show those marks and reveal that he was wounded ‘in the house of (his) friends.’ The wounds in his hands, feet, and side are signs that in mortality painful things happen even to the pure and the perfect, signs that tribulation is not evidence that God does not love us. It is a significant and hopeful fact that it is the wounded Christ who comes to our rescue. He who bears scars of sacrifice, the lesions of love, the emblems of humility and forgiveness is the Captain of our Soul. That evidence of pain in mortality is u...