SPIRITUALLY BANKRUPT

In the Sermon on the Mount, the Savior outlined the steps to discipleship in a section that has come to be known as the Beatitudes.  The first of these states: 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

For years I thought this meant blessed are the humble, but elsewhere there is a beatitude for humility, so what does poor in spirit mean? Why would people who are spiritually poor be blessed with Heaven?

The Book of Mormon records much of the Sermon on the Mount as given by the Savior after His resurrection at the Temple in Bountiful. To the Nephites, that Savior said:

Blessed are the poor in spirit who come unto me, for their is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Now it makes sense.

I believe that the poor in spirit are individuals who are not just spiritually poor but spiritually bankrupt. Their coffers are empty and their wells are dry.

Have you ever felt spiritually bankrupt?  I have.  Actor Mel Gibson discusses the result of his own spiritual poverty. When this occurs, we have to make a choice: we can turn to the world in an attempt to feel better, and many people choose to do so.  They deal with their poverty by worldly means by burying themselves in mindless busy-ness or dangerous, high-risk behaviors.  Others come unto the Savior, the only sure path to healing and grace.

We have discussed the fall of Old Testament kingdoms and peoples.  All of these have occurred because the majority of the people have violated their covenants and, as a result, have become spiritually bankrupt.  They lose God's protection because they are deaf and blind to the fact that they are living in spiritual poverty, despite God's sending prophets to warn them.

Two civilizations in ancient America also fell due to their turning away from God and following the paths of men.  The Jaradites were a people who left the Tower of Babel and were led by God to a land choice above all other lands (Ether 2: 7.)  Their tragic story is told in the Book of Mormon's Book of Ether. In the end, there were no spiritually solvent people left, with the exception of the Prophet, Ether, who had gone into hiding to save his own life and to complete his record. On the final day, two men stood facing each other. Each was the only survivor of two warring parties. Two million men and their families had been killed by the sword.  There was enmity between two people, which is sad, but worse yet was their enmity with God.

Two men remained: Shiz and Coriantumr. Coriantumr looked over the slain of his people too numerous to be buried and he remembered the warnings of the prophets.  He began to repent, but it was too late. His soul mourned and refused to be comforted. (Ether 15: 3) He offered to give up the kingdom and lay down his sword if Shiz would likewise do so.  Shiz replied that he would put down his sword only if Coriantumr allowed himself to be slain.  Coriantumr refused and in the end he killed Shiz and was left alone.

Think of it: Two spiritually and morally bankrupt peoples in a bisected nation, each holding onto to their hatred and mistrust of men who should have been their brothers.  And for what?  Coriantumr hoped to end the conflict by surrendering his kingdom, but there was no kingdom left to surrender! No people to be saved. No political agenda to fulfill. A truly tragic narrative.

The Book of Mormon is, among other things, a cautionary tale for us. Our nation is also bifurcated along political lines. What can we do?

In 1690, a clergyman penned these words about a God shaped vacuum in every human heart. If we don't choose to fill with Jesus Christ, then our empty hearts will be and an empty well (or bank account.) There is nothing upon which to draw when life's trials thick confound you. (God Be With You 'til We Meet Again, LDS Hymn)

I remember such a time in my own life.  I struggle with clinical depression and have for over sixty years.  Sometimes I have trouble feeling the Spirit and seeing God's hand in my life.  At that time, I promised God in prayer that even though I feel He is absent, I know in my heart that He is not.  I promised Him that I will continue to follow the commandments, pray, and study until the depression lifts and I can feel Him once again. I am so grateful because when the depressison lifted, I had no guilty feelings about things I had done. I was emotionally bankrupt and physically bankrupt, but I could not allow myself to become spiritually bankrupt.

I wish that I could convey this message to the people of this nation.  We are in danger of going the way of the Jaradites. I pray it is not too late.

Beyond the Mark

The Book of Mormon Prophet Jacob was born somewhere in the wilderness of the Arabian Peninsula. His father, Lehi, had been a prophet in Jerusalem during the reign of Judah's last king, Zedekiah.  Like Uriajah, his life was in danger because he spoke God's truth to people who were deaf and blind to the truth. Jacob would have heard that story from his father and from his elder brother, Nephi. Perhaps that is one reason he spoke to his people about seeing things only from their own perspective and traditions and closing their minds to any other point of view, including God's.

Wrote he:
. . . the Spirit speaketh the truth and lieth not.  Wherefore, it speaketh of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be.. . . God also spake them unto prophets of old. (Jacob 4: 13)

Jacob knew of his father's plight because he spoke of things as they really are.  In Judah, they saw only what they wanted to see: God would never destroy Jerusalem because it was God's holy city, and outside enemies would never destroy God's holy temple. The problem with that fallacious reasoning was that the Jews had rejected God's call to repentance.  They had, through false traditions, legislated God out of their national life. They longed for the reestablishment of a Davidic Kingdom, but because of the hardness of their hearts, that was not going to happen in their times. Jacob explained:  
. . . the Jews were a stiffnecked people (they refused to bow their heads in humility before God but, rather, were proud and arrogant.) . . . they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came of looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall (which, of course, they did.)(Jacob 4:14)

What does it mean to look beyond the mark? I can immediately think of two possible reasons.  

First, the Jews had build fences and traditions around the Law.  For example: the Lord told Moses that the Children of Israel should not cook goat meat by seething it in its own mother's milk (which was a pagan rite.) To ward off even the possibility of that happening, they developed traditions in which Jews would never serve meat and dairy in the same meal.   Later, they required that meat and dairy be cooked in different dishes lest any smidgeon of milk remain in the pan where meat was to be cooked.  Even today, many traditional Jews keep the kosher laws. The problem wasn't the fences necessarily, but the fact that the fences became more important to the Jews than the law about which they had been built.

Second, and perhaps most important, they looked to the arm of flesh rather than relying on God. Instead of listening to prophets like Jeremiah and Lehi, they entered into an alliance with Babylon which was their undoing.

I mention this because I think we, too, are in danger because we look beyond the mark. We follow traditions that are contrary to the law of the land (the U.S. Constitution.) We have allowed what is popular and politically correct to rewrite the Constitution by interpretation that is politically correct (i.e., the arm of flesh) rather than seeing things are the really are and really have been.

I fear for our nation.  A large segment of our society have become, not only immoral, but amoral. The fact that God created man in His own image, male and female, seems so clear as to be undebateable, yet in our nation today there are parents allowing their young children to "change genders" and we are told to tolerate such insanity as a man competing in women's sports because he "identifies as a woman." Blindness that comes from PC traditions and the arm of the flesh rather than the Word of God.  In fact, God is mocked, as are the people who believe and testify of Him.

George Orwell once wrote: The farther a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. As a nation, we are guilty. He also wrote: Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful. . . and finally, The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

These words were penned in his 1949 novel 1984. It is now 2019 and we are firmly in the grip of the Orwell dystopian society where a socialist government controls everything in both private and public life.* The Jews sought for things they could not understand (Jacob 4:14.) Americans have created things that are that are impossible to understand because they are completely incomprehensible. 

God allowed the Jews to search for things they could not understand because they desired it. (ibid.) What do we desire? Our nation is running to the edge of a spiritual and political cliff like lemmings.  Those of us who do remember our nation's history and who seek God's will in all things must be the light in the darkness and the leaven in the dough. (See Matthew 13)

That is a heavy responsibility, but we must take it on or perish.

*www.yourpdfs.com/1984-pdf/


©2019, Kathleen Rawlings Buntin Danielson

Politics and Faith

Since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the united states has recognized a division between Church and State.  This came out of the founders' distrust of many of the creeds of their day, many of which were state mandated; yet they all wrote of and believed in Christian principles. 


In the First of the Bill of Rights  the Founders wrote: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Somewhere along the way, the courts have interpreted away the intent of the Founding Fathers and have created not freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. God has been legislated out of America in the name of political correctness.  We cannot have nativity scenes or monuments with the 10 commandments in any public space for fear of "offending" someone.

This is tragic as we are engaged in a serious crisis of spiritual warfare and we have removed the Only One who can help us withstand the onslaught of the adversary from our public life. This is a war we cannot win politically.  It must be won spiritually.  If we in America have deluded ourselves into thinking the spiritual realm doesn't exist, we will be rudely awakened. We will suffer the fate of Israel and Judah, proud and stiffnecked people who also refused to acknowledge the spiritual within the political.

If you remember the geography of the near east, you will recall that the kingdom of Judah was immediately in the path between Egypt and the Empires of Mesopotamia.  Their spiritual wells were, for the most part, bankrupt.  Thus they tried to rely on the "arm of flesh" instead of on the Lord.

Prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habbakuk, and Lehi warned them repeatedly to avoid alliances with hostile nations.  If they would repent and turn again to the Lord, He would encircle with the walls of His divine protection.  They didn't listen.  Even King Josiah, who was one of Judah's most righteous kings, gave in to fear and entered into an alliance with Babylon, although it was a secret alliance at first.  Pharoah Necco of Egypt wanted to cross Judah to war with Babylon.  Against the warning of the prophets, Josiah went to war against Egypt and was mortally wounded. When we talk of faith but don't walk with faith, we are in serious jeopardy.

The prophets who cried repentance and faith were ridiculed, tortured, some even killed, on the grounds that what they were preaching was treasonous because it emphasized God, whom they saw to be ephemeral, if existent or not. The Book of Mormon tells us that God led Lehi and his family out of Judah in order to save his life.  Lest you think that is an exaggeration, I offer into evidence the Prophet, Urijah, who was contemporary with Jeremiah and Lehi.  He was also persecuted and threatened with death for preaching the fall of Judah if they did not repent.  He, too, was warned and fled to Egypt where he thought he would be safe.  King Zedekiah was so vengeful, he sent men to Egypt to extradite Urijah.  He was dragged back to Judah where he was executed by the sword of the King in the palace.  Whether the king did it himself or had a servant do it, Jeremiah (20:20-23) doesn't tell us.  The truth is always dangerous to those who speak it in the face of a people living a great lie.

Do we dare, as a nation, to ignore our current spiritual warfare in the false belief that we can solve our problems politically?  Perish the thought! Those who do so are fools and they lead other fools into destruction.  Truth doesn't cease to be true just because a group of people choose not to believe it.  Ignorance of the laws of God is as dangerous as ignorance of the law of gravity.

Today, we don't threaten those who speak for God with death; we threaten them with impeachment.

©Kathleen Rawlings Buntin Danielson November 2019

The Crucible

In 1953, playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote a play which he title The Crucible. It was set in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 17th century when the colony was struck with terror over witchcraft which, frankly, didn't exist.  While the play was, on the surface, an historic piece, it was, in reality, a comment on the "witch hunts" of the McCarthy Era. 

Like their Puritan forefathers, the House Unamerican Activities  Committee brought a different type of terror in its hunt for communists around every corner.  They ruined many people's lives, reputations, and careers, particularly in the entertainment industry.  Innocent people would name other innocent people to placate the committee, which had far more authority than the Constitution allowed.  People became paranoid and afraid of their shadows. Saddest of all was that Senator McCarthy and his cronies firmly believed they were right and were doing a service for America.   It was a  dark day in our nation.

We have a similar crucible occurring today. The deeply ingrained hatred of President Donald Trump by the outspoken liberal community has produced a witch hunt to remove him from office since the day he was elected. It rivals in every way the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Judge John Hathorne. (Hathorne was the only judge in the Salem witch trials who never repented of the role he played in the hanging deaths of 19 innocent people. He was an ancestor of American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who added the w to his name to distance himself from a progenitor of whom he was ashamed and disgusted.)  

We can now add new names to the witch hunter list, including Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senator Charles Shumer (D-New York)  Like Judge Hathorne and Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), these two individual pot-stirrers are responsible for creating a divisive atmosphere of hatred and even violence based on "evidence" that is as threadbare as any Hathorne or McCarthy tried to use. It is tearing this nation (and the Constitution) apart in a way not seen since the Civil War.  In fact, one might say we are experiencing a true Civil War as opposed to the War Between the States in the 1860's. 

I don't know what the answers are.  Trying to talk reason to people who have lost all reason is futile.  Like any other prejudice, such attitudes are completely irrational.  If one tries to talk rationally to an irrational person, blind with hatred and false information, it will drive you crazy.  The only things I can do are to:

• pray for this nation and its duly elected president
• study the issues and vote wisely
• stay away from argument on social media.  
  

You can declare your testimony of Constitutional America when appropriate, but avoid contention.  Own your opinion as your own. Walk away from arguments that cannot be won.  Remember, you don't have to attend every fight to which you are invited! 

Returning to the theme of the House of Israel and the fall of Judah to Babylon, God called the Prophet Ezekiel saying, 

Son of man, the house of Israel is to me become dross: all they are brass, and tin, and iron, and lead, in the midst of the furnace; they are even the dross of the silver. (Ezekiel 22:18)

We, as a nation and a people, are in the crucible.  If we stay close to the Lord, we can emerge as silver and not dross.

© Dr. Kathleen Danielson, November 2019