Come, Follow Me December 16-22: Moroni 10
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
That Which is Good...is True
By Philip Barlow
Moroni, who brought the Book of Mormon to a close before “sealing up” the large record abridged by his father, was a veteran of calamity. And it can be dangerous to tame calamity too readily. In our zeal for happy endings, we risk trivializing tragedy, justifying wretchedness, domesticating human agony, or avoiding reality. This is an understandable impulse, but reality must be confronted before we can properly act and authentically heal. We must take care how we render others’ lives while trying to comfort–either them or ourselves.
Despite this caution, it seems that rich spiritual insight and (not the same thing) profound spiritual power are sometimes incubated in grueling circumstances. In prison, for example. In such quarters, want and wound may prompt great souls, at last, to transcend their despair by absorbing grace, discerning truth, and forging courage. Think of Martin Luther King in the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, whose letter from that place, published in 1963 and addressed to eight white religious leaders who opposed his nonviolent protests against injustice, helped alter the course of a nation. Twenty years previous and an ocean away, Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned letters, papers, and scraps of notes while in a Gestapo cellar and subsequent Nazi prisons prior to his execution at a concentration camp in Flossenbürg (1945). Since their 1951 publication, these writings have helped tens of thousands rediscover and reimagine the relevance of religion in a vexed world. A century before that, portions of Joseph Smith’s eloquent laments and prophetic literary propulsions, produced while incarcerated at Liberty, Missouri, were eventually canonized. Sections 121 and 122 of the Doctrine & Covenants remain among the most brilliant eruptions of light in the Restoration.
Moroni’s prison was of a different sort. His solitary confinement derived from finding himself friendless, without father and without mother, orphaned from his fallen people, a fugitive from those who sought his blood. Marooned from humanity, he was mortified in more than one sense: He knew his personal days were numbered (Moroni 10:34), and he was a sole, forlorn witness to the savage death of his civilization (Mormon 8:1–13). Whatever a person might be impelled to say in such a moment, whatever a prophet might write, we have special cause to pay attention.
The text to which we attend is Moroni’s farewell, the last chapter of the last book of the entire Nephite-Jaredite narrative available to us. It amounts to Moroni’s last will and testament, cast as a cluster of admonitions. Each warrants scrutiny. In our brief space, however, let us consider one aspect of the first admonition, which may be the most cited passage in the Book of Mormon:
And when ye shall receive these things [Moroni’s own writings, perhaps, and presumably the entire abridgment of his father; Moroni 10:2; Mormon 6:6], I would exhort you, that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. (10:3–4)
That is a promising promise, a reassuring one that thousands upon thousands of church members report having experienced. For some, however, this passage presents challenges.
I once hosted in my office a young man in dismay. He was facing a decision about going on a mission. He had read the Book of Mormon four or five times, asking God each time, in the name of Christ, concerning its truth. He professed and exuded earnest intent. He wasn’t sure how to show faith in Christ because such faith was part of what he was praying for–but he mustered all the faith he could. Nonetheless, he received no discernible answer to his study and recurrent pleadings. This left him frustrated and insecure: Was he not faithful or sincere or good enough to hear from the Lord? Or was the promise of Moroni 10 hollow? In this state of affairs, my young friend wasn’t sure he could, in good conscience, serve a mission in hopes of converting others. His plight in relation to Moroni 10 represents that of many others who have shared it in private conversations or in public forums.
For those seeking grounds for faith in the church and in the Book of Mormon, it may help to notice two things about the scriptural passage under question. First, Moroni’s promise stipulates no time frame. This is significant on its own and may summon patience in us. We may understandably be frustrated when we find no immediate response to our sincere petition, but it may take time for us to be prepared to recognize some kinds of truth. Moreover, the lack of a specified time frame may also link to a second point: Moroni’s promise does not indicate any particular mode in which God may “manifest the truth of ‘these things.’” Rather, verses 3–6 declare only that the manifestation will be accomplished “by the power of the Holy Ghost.”
This absence of a declared revelatory mode highlights the issue of how we are to recognize such manifestations when we encounter them. Perhaps under the influence of cultural presumptions or scriptural passages like Doctrine and Covenants 8:2, my office visitor assumed that upon his repeated prayerful petitions, God would (as he promised Oliver Cowdry in relation to the power to translate) “tell” him of the truth of the Book of Mormon in his head and in his heart. This is a fully plausible mode of encounter with the divine, experienced by many of the faithful, including me. However, it is not one specified in Moroni 10:4–5, much less is it specified as the sole manner of God’s communication of truth. The Lord is shown elsewhere in scripture to work, by means of the Holy Spirit, through diverse modes of communication. This diversity is depicted widely in scripture. Different ways of hearing God and truth may indeed be one implication of President Nelson’s query to the church: “How do you hear Him?”
God speaks, for instance, through prophets and scripture, and through the temple endowment and by the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12; 1 Nephi 17:45; D&C 85:6). God and God’s message may be discerned in nature and through the right kind of music. It may be found in the almost inaudible echo that lingers and resonates in a high-ceilinged oratory in the moments after monks have ceased each phrase of their Gregorian chant. Jesus taught that we may know truth experientially by “trying [experiencing and testing] the doctrine” under consideration (John 7:17). He further proclaimed that we may know true from false prophets “by their fruits,” for good begets good, and we do not “gather grapes from thorns” (Matthew 7:16). In some instances, “we must study [an issue] out in our minds,” then receive positive or negative feedback through “a burning of the bosom” or “a stupor of thought” (or a feeling of “comfort and serenity”).[1] In other instances yet, revelation comes, as Joseph Smith described it, by an inflow of “pure intelligence.”[2] God, we are told, spoke to Moses through a burning bush and to Peter, Paul, and Enoch by exotic, dramatic visions. Sometimes, God speaks to us through other people.
Moroni himself seems to point to God’s variant forms of communication to mortals. Immediately after his promise in verses 4 and 5, Moroni enumerates (verses 6–18) essentially the same spiritual gifts that Paul famously wrote of in 1 Corinthians 12[3]: the gifts of wisdom or knowledge or faith, of healing and prophesying, and others. By the proximity of this listing and his previous promise of discerning the truth of the Book of Mormon, Moroni clearly links them. He suggests that where one encounters these varying gifts of the spirit, all of which “come by the Spirit of Christ” (v. 17), the same spirit witnesses of the truth of “these things” (the record we know as the Book of Mormon). Both the gifts and the Book are “good.” That which is good, in turn, is true (v. 6). And that significant assertion is one seed from which a person possessed of a broken heart and a contrite spirit might begin to nurture an attitude, an openness, and receptivity that could lead to an organic, thriving faith.[4]
To “know” the truth of “these things” in Moroni 10 might mean, for some, to have experienced the goodness of their fruits.[5]
[1] As suggested by Dallin H. Oaks, “Teaching and Learning by the Spirit,” Ensign, March 1997, 13.
[2] History, 1838–1856, volume C-1 [November 2, 1838–July 31, 1842] [addenda], 9 [addenda], The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed December 16, 2024, www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-c-1-2-november-1838-31-july-1842/544?highlight=pure%20intelligence.
[3] This striking example of inter-textuality in Moroni 10 and 1 Corinthians has, of course, been noticed by many believing Latter-day Saint commentators. Proposed explanations include that God revealed the same gifts, using similar language, to the prophets in both hemispheres in their respective times. Or that Moroni, by revelation, was shown and drew from Paul’s earlier writings. Or that Moroni’s dependence on Pauline language resulted from an interpretive intervention by Joseph Smith
[4] Cf. Alma 32. The close relation of “true” and “good” declared here by Moroni could be put into fruitful dialogue with the classic secular meditation by Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which makes an elaborate case that “truth” emerges from “Quality,” rather than the other way around.
[5] The Hebrew term behind “know” or “knowing” in our English translations of the Old Testament often carries a sense of “to experience.”
Images
Benton Blonde, I Bid Unto All Farewell, 2024. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/i-bid-unto-all-farewell/].
Briana Shawcroft, Angel Moroni Ushering In, 2024. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/angel-moroni-ushering-in/].
Charlene Collins Freeman, Fruit, 2024. [https://charlenecollinsfreeman.com/shopcharlenecollinsfreeman/plums]
Will Stanger, The Pleasing Bar of the Great Jehovah, 2024. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/the-pleasing-bar-of-the-great-jehovah/].