CHRIST-CENTERED PLAN OF SALVATION

This week's reading encompasses the prophecies of Samuel the Lamanite. When the Savior appeared in America several years later, He instructed the Nephite record-keepers to go back and include Samuel's prophecies regarding death and resurrection. This section is so important because it teaches a Christ-centered way God's Plan of Happiness/Redemption/Salvation.

When we think of Father's Plan, we usually picture something like this:

How many times have you seen this, or something similar, on a chalkboard in a Church lesson?  Brothers Tyler and Tanner (Book of Mormon Central) describe this as a "geographical representation" of the plan.  A much better representation is one that deals with our states of being in relationship to the Savior's atonement. 

This link to Book of Mormon Central covers this representation in the last half of the clip.

Samuel the Lamanite 

This idea is represented by this graphic:

When I was a child in Primary singing "Dearest Children," I took one verse literally: Dearest children, Holy Angels, watch your actions night and day, and they keep a faithful record of the good and bad you say. Cherish virtue!  

That was misleading to a young child who was still in the concrete thinking stage of cognitive development.  The picture I saw in my mind is of the angels keeping a tally sheet: 49 sins and I can still go to Heaven; 51 sins and I'm consigned to hell.  As a 7-year-old, I literally had nightmares of Satan locking me in a glass cage while all around me (including me) was burned alive!  Talk about terror! 

Since then, I have come to understand that God and His angels don't keep a tally sheet.  Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow, wrote the Prophet Isaiah. Through the Savior's atonement, I can be forgiven.  He is not interested in where I have been so much as He is interested in where I am now and where I am going.  The sum total of my life will be the person I have become in the end. 

My dad had this album and I played it many times as a child.  There is a song on there where a man is facing an horrific final judgement similar to my nightmare.  He sings, "I stole some bricks when I was six and I'm afraid to die." That is how children (and some spiritually immature adults) see God: as the punisher with the flail and not the shepherd with the crook, like some modern version of the Egyptian god, Osiris. That is not my God!

In the words of modern Apostle, Jeffrey R. Holland:

© Kathleen Rawlings Buntin Danielson September 2020