Remembering The Covenant: Modern Prophets

The following post has been a labor of love over several years. By the time I finished it was 17 pages in a Google Doc. With no real way to cut it down and an acknowledgement that no one is likely to read a 17 page blog post I'm cutting it up to publish it in several parts (7 in total) in order to make it more likely that you'll reach the end. 😉

Part 2 can be read here: Remembering the Covenant: The Gentiles

This is part 3: Modern Prophets.

Revealed Truth and Prophets

So now that we’ve identified the who, when, and where of the Lord’s prophecy 3 Nephi 16 let’s address now just how the Lord will go about revealing the missing truth to these Gentiles.

Fortunately He already has a well established pattern for doing so and there’s a passage of scripture in the Old Testament which defines this pattern in a clear and direct way. It reads:

Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.

Amos 3:7

In other words, if God has truth to reveal to His children in general He is going to find someone to whom He can communicate as a prophet and through whom He will choose to reveal that truth.

Now, taking this pattern into consideration along with the details above regarding the timing and location of the prophecy, the only person I know of at the time and place of the colonizing of the Americas by western Europe who really fits the bill is Joseph Smith. There were of course Protestant and Evangelical movements going on at the time, however, their doctrines and tenets relied on a closed canon of scripture and rejected the idea of new revelation from the true and living God, so they don’t really fit the bill. There were also other individuals in that era claiming to receive divine revelation from heaven, but they are so obscure that the history text books used in grade and high school in the US do not mention them individually by name, and their churches, movements, and messages didn’t last long enough or have the breadth of influence required to be considered a fulfillment of the prophecy either. Any other churches in existence today which have their foundation around the same time and place referenced in the prophecy either fall under the same category as the Protestants and Evangelicals or they don’t claim revealed truth necessary to restore the house of Israel to its true God. Even those churches which claim a history with Joseph Smith fail in terms of the breadth of influence and scope of work they have done in the world.

Thus Joseph Smith and his successors in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with the members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are the only specific individuals to whom this prophecy of Christ refers, and generally speaking all the members of the Church at that time and since are included in it implicitly as part of those who were sent forth to share the revealed truth with Israel.

Which leads us now to address the what of Christ’s prophecy: what is the truth God promised to reveal? The revealed truth which Joseph received and which the church members were sent forth to share includes the Book of Mormon and the subsequent revelations related to what the Church calls the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ contained in the scriptures now known as the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Since Joseph’s time numerous further pieces of instruction and wisdom have been passed on through God’s chosen prophets relating to the governance of Christ’s church, the building of His kingdom on earth, and the restoration of Israel to their true faith and promised lands.

To The Point

But the point of this post is not to verify and proclaim the divine backing of the Church and its leaders. No there is a much more culturally relevant point to this post – to warn – and to get there we must finish a few more verses from the prophecy.

Once the Lord has finished revealing “the truth” to the Gentiles as He promised He would and the Gentiles have been sent out to mix with and share their faith with the house of Israel in all the world, Jesus will then begin gathering Israel in to the lands of their inheritance.

It is worth noting that Jesus refers to the time when these things are to take place as the “latter day,” which is to say that when these things take place (from Joseph Smith’s day to our time) it is not the last days foretold by the Savior in Matthew 24, Revelation, and other places in scripture, but the time just preceding that time – or a later time than all other times except the last times.

So now that we have established that we are living in the “latter days,” and not the “last days,” (though we are coming very close) and now that we have identified who the Gentiles are to whom the truth would be revealed and who would then go and share that truth with the house of Israel and we know that the location these Gentiles will come from is primarily (though not limited to) the United States of America let’s get to the point of it all and then loop on back to where I began in the book of Mosiah.

To be continued in Part 4: Apostasy . . .

This is the end of Part 3: Modern Prophets.