Joseph Smith and Jesus

The apostle Paul says in Galatians 1:8-9

Galatians 1:8–9 NASB95

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!

What I have just laid before us for tonight is just one of many texts that we can reference as we seek to witness to one of my favorite groups of people to share the Gospel with: Mormons or as they would rather go as today: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I have such a love for the LDS community, obviously not because I agree with their theology, but my heart’s desire is that they would come to know the true Gospel. For years, I’ve told Lora that if an LDS missionary should show up to the house and I’m not home, call me immediately and I will drop everything to come and talk to them. Like, let them in, make them a cup of hot chocolate because they don’t drink caffeine, and get my Bible ready because these are people that I want to talk to. In fact, I so greatly love the LDS community, that I am in the early process of trying to plan a mission’s trip out to Utah or Arizona, to go and reach the LDS community, so if that is something that interests you, talk to me when we are done and we can see if we can get the ball rolling on that. Now chances are, you have seen a Mormon or LDS missionary in your life, or you would be able to recognize them if I pointed them out to you. These missionaries are the young looking 20-somethings that go door to door, usually going by the name Elder…, are dressed up pretty nice, and have little name tags on. Most of the time, they are incredibly respectful, incredibly genuine in their conversations, I’ve also experienced a more negative side but we can talk about that later. Overall though, I’ve had multiple great conversations with Mormons, I never get tired of talking to Mormons, if you have a Mormon missionary that is coming to your house and not leaving you alone, invite them in, call me up, and I’m sure after an hour or so you’ll never see them again. My first in-home conversation with an LDS missionary was on Mother’s Day of last year and 15 minutes after that first conversation, not a single missionary has been back. Like I said with the JW’s, I’m about 99% sure that my address is now on some database and I’ve been blacklisted by the Mormon Church for the glory of God. So, what I want to do tonight, is really the same thing that we did when we talked about the Jehovah’s Witnesses. What is a semi-fast overview of the history of the Mormon religion, what are some of the core beliefs of Mormonism, and then finally, what can we do to reach them with the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. And just like our study with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I already know that I have way too much material for one sitting, and we will be lucky if we get through all of this. Let’s open up in prayer and then we will start our look at the history of the Mormon Church.

History of the Mormon Church

Now if we want to do a deep dive into the history of the Mormon Church, we could go back a number of years and look at some of the movements that took place in the 1600’s and 1700’s, we could talk about some of the beliefs of the Freemason’s, but we can start a little bit further at the end of the 1700’s going into the 1800’s and look at what was happening in America at that time. Starting around 1790 and stretching into the 1830’s and 1840’s, America was experiencing the Second Great Awakening. There was a great religious fervor that was taking place in America at the time and not everything that came from that was positive. Unlike the first Great Awakening where you have men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, incredibly gifted theologians and pastors, that held fast to the Word of God leading the movement, you have more of a questioning of the Bible taking place in the Second Great Awakening so in some ways, I struggle to even call it a revival because true revival does not happen outside of the faithful preaching of the Word of God. In the Second Great Awakening, you have men like Charles Finney, who I largely believe was an unconverted man, preaching to multitudes. Finney rejected most of the doctrines that we hold to today, I think that it was R.C. Sproul who said that Finney wasn’t a heretic, he was the Arch-heretic. He was teaching things that were just out of this world kind of looney. He denied original sin, he denied the penal substitutionary death of Christ for atonement, and he believed that sinners could change their own hearts. Nothing that you will find backed up by Scripture. So what we see being produced in the Second Great Awakening, large portions of it seem to contradict Biblical Christianity. It’s no coincidence that from this Awakening, we see the Jehovah’s Witnesses come, we see the Seventh Day Adventist Movement come, and we see Mormonism come. In these days, we see revival of religion but I wouldn’t say we necessarily see a revival of Christianity. Iian Murray’s book, Revival and Revivalism is a great resource if you are interested in learning more about this time period. There’s so much from this time period that I would love to look at one day, in fact, it would be really cool to do a study on Church History, maybe we can do something with that in the future but let’s focus on Mormonism. Where does Mormonism come from? It comes from the teachings of Joseph Smith. The most important figure of LDS history and theology is Joseph Smith. I’ve heard the Cultish podcast phrase it like this, when it comes to Mormon theology, Mormons claim that Jesus is the door but Joseph Smith is the hinges. How important is Joseph Smith to LDS belief? The tenth president of the Mormon church, Joseph Fielding Smith said, “Mormonism, as it is called, must stand or fall on the story of Joseph Smith. He was either a prophet of God, divinely called, properly appointed and commissioned, or he was one of the biggest frauds the world has ever seen. There is no middle ground.” So who is this guy? Joseph Smith was born on December 23rd, 1805 in Sharon, Vermont. Around 1816, Smith and his family moved to upstate New York in Palmyra. After a few years, Smith’s family would move to a 100 acre farm in the Manchester, New York area, not far from Palmyra. This farm, this region of New York, is the location of what is likely the most important alleged event in Mormon history. When Smith was about 14 years old, his family had joined a Presbyterian church but he himself wasn’t sure what church he should attend. Smith believed that there was so much strife between denominations that he couldn’t figure out which one was right and which ones were wrong so he claims that he went out to the woods by his house to pray and he claims that while he was praying, he received a vision. In this vision, two persons appear and the identity of these two people are identified as God the Father and Jesus Christ in physical form. Now one of the issues with this, and there are several, is that the identity and even the number of people that appear in this vision change over time. This first vision claims to have taken place in the Spring of 1820 but Smith does not claim to have seen God the Father until after 1834, a whole 14 years after the vision. Until that point, we see the visitors identified in Smith’s writings as either angels and Jesus or just Jesus. Actually, if you were to look through official LDS writings, you would see that this first vision has 9 different accounts. In 1831-1832, Smith claims that he saw the Lord. In 1835, it changes to seeing only one person. In 1840, he claims for the first time that he saw God the Father and Christ the Son. Now this is important as we talk about the beliefs of Joseph Smith because what you see in the history of the Mormon church is an evolution in Joseph Smith’s theology. But what part of Smith’s story remains consistent? The most consistent element is that when Smith asked which church he should join, the person said he should join none of them because they were all wrong. Here is what Smith records, “I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)- and which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt.” According to Smith and this first vision, every denomination, every Christian, every pastor, is wrong and unsaved. Here is one of the many places where modern day LDS believers are inconsistent. Usually when I talk to them, I bring them back to this statement in the first vision and I’ll ask them whether they believe that I am a Christian or I am saved. Usually this is after I identify myself as a pastor and I have never had a Mormon say that I wouldn’t go to Heaven or that I’m not a real Christian. When they say yes, I will say, that’s ironic because Joseph Smith doesn’t believe that, Joseph Smith believes I’m going to hell, and then I quote them the line of how all our creeds are an abomination and the professors are all corrupt. So these 9 different first visions, without them, the entire church falls. Gordon Hinckley, the 15th president of the Mormon church nails it when he says, “Our whole strength rests on the validity of that vision. It either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not, then this work is a fraud…upon that unique and wonderful experience stands the validity of this church.” If Joseph Smith did not see what he claimed to have seen, the Mormon faith falls apart and I believe that Smith either lied about the event or he was greatly deceived by some demonic force, maybe both. After this first vision, Smith claims that he had a second vision on September 21, 1823. In this vision, Smith claims to have seen a messenger from God appear at his bedside named Moroni and Moroni told him that God had a work for him to do. Smith writes, “He told me that a book had been deposited, written on golden plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and containing ‘the fulness of the everlasting Gospel’ as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants of this land. He also said that there were ‘two stones in silver bows- and these two stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummin- deposited with the plates,’ adding that God had prepared these stones for the purpose of translating this book.” Having been told where these plates were, Smith goes the next day and finds it exactly as the angel said but at this point, the angel reappears and says that he can’t translate the plates now, he needs to come back to this place every year for the next 4 years. Finally on September 22nd, 1827, he receives the plates with instructions on what to do. Around that time, Smith moves to Pennsylvania and starts to copy the characters off the plate and using the other stones, attempts to translate them. Around this time, Martin Harris, a friend of Smith’s, having known what Smith was doing and wanting to finance the book that would be produced from the translation of these plates, wants to make sure that what is being translated is legit. He believes that the characters are Hebrew but Smith claims that they are actually “reformed Egyptian.” The Mormon church claims that Smith gave to Harris a copy of the “translated materials” and Smith went to a professor in New York named Charles Anthon who they claim verified that the translation was correct. However, 5 years later in 1834, Anthon heard that he was being used as a witness to the validity of the interpretation and he wrote a letter that this was entirely false. There was nothing correct in the sample that he saw. Now of course, the LDS church wants everyone to forget that, and for our study sake, we can pretend to forget that too. In April 1829, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery began to translate what would come to be known as the Book of Mormon. Smith would look into the hat and translate the golden plates while Cowdery would write what Smith told him to write. A month later, they went to pray and Smith claims that a messenger that was identified as John the Baptist appeared and conferred on him and Cowdery the priesthood of Aaron. Not long after this conferring, Smith claims that Peter, James, and John appeared and conferred on to Smith and Cowdery the priesthood of Melchizedek. On March 26, 1830, years after the claimed first vision, the Book of Mormon was complete and on April 6, 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints was organized. Over time, Smith and company would start to move west and Smith would write another sacred book, known as Doctrine and Covenants. The Mormons actually have 4 sacred books that they consider Scripture: The Bible, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. As Smith kept moving west, he settled in Independence, Missouri which he claimed was “the land of promise, and the place for the city of Zion.” Smith prophesied that the New Jerusalem would be found here in Jackson County, Missouri and the new temple would be built there. And as we can tell by a quick google search, that didn’t happen but we will talk about that later. In 1839, Smith, surrounded by controversy had assembled what was practically a small army called the Nauvoo Legion. Smith would command his men to destroy a publisher that was publishing an anti-Mormon paper and Smith was arrested. He would be released and then rearrested, along with his brother Hyrum and taken to the city jail in Carthage, Illinois. A mob found out that the Smith’s were there and on June 27, 1844, Joseph and Hyrum were killed and now they are seen as martyred heroes. While the LDS is quick to state that Joseph Smith was a martyr, they don’t quickly admit that Smith died, having shot 4 men with a smuggled in gun. Most martyrs don’t fight back, that’s all I’m saying. After Smith died, Brigham Young became the second president of the Mormon Church and the group moved further west to escape the persecution and finally on July 24, 1847, the group arrived at Salt Lake in Utah and Salt Lake City has been the headquarters of the Mormon Church ever since. For our college sports fans, this is why BYU, Brigham Young University, is in Utah. So that’s sort of a quick overview of the early years of Mormonism, there is a lot more that we could talk about but let’s get to some of the core beliefs of Mormonism.

Core Beliefs of the Mormon Church

Now I’ll admit, I struggled with trying to keep this concise enough so that we weren’t spending days dissecting what the LDS church believes so I will tell you ahead of time, we aren’t going to cover as much as I wish we could. What I will do is give you 3 great resources from smallest to biggest that I would recommend: Sharing the Gospel with a Mormon by Tony Brown, The Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Martin, and Letters to a Mormon Elder by James R. White. The most expensive of those will be the Martin book but that is because he covers more than just Mormonism. So what I want us to do is sort of talk about what the LDS Church believes about the Bible, about God, about Jesus, and about salvation. Sort of along the same line that we talked about when we looked at the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

LDS and the Bible

What do Mormons believe about the Bible? I mentioned earlier that they have 4 books that they consider sacred writings or Scripture, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. When it comes to their view of the Bible, they believe that it is the Word of God but only to an extent. In fact, usually when you come across Mormon Missionaries, the first thing that they will turn to is the Book of Mormon. The reason that they do this is because they believe that the Book of Mormon far exceeds the usefulness of the Bible. Joseph Smith said, “I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.” They believe that the Bible is the Word of God as far as it is translated correctly. The belief is that much of the Bible has been polluted or corrupted by outside influences and that is why the Book of Mormon is needed. Orson Pratt, one of the Mormon “apostles” wrote, “Can we rely upon the Bible in its present known corrupted state, as being a faithful record of God’s Word? We all know that but a few of the inspired writings have descended to our times. What few have come down to our day have been mutilated, changed, and corrupted in such a shameful manner that no two manuscripts agree. Verses and even know chapters have been added by unknown persons; and even we do not know the authors of some whole books; and we are not certain that all those which we do know were written by inspiration. Add all this imperfection to the uncertainty of the translation, and who, in his right mind, could, for one moment, suppose the Bible in its present form to be a perfect guide? Who knows that even one verse of the whole Bible has escaped pollution, so as to convey the same sense now that it did in the original?” Brigham Young didn’t go quite as far as Pratt but his exact words were “The Bible is good enough as it is.” Now a glaring review and it doesn’t quite give a sense of reassurance. One of the books in the Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi says in 1 Nephi 13:26, “For behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away.” Then in verse 29, “Because of the many plain and precious things which have been taken out of the book, which were plain unto the understanding of the children of men, according to the plainness which is in the Lamb of God- because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb, an exceeding great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them.” So we don’t know when and we don’t know what plain and precious parts had been taken out, but apparently these parts are revealed or clarified in the other LDS writings. Now if you ask what has been taken out of the Bible or what has been translated incorrectly, a Mormon missionary will probably struggle to give you a real answer. Usually they will say that if it contradicts the Book of Mormon, that is the place that has been incorrect. There is this misconception among some Mormons that the way that we get the English Bible is that it starts out in the original Greek then gets translated into Latin then into French and eventually finds its way to English. It’s like a game of telephone where you are left with a fraction of what you started with but that isn’t how we get our modern English translations. We go from Greek manuscripts or Hebrew manuscripts and we translate from that original language into English.

LDS and God

What do Mormons believe about God? To answer that, we need to ask, Which one? First off, Mormonism denies the Trinity. Traditional, orthodox Christianity teaches that there is one God in three distinct persons: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Now if we think back to Joseph’s vision, he saw two distinct persons and he claimed that one is God the Father and One is God the Son. The Mormon Church identifies God the Father as Elohim. Between 1830 and 1844, Joseph Smith’s theology evolves from monotheism to polytheism. We go from one God which is traditional Christian belief to multiple gods. In fact, Smith’s theology evolves to a point where the God of the Bible, Elohim is not the first God, He is just one God in a line of Gods before Him and after Him. Mormonism teaches that there is a whole counsel of gods that came together and planned to create the world. Joseph Smith taught this in Journal of Discourses, 6:5. While the Book of Mormon asserts in numerous places that there is only one God, they will try to get out of this by asserting that there is one God of this world. That way God isn’t limited and they can claim to avoid some contradictions that are clear in Scripture. At the beginning of Joseph Smith’s theology he believes in one God which is consistent with his upbringing in Presbyterianism but here is what he says in a sermon in 1844, “I will preach on the plurality of Gods. I wish to declare I have always and in all congregations when I have preached on the subject of the Deity, it has been the plurality of Gods. I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods.” One of the clearest expositions of Smith’s theology comes towards the end of his life in a funeral address that he gave in April 1844 which is known as the King Follet Discourse. This is a sermon that we will come back to in our defense but it gives the fullest representation of what Joseph Smith’s doctrine of God became and what the LDS church teaches. Smith said, “It is necessary we should understand the character and being of God and how he came to be so; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see.” What do we see behind the veil? We see that God is not eternal, that God is a created being from a long line of other Gods but Smith goes beyond even that. In the same sermon he says, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power, was to make himself visible,- I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form- like yourselves in in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked, and conversed with him, as one man talks and communes with another.” Smith taught that just as Adam walked in the garden as a created being, God Himself once walked the earth as a man only to be exalted as God of this world later. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22 teaches that God the Father has a body of flesh and bones just as we do. The LDS church denies that God is eternal, that He is the only God, and while they will not say it outright, if God was as we are, He too must have a sin nature and He too experienced resurrection from the dead.

LDS and Christ

There is just so much happening in this belief system. Let’s briefly turn to their beliefs about Christ. Jesus is identified by Mormons as Jehovah. As you can guess, they aren’t friends with the Jehovah’s Witnesses in that regard. They believe that Jesus is the first born of the myriads of pre-existent spirits that existed in the pre-existence. One of the sickening and there are so many that are sickening doctrines of LDS theology is that Heavenly Father had sex with Heavenly Mother to produce Jesus as the firstborn and the angels are other spirit children of Elohim and HIs goddess wife or wives. If this is true, this means that the Devil and the demons are the brothers of Jesus. Mormons do not believe that Jesus is equal with the Father and they believe that while Jesus is said to have created this earth under His Father’s instructions, he was helped by certain spirits that also existed like Adam and even Joseph Smith in his spirit form before he was born. We’ll try to touch on that in a minute. When it comes to the incarnation of Jesus, they believe that Mary became pregnant through a physical union with God the Father but they still will say that it was a virgin birth. Following Mormon thought and doctrine, we can see that Jesus Himself has not always been God but that He Himself became a God just like all gods before Him did.

LDS and Salvation

So we are burning through my time, what do Mormons believe about salvation? As Christians, we believe that we are saved by grace through faith. We believe that it is by faith alone that we are saved but Mormons reject the doctrine of justification by faith. Their articles of faith read: “We believe that through the atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” In the Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 25:23 reads, “For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” It is only after we have done everything that we can possibly do that God will give grace to us so that we would be saved. Joseph Smith, back in the King Follett discourse tells us what eternal life for the Mormon looks like: “Here, then, is eternal life- to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you, namely by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.” Lorenzo Snow, one of the Mormon apostles, developed this well known description of who God is and what man is supposed to be: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.” Mormons believe that not only will they become Gods, they will become gods of their own planets. Now, officially Mormon doctrine will deny this but if you look through the statements of their presidents over the years, you will see that the faithful will be exalted and will govern over creation and will themselves populate the worlds that they are governing. So despite what the church says, they still believe that they will govern planets one day. The LDS church believes that every person began his or her existence in a Pre-mortal existence. They existed as the spirit children of Elohim and when we are born, we go through what they call the “veil of forgetfulness” and forget everything about the pre-existence. Man lives his life and when they die, the body goes into the ground and the spirit goes either to paradise if they were good or to spirit prison if they are bad. When the time for the resurrection happens, the body and spirit go to the final judgment and there you have multiple chances and get one of 3 kingdoms depending on how you respond to Mormon doctrine at that point: You either go to the telestial kingdom, the terrestrial kingdom, or the celestial kingdom. However if you completely reject everything, you get cast into outer darkness. You want the celestial kingdom because the celestial kingdom is where you will be able to have spirit children and will live out your life on the new earth that has been created in the presence of God forever. To get this, you were a faithful mormon your entire life. The terrestrial kingdom is probably on some other planet and it is for those who reject the Gospel in life but change their mind in the spirit world or for slightly less faithful Mormons. The telestial kingdom is for those that have rejected Mormonism and then after the thousand year reign of Christ will be resurrected into this kingdom. After a thousand years of torture, they become servants of God but they don’t dwell with Him or Christ. So, good news, you all have options if this is true.

Reaching Mormons with the Gospel

Now with the about 10 minutes (if that) that we have, how can we reach Mormons with the Gospel? As with any defense of the Gospel that we give or any evangelism that we attempt to do, it is pointless if we go about it without using the Word of God as the foundation of our witness. When it comes to reaching Mormons, we can use the Scriptures to combat and challenge anything that they may throw at us. What I’ll do with the time we have left is tell you the three defenses that I’ve used the times where I’ve talked to Mormons. I’ve had more engagements with JW’s than Mormons but really some of the same arguments you use against the JW’s you can use against the Mormons. Just as we did with the JW’s, we want to get our LDS friend thinking and questioning. Now in his mind, he has been taught and trained that Joseph Smith is a prophet and if you challenge him, you are lost. To question Joseph Smith is a big deal in the Mormon Church because remember, he is the one that God chose to restore true Christianity. One of the first encounters I had with a Mormon missionary, I was outside of Walmart and I start going through my objections to Joseph Smith and the missionary goes, “Well to me it sounds like you are biased towards Joseph Smith.” I told him that I wasn’t biased towards Joseph Smith, I’m biased towards any person that claims to be a prophet and deliberately leads people away from the true Gospel. I’ve also been told in an encounter that because I questioned Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, that my questioning meant that I had a spirit of contention which is a nice way for an LDS person to say that you have the spirit of Satan in you. Now when these things happen, I’m not going out there hooting and hollering and yelling about hell fire, I’m there to have a conversation. But we want that conversation to focus on Scripture, Christ, and the contradictions of Joseph Smith. A lot of directions we could go right now but we could start with just the plurality of gods options and our becoming of gods one day. We take them to Scripture. They are going to want to take you to the Book of Mormon, usually a missionary will have some access to it, maybe even a physical copy, but take them to the Bible. Ask them where in the Bible do we ever see a multitude or plurality of Gods being talked about. They will probably point to 1 Corinthians 8:5–6 where Paul says, “For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.” They’ll say, “Look, Paul says that there are many so called gods in heaven and earth so Paul recognized plurality.” Well what kind of gods is he referring to? Paul isn’t saying that there are a plurality of gods, he is saying that their are a number of false gods that exist that man has attributed deity to. Paul says in verse 4 that there is no God but one. None of the so called gods were actually gods. They will bring up Psalm 82:6 which says, “I said, “You are gods, And all of you are sons of the Most High.” Again, this comes down to context. In Psalm 82, God has called the wicked rulers of the world to stand before Him. God is not saying that they are gods, He is saying that in their own sinfulness they claim to be gods. Later in John 10, Jesus refers to this verse and says that if men can lie and make themselves gods, why can’t the Messiah be called God? But nowhere in these verses do you see any hint that there is a council of gods or a plurality of gods or that we can become gods. You see plenty of verses on monotheism though. Isaiah 43:10 ““You are My witnesses,” declares the Lord, “And My servant whom I have chosen, So that you may know and believe Me And understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, And there will be none after Me.” Isaiah 44:6 ““Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last, And there is no God besides Me.” Isaiah 45:5–6 ““I am the Lord, and there is no other; Besides Me there is no God. I will gird you, though you have not known Me; That men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun That there is no one besides Me. I am the Lord, and there is no other,” Pretty much everything from Isaiah 40-45 blatantly contradicts what Mormonism teaches. Some other questions that you can ask them is for any support or evidence as to what plain and precious parts of Scripture are missing. If they say that they don’t know, you can also ask them if Jesus was lying or wrong about the sufficiency and unchanging nature of the Word of God. Jesus says in Matthew 5:18, “For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” He tells the disciples in Matthew 16:18 that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. In Jude 3 we read of “the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.” So did God fail in his promise to the church? If the faith was once for all handed down to the saints, why did it need to be recovered by Joseph Smith 1800 years later? At what point did the gates of hell prevent against the church that necessitated Joseph Smith’s revelation? Why do we need more revelation if the faith was once for all handed down? All questions that they probably don’t immediately have an answer to. Remember, at this point you just want them questioning LDS theology. If you have time to study some of the false prophecies that were delivered by Joseph Smith and the LDS apostles, I would recommend sharing those and asking how they navigate what God says in Deuteronomy 13:1-6 and Deuteronomy 18:15-22. The marks of a false prophet are a single failed prophecy, to be a prophet from the Lord, a prophet needs to have a 100% success rate. Joseph Smith said that the Lord told him that the United States government would collapse in the lifetime of his listeners and that didn’t happen. Joseph Smith said that he would see the Lord return in his lifetime and that did not happen. In the 84th section of Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith prophesied that the New Jerusalem would be built in Missouri and dedicated by Joseph Smith’s own hand. This would take place in the generation of those living at the time and that the people of that generation would see the glory of God descend upon the new temple and fill the house and that did not happen. The Mormon will argue that the prophecy depended upon the actions of men and that the unsaved heathens prevented the work from being done and the prophecy being fulfilled but does that mean that God depends on man? Is He unable to control the actions of humans? Smith prophesied on April 17th, 1838 that David Patten was to sell all of his belongings and that God said he was to perform a mission the following Spring with a company of others to take the Gospel to all the world. This did not happen because Patten was killed on October 25th, 1838. The prophecies don’t stop with Smith, and that is only a small portion of them, Brigham Young in 1863 prophesied that the Civil War would not free the slaves (and some incredibly racist comments but this shouldn’t surprise us because the Book of Mormon had incredibly racist content in it) and we know that the slaves were freed. You can also ask them if a true prophet would ever contradict previous revelation. Joseph Smith did it plenty. The last time that I spoke to some Mormon missionaries, I kept asking them how they could make sense of Joseph Smith’s evolving theology. We know that LDS theology teaches that God is not eternal, that Jesus is not eternal, that Elohim was at one point created as we were. I’m not saying you need to have the King Follett discourse memorized, but it probably doesn’t hurt to know some of it. Ask them what the Book of Mormon says in its title page, the introduction written by the prophet Joseph Smith. Here is what Joseph Smith says the purpose of the Book of Mormon is: “Which is to show unto the remnant of the house of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations.” Wait who is Jesus? This says he is the Eternal God. But what does Joseph say later on in 1844 at the King Follet Discourse? “We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see.” The question then is how is Jesus the eternal God if Joseph Smith is refuting that idea and denying it? I think that was the entire conversation of how can God be God from all eternity but Joseph Smith denies it? No answer. That was the conversation where I was called the devil so maybe I just got some new missionaries or something. The last thing that we have time for is that when it comes to Mormon missionaries, usually if they get a question that they can’t answer, they have been trained to share their testimony. Don’t let them get out of the question. You will also be challenged by them to take the Book of Mormon, read it for yourself, and ask that God would reveal to your heart what is true because that is what they did. They read it for themselves and they know in their heart that it is true. They will say that they know in their hearts that it is true and if we would approach it with a desire to know the truth, God would reveal it. Here’s the issue with this though. The test of the Mormon for whether or not something is true is that they feel in their heart absolutely convinced that it is true. But is the Muslim right when he does that? When the Muslim prays to Allah that the Quran is true and he feels convinced that it is, does that mean it is right? No! We would both agree that they were wrong. Jeremiah says in Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” Let’s say that I pray and the Lord tells me that the Book of Mormon is absolutely wrong, Joseph Smith is a false prophet, and LDS theology does not lead you to salvation. Does their argument still work with that? How do we know that anything is true? We don’t know it because of religious zeal or because we are convinced that it is true. Something is true whether we verify its truth or not. Here is the actual example that I used with the Mormon Missionary that called me the devil. I used his argument and I said, what if I took the Bible or the Book of Mormon and I prayed that God would let me murder my wife and kids and when I was done praying, I felt sure in my heart that God wanted me to do that. How would I know that was wrong. He said because murder is wrong. How do we know that it is wrong? Because the Bible says so. That’s the way we know anything! We know because God has revealed truth in His Word and God’s truth cannot contradict itself. The way that we test not just the claims of Joseph Smith but anything is based off of what God has already revealed and what the Scripture testifies to is that Joseph Smith is a false prophet and the Book of Mormon and LDS leaders are antichristian and that Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, is the only way to salvation. With the few seconds we have left, what questions do you have?