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