Debunking the Mormon “17 Proofs of the True Church”

Source: ldssmile.com

There is an oft-repeated tale in Mormon folklore that there were these four young men in a Bible college somewhere in the US, who were trying to identify which of all the Christian churches in America was closest to the New Testament church.

As the story goes, they developed this list of seventeen points or indicators from the New Testament that would identify a church that truly represented Jesus’ “original church”, and then they all went their separate ways to try and find the closest thing they could find. A year or two pass by and it turns out they all of them convert to the LDS/Mormon church.

Now, I grew up Mormon, so I heard this story a number of times growing up. I can’t 100% confirm that this list was published by the church itself, but I know I was once given a bookmark or pass-along card or pamphlet with this list of 17 points on it “proving” that the LDS church was Jesus’ “only true church”. And I’ve confirmed that they used to sell pamphlets by that name and outlining these points at deseretbook.com, the online store for the LDS church’s publishing house.

So, if the list wasn’t invented by the church itself, it was definitely promoted and sold by the church as a pamphlet at some point, in at least English and Spanish. Furthermore, I personally knew some local congregations and missionaries who used to hand them out as a proselytizing tool to Mormons to give to their non-Mormon friends to try and convert them.

So, it’s on that basis, of it being used to convince people that the LDS church is Jesus’ “only true church”, that I’m going to reassess the entire list and debunk it for you today.

Now that I’m older, wiser, and have actually studied many parts of the Bible in the Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc, and corrected for myself a lot of the LDS false claims and scriptural interpretations, I have a lot to say about this list of the so-called 17 points of the true church.

First things first, I call BS on that whole story.

Just looking at this list again for the first time in probably a decade, I can identify several glaring problems with it that red-flag for me immediately. I can’t imagine any Bible-college-trained pastor buying into the LDS interpretation of even half of these scriptures.

Many of these points are either completely misunderstood, misconstrued or misinterpreted by the LDS church, based on their own traditions. And some of these points now provably do not represent or indicate the LDS church in any way whatsoever.

So we’re going go through these “proofs” one by one. We’re going to look at the claim. We’re going to look at the verse(s) used to back up the claim, and we’re either going to show how the LDS got it wrong or that they are blatantly deceiving their followers by pretending to this.

Note: for the sake of convenience, clarity and brevity, all quoted Bible verses will be from my own translations of the Greek, Hebrew, etc, so I don’t need to double up and quote them twice by giving you the KJV or NIV and then re-translating it for you.

1. Christ organized the church

Ephesians 4:11–14

And yes, he gave some to be emissaries, but others to be visionaries, and others to be preachers, and others to be shepherds, and others to be teachers,

in order to calibrate the sanctified (born again) unto the labor of service/ministry in building the body of the Messiah,

until we all might arrive unto the oneness, the faithfulness and the recognition of the Son of the Creator, unto complete manhood, unto the mature measure of the fullness of the Messiah,

so that we might no longer be infants, tossed to and fro by waves and driven by every wind, (such as) the teaching in the cube (kabbalah), (or on the other hand) the men in thoroughness towards the methodology of wandering/exploration (“science”/academia).

It sounds a little different than you’re used to, but yes, this is the section on the five-fold ministry of the church (body of Christ).

Every born-again believer or saint (sanctified one) is compelled/called and inspired by the Spirit of God within them to serve the body of Christ in one of these five roles, even if that role is just as a teacher of your own children in your own home.

It’s very clear here that for all the body of Christ to arrive at the oneness and maturity and stature of the Messiah, that all born-again believers must “labor” in one of these roles, and that the body/group as a whole is calibrated and perfected by everyone else, as all the cogs fit together and work in conjunction with each other.

It’s a self-regulating system that shouldn’t be corruptible because nobody is set up on a pedestal above anyone else. And the Greek grammar here is specifically trying to emphasize that an emissary/messenger (or apostolos — not a title) is not superior in any way to the other roles here. That all are necessary for the unification and maturing of the body of Christ.

The craziest thing about this is that Joseph Smith’s original 1829 church of Christ that eventually morphed into the LDS church was built on the law of common consent, in which everyone was supposedly equal as brothers and sisters and there were no elite rulers or priest-class above everyone else and making all the rules for the common folk.

The modern LDS church, on the other hand, would have you believe that this passage means that Jesus personally created a priesthood organization with special authority over the rest of the saints/believers, and that these religious middle-men were empowered by God to help everyone else become unified and perfected as they obeyed the priest-class above them, and THAT is what makes a church.

This is frankly ridiculous, and the LDS context here is blatantly incorrect.

A church is a body of believers.

More specifically, a Christian church (or church of Christ/the Messiah) is a body or congregation of born-again Spirit-filled believers whom together function in these five different, inspired roles to help build each other up to become more like Jesus.

It’s not an international multi-billion-dollar corporation led by a 99-year-old man alleged to be a prophet, who has never produced any prophecy or revelation.

2. The “true church” must bear the name of Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 5:23

…as (the) man is the wife’s head, as also the Messiah is the church’s head, being savior/preserver of the (church) body.

I don’t think this one requires any special interpretation. The metaphor here is simple. Jesus is head over the church body, just as a husband is head over the family.

It says literally nothing about a church body itself needing to be called by Christ’s name like a wife is usually called by her husband’s surname. You would have to read that special interpretation into the verse.

And no, it’s not misogynistic or chauvinistic. Men and women are fundamentally different. Men are, on average, six-to-eight inches taller than women. They’re physically bigger, stronger, more dense, more equipped to handle conflict, weaponry and perform hard labor. Women are softer, more delicate, more conflict-avoidant.

The husband being head over the wife is really a simple metaphor. The man is the protector and provider. He is the eyes and the ears and the mouthpiece of the body/family. He should also have the overarching vision for the family and take the wife and children under his “wings” as they journey together towards that vision for their benefit and prosperity.

Jesus is our spiritual protector and provider. He has given us the vision and the path and the map to follow and asked us to come along with him. He is the head. As a body of born-again believers, we should be in agreement together that it’s HIS plan and his vision that we’re following and submitting to.

According to the LDS church (or whomever actually wrote this list), what Paul is actually saying here is that a church is a corporate entity with the name Jesus Christ somewhere in the title.

But you know what? That’s not actually Biblical. That whole idea comes from the Book of Mormon.

In the Book of Mormon narrative, a dude called Alma hears this martyr preaching to the king and the priests about repenting and obeying the ten commandments, and Alma’s the only one who believes this guy they’re going to kill, therefore, he has to run for his life. He begins preaching in secret, baptized hundreds of people and they form churches, and it grows and grows throughout the land. The Book of Mormon makes the point several times that any church actually belongs to the name they call themselves by. ie. If they call themselves the church of Moses, then it’s Moses’ church. Therefore, in order for a church to be Christ’s church, it must be called and known by the name of Jesus Christ. (And all of this allegedly takes place a hundred years before Jesus is born.)

This is why Mormons have a love-hate relationship the name Mormon, flip-flopping back and forth on it depending on who the current church president is, and if you ask them if they’re Mormon, many will say, “no, technically, we’re the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormon is just a nickname people gave us. We prefer LDS, etc, etc.”

So, the very fact that somebody has attempted to superimpose this Book of Mormon idea into the Bible is a major red flag that this list was written entirely by Mormons and that whole story with the four Bible-college guys is just some made-up Mormon folktale.

So, does a New Testament-style church need to be a corporate entity with the name “Jesus Christ” somewhere in the title?

No, LDS church. That’s an incredibly Pharisaical interpretation. You’re reading into the text things that just aren’t there, because you want them to be true.

3. The “true church” must have a foundation of Apostles and Prophets

Ephesians 2:19–20

You are therefore no longer strangers and foreigners, but are the countrymen of the sanctified and members of the Creator’s household,

built upon a foundation of emissaries (apostles) and visionaries (prophets), the capstone himself being Iesous the Messiah.

I would like to reiterate here that when Mormons read or hear or say “the true church”, they aren’t thinking in a context reflective of the actual definition of what a New Testament church actually is, like the one implied clearly in this very passage.

They aren’t thinking about location-based groups or fellowships of like-minded born-again believers meeting together in each other’s homes regularly to break bread and sing hymns and share their spiritual walk together. They aren’t thinking about people.

When Mormons hear the phrase “the true church”, they associate that term with the worldwide religious corporate behemoth that is the LDS church, and all the paperwork and administration and checklists and profit margins and growth projections that a corporation entails.

So, they read Paul’s words here about you, the people, the body of Christ, being built upon a foundation of apostolos (emissaries) and prophetas (visionaries), and they completely ignore the Biblical prophets and apostles that helped lay the foundation for the body of Christ in the Old and New Testaments, and they interpret the verse only within the context of an organization with a modern corporate structure having people at the top who title themselves “prophet” and “apostle”.

This is an incredibly awkward reading of the verse, and again, I don’t buy the claim that four different Bible-college-trained ministers would interpret it like this.

What makes it even more ridiculous is that we have examples in the New Testament of the word apostolos being used with a capital A indicating an actual title or rank to refer to Jesus’ twelve Apostles, but Paul never once uses the term like that indicating an actual role or title.

(I personally believe that is because he couldn’t rightly refer to himself as an Apostle with the big “A”, so he stuck with the lower-case term apostolos or “emissary” to avoid any push-back, but that’s a story for another time.)

We also need to make clear that the Greek term prophetas doesn’t mean “prophet” in the same way Mormons use it, because it also means “poet”.

In the Greek, it describes any inspired or visionary man or woman who, at their higher vibration closer to God above, is able to write or compose in a higher-minded or profound way that inspires people.

In a Christian, “five-fold ministry of the church” context, it means any born-again believer inspired by the Holy Spirit to write or compose in a profound way that inspires people and brings them closer to God. I believe C S Lewis is one such visionary. I believe King David as the author of the Psalms was another.

So while you could argue that the LDS church president IS a prophetas in that sense (assuming he’s actually been born again and he writes his own sermons/talks), he’s one of millions of them; anyone with the Holy Spirit who writes inspired books or music or poetry or gives inspiring sermons/speeches, is a prophetas too.

But wait, it gets even worse.

By claiming that the LDS church is built on a foundation of living prophets and apostles, they then have no choice but to interpret the phrase Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone (“capstone”) to mean that the living and resurrected Jesus literally sits at the head of the LDS church, not revealing himself to anyone but the LDS prophets and apostles, whom he meets regularly in the Salt Lake City Temple to let them know what they need to do to lead and guide the LDS church on a weekly or monthly basis.

I kid you not, many Mormons actually believe this — I know I did — because it’s the logical conclusion of their claims.

And wild rumors and stories get thrown around about the one guy who’s allowed to clean this secret room in the temple that just has two chairs in it, and they’re both well-worn but only the LDS church president himself can go in there (besides the cleaner) and cue the spooky music because that must mean Jesus personally appears out of thin air in that room every week to speak to the 99-year-old Skull and Bones member who runs the LDS church.

But this very idea directly contradicts Jesus warnings to us in Matthew 24 that anyone claiming to have seen Jesus privately in the wilderness (like Joseph Smith) or in their “secret chambers” (like an LDS temple) before Jesus returns in his Second Coming (to be seen universally by the entire world) should be dismissed and disregarded as a false prophet.

Sorry, LDS church, but a “true church” doesn’t have a giant corporate structure run by a bunch of obviously false “prophets” and “apostles” following a false Christ who appears to them privately contrary to Jesus’ actual words.

A “true church” is a body of born-again believers with a foundation in the words of actual biblical visionaries (prophetas) and emissaries (apostolos) as found in the Bible (and other inspired books and writings by born-again believers).

4. The “true church” must have the same organization as Christ’s church.

Ephesians 4:11–14

And yes, he gave some to be emissaries, but others to be visionaries, and others to be preachers, and others to be shepherds, and others to be teachers,

in order to calibrate the sanctified (born again) unto the labor of service/ministry in building the body of the Messiah,

until we all might arrive unto the oneness, the faithfulness and the recognition of the Son of the Creator, unto complete manhood, unto the mature measure of the fullness of the Messiah,

so that we might no longer be infants, tossed to and fro by waves and driven by every wind, (such as) the teaching in the cube (kabbalah), (or on the other hand) the men in thoroughness towards the methodology of wandering/exploration (“science”/academia).

As you’ve doubtless noticed, this is exactly the same scripture as point numero uno. It appears they’ve just made a separate conclusion from the same scripture.

If you’ve paid attention to what I’ve explained thus far, you’ll hopefully remember that the church “structure” explained here is nothing like the LDS church structure.

This passage refers to each born-again believer in the body of Christ being called or inspired by the Holy Spirit to function in one of these five roles, so that everyone in the church is working individually and in teams or groups for the good of the collective congregation or body of believers. It’s a level-ground, rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude that everybody shares and takes some individual responsibility for.

Since the LDS church claims to have this organizational structure, let’s go through these five roles in a little more detail.

An apostolos is an emissary or messenger or missionary. They actively go to places where people don’t know or understand Jesus and the gospel and they “publish tidings of peace” and help lead people to Jesus.

LDS apostles, on the other hand, haven’t been missionaries since Brigham Young exempted them all from that role in 1844 shortly after Joseph Smith’s death, allegedly because they were needed to run the church in the absence of a church president. (Although, once they had a church president again three years later, they never reversed that exemption or went out on missions ever again.)

A prophetas, as I explained in the previous point, is a visionary writer or composer who inspires both believers and non-believers bringing them closer to God with powerful, inspired words and music.

An LDS prophet, on the other hand, is any of the top fifteen guys in the church corporate structure, who allegedly speak to and for God as “prophets, seers and revelators”, but the LDS church also, for the last 70 years or so, specifically refers to the church president as “THE prophet” because he alone is the special boy with all the priestly keys of power from God.

An euangelistas is a preacher. The word evangelist is often used in English to mean the same as missionary, but this isn’t a traveling minister of the gospel, like the apostolos. This more correctly means one inspired to preach wherever they are or live, and in many cases more likely to the already converted, inspiring them with moving and uplifting speeches and sermons.

Unlike the last two categories, the LDS church has no formal role they call “Evangelist”. They do have tens of thousands of young unpaid missionaries, whom they send out across the world like emissaries, while the people at the top who call themselves “apostles” stand up twice a year and preach to the converted from a pulpit.

A poimenas is a pastor or a shepherd. These are people who lead and nurture or “shepherd” each local body of believers, and protect them from wolves in sheep’s clothing. In a lot of modern Protestantism, the terms pastor and preacher have become conflated, and people now expect pastors that are preachers, but these are actually two separate roles or callings within the five-fold ministry of the church.

The LDS church has no formal role called “pastor” or “shepherd”, but they do have Bishops and Counselors and Quorum Presidents and so on at the local congregational level. The key problem here is that because of the top-down corporate structure of the LDS church, Bishops are like the branch or store manager of a much larger company. They have some freedom, some influence, but they’re ultimately just reporting to the higher-ups. And in the case of the LDS church, I think the higher-ups at the top are all provably wolves in sheep’s clothing, which, unfortunately, means that the Bishops or pastors “hired” (in an unpaid capacity) by the wolves at the top are not actually protecting the sheep; they’re simply unwitting cogs in a system that feeds off the sheep.

A didaskalous is a teacher. I believe this is the most common role in the body of born-again believers that is the church. I also believe there is usually one in every family, because it is the most necessary role for children on the family level. The role of the teacher is not about going out and talking to new people, or writing new books or songs, or preaching new sermons to hundreds of people or even about taking any responsibility over potentially hundreds of other people to shepherd them. The role of the teacher is about absorbing good information from trusted sources and sharing what you know or have learned with individuals and small groups within your family and community circles. This is the traditional role of a majority of women as mothers/nurturers because they teach their children in the home.

(I’m not saying women can’t be in the other roles. I think when you understand the difference between a pastor and a preacher, then you definitely need women pastors for the women at the congregational level, but they’re not preachers, they are shepherdesses and most often teachers.)

In the LDS church, local level “teachers” are called by the local leadership to teach various Sunday school classes, but the church has become so standardized and corporatized that the teachers are told to simply teach from a manual/handbook written by people at church headquarters, and everyone in every congregation in the world is supposed to learn the same lessons each week no matter where they are or what the individual congregations actually need.

It’s the same problem with federal government institutionalized schooling. It creates far too much uniformity and inflexibility at the direct expense of individuals and communities, where things actually matter most.

And that’s probably the most fundamental difference here between the actual collective body of churches described in the New Testament and the LDS corporate behemoth; the former is about self-governing local bodies of believers who are individually accountable to God for their own spiritual role to play, and the latter is about a top-down hierarchy that robs individuals and communities of their autonomy and personal relationship with God, making them into automaton cogs in a much larger machine that they serve at the expense of self and family. (Yes, I’ve used the cogs-in-the-machine metaphor three times now. I don’t apologize.)

So, no, I don’t think that any sound understanding of the proper New Testament church structure remotely reflects the LDS church structure. They’re actually inverse in a lot of ways.

5. The “true church” must claim divine authority.

Hebrews 5:4–10

And nobody takes the weight (of being high priest/Kohanite) upon themselves, but are called by the Creator as was Aaron.

Likewise also the Messiah did not glorify himself to become a high priest, but rather (it was) the One who said to him, “You are my child; this day have I become one-flesh with you.”

And also elsewhere says, “You (are) a priest unto your lifetime, according to the *King of Righteousness’ appointment.”

Who (the Messiah) in the days of his flesh, having offered up his loud crying and tears, in both give and take, to the One able to save him from death, and having been heard because of piety,

Though a child, he learned submission from the things he experienced,

And having been made whole, he became to all those submissive to him, the cause of perpetual deliverance,

Having been named by the Creator, high priest, according to the *King of Righteousness’ appointment.

(*the alleged name “Melchizedek” in the Hebrew is actually the phrase “King of Righteousness”. It is unknown whether it’s a name or title, and I have opted to use the title form specifically to provide contrast with other Bible translations.)

The LDS way of interpreting this passage is SO different to a mainstream Biblical understanding that LDS and non-LDS Christians trying to discuss this passage will find themselves talking past each other, not understanding why they aren’t being understood. So, bear with me while I try to explain this.

The LDS church would have you believe that this biblical passage refers to two different classes of supernatural priesthood power (the Aaronic priesthood and the Melchizedek priesthood) available to man, that they claim were restored unto Joseph Smith between 1829–1831.

However, these “two priesthoods” first appear in the LDS context when they were added in, after-the-fact and without explanation, to already-existing published “revelations” for their re-printing in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, indicating some gross historical discrepancy here. How could Joseph have received these two priesthoods from God in 1829 and 1831 when they were artificially inserted into the history in 1835?

The LDS church also claims that these “priesthoods” are types of special invisible spiritual power and authority given to men of leadership rank in the LDS church.

However, this shows a blatant misunderstanding of the Old Testament priesthood. The tribe of Levi were a special warrior tribe given no lands of inheritance of their own, but instead given four special sanctuary cities in each tribe’s lands and given duties to slaughter the animals offered for sacrifices, guard the tabernacle, etc. From among the tribe of Levi, Aaron, his sons and their descendents were set apart as a special priest-class, called Kohanites, who officiated at feasts and ran the temple sacrifices and lived by oath/vow at a higher “purity” standard than the common folk, so that they could enter the tabernacle and later temple where the Spirit of God resided, without tainting it by association.

The point was to show the common people at the time that they needed to appeal to someone of greater spiritual purity to help them atone for their sin, which was to prepare them for the Messiah; the great and sinless final sacrifice.

Likewise, there appears to be a singular position of high-priest (or chief/head Kohanite) that Aaron and Jesus both held in their lifetimes. But there is no evidence that it was its own category of spiritual power and authority available to all men, or necessary to their “eternal progression”, as the LDS church wants you to believe.

And what the writer of Hebrews is likely trying to make clear here to the Hebrew people in this passage is that their democratic system of priests voting for their own high priest was not enough to qualify them with spiritual authority; that only God could do that.

The most key thing to understand here (if you’re LDS) is that all spiritual power on earth comes through the Spirit of God only; there is/was no special spiritual power inherent to being a member of the Old Testament priest-class or any other form of brotherhood/fraternity, secret or otherwise, beyond what living a purer life brings.

In many ways, the Levites were like the Jesuit priests and being a Kohanite was like a being a Catholic or Buddhist monk, except that you were actually expected to marry and father children. But the vows that you did take, that held you to a higher purity standard, were designed to keep you at a more clean, sober and enlightened place.

Before Jesus made intercession for us, man lived in a fallen state, separated from God, and the Spirit of God was only available in a limited capacity in the world, perhaps (and this is just speculation), to whomever was God’s chosen single high priest. We know that John had it with him from infancy before Jesus received the Spirit of God after his baptism, which also appears to be when God made Jesus the high priest, transferring that role away from John to Jesus.

Peter, however, in his first general epistle to the church, makes it clear to us that because of Jesus’ intercession on behalf of fallen man, we, the born-again believers who have been baptized of fire, who have received the Spirit of God to dwell within our body temples, are ALL the “priesthood” or knighthood (Kohanitehood) of the New Covenant, under Jesus, our high priest. Everyone of us.

There is no longer any special priest class standing between us and God, and there is no longer the need for an earthly temple/tabernacle made by men for the Spirit of God to dwell in.

We have the Spirit of God within us. We have access to spiritual gifts and intimate relationship with God directly. And we have an obligation therefore to hold ourselves to a higher purity standard than we expect of non-believers.

Just to be clear to any LDS reading this, though… I don’t consider the LDS purity standards to be soundly based in God’s word. I think many of them are highly problematic and abusive, especially to children, who have not been spiritually reborn of God. (They need to be mature enough and have chosen that path for themselves before they’re held to that standard. Experience precedes maturity, which means that people need to be free to make whatever mistakes they need to make in order to learn.)

For instance, the LDS church taught me to have a childish and irrational fear of all things alcoholic that persisted into my thirties. In order to overcome this limitation, I not only had to drink alcohol on many occasions, I had to actually get drunk once.

And having now had that experience, I’m fully confident within myself that I never want to feel like that again, and I’m better off for it. I don’t desire to drink every day, week or month. But I’m not opposed to it. I do think there may be some health benefits to fermenting your own mead or ginger beer, and I think there’s an important ritualistic element to the celebratory aspect of having some alcohol to feast special occasions and holy days. I think cultural tradition is important. But I want to remain sober-minded, and I’m confident within myself that it’s my own standard and choice, and I’m not just conforming to the standards of some religious institution claiming authority over me, that I then need to seek absolution from if I happen to mess up.

As a born-again believer, my spiritual authority is God, whose Spirit dwells within me.

So, to sum up, does the church need divine authority? Yes!

However, that authority comes directly from the Holy Spirit of God in each born-again believer, and not through some Old Testament-style purity-based priest-class.

When two or more of us born-again believers gather together in his name, he’s right there with us, connecting us. And there’s definitely enough born-again believers in most large LDS congregations to bring the Spirit of God there, but it definitely doesn’t come from the LDS “priesthoods”.

6. The “true church” must have no paid ministry.

Isaiah 45:13

I have awakened man to righteousness, and all his ways I will direct. He shall build my city, and my people in captivity shall go free, not for price or reward, says the Word of all Creation.

1 Peter 5:1–2

To the elders among you: I, a fellow elder and witness of the Messiah’s Passion, who am also about to be partaker of his revealed glory, exhort you

To pastor the flock of the Creator among you, caring for them not forcibly, but willingly, as does the Creator; neither greedily (literally: “enacting a sordid con for profit”), but rather eagerly.

So, before I get into the problems with the LDS church related to this claim, you can probably see that contrary to what I genuinely believed growing up Mormon, neither scripture says pastors shouldn’t be fairly compensated for their time, effort, energy in the ministry. When you dig into the Greek, it actually explicitly describes a confidence scheme, in which people are scamming or manipulating the trust of other people for direct financial gain.

So, yes, if there are preachers or pastors out there actively conning or manipulating the trust of their flock to squeeze as much money out of them as they can just to enrich themselves — ie. Pastors who understand that the Biblical tithe is not a 10% gross tax, but 10% of your annual increase/net profit/surplus at the end of the year, but promote a 10% gross tax anyway — well, that’s definitely not biblical.

But I don’t see anything Biblically incorrect or problematic with having a non-profit ministry set up under trust, that, in addition to owning the chapel or shelter or orphanage or vicarage and funding whatever charitable endeavors the ministry does in the community, also pays wages/salaries to pastoral, preaching and worship staff equivalent to the median hourly wage/income of the area in compensation for their time.

And that’s hard for me to admit. Ouch. This whole topic still hurts me, because this is one I was indoctrinated with my entire life as one of the core proofs that the LDS church was the one “true church”, because we had “no paid ministry”.

And it turns out that not only is that not the Biblical standard, but as far as the LDS church leadership is concerned, it’s also a big, fat lie.

Not on a local level, of course. Nobody in any of the actual congregations or bodies of LDS church members gets any paycheck for all they do in church, not me or anyone I know. On top of that, they donate at least ten percent of their income and sometimes even more than that in time to the church.

But the guys at the top of the corporation sure as heck do.

Of course, they don’t call it a paycheck. But all the top “general authorities” get six-figure tax-free “living stipends”, all debts and any mortgages paid for by the church, plus church-owned cars, paid-for travel, reimbursements for most expenses (including holidays and gifts for extended family), and a million-dollar signing bonus if and when they make “Apostle”.

Oh, and they are completely exempt, according to the LDS church’s own policies, from any obligations to pay tithes and offerings any longer!

But wait, there’s more. Their high status in the LDS church structure also affords them self-promotional opportunities for book deals, paid positions on the boards of various LDS-owned businesses and LDS-affiliated charities, political NGOs, and other enrichment opportunities that often come to politicians with insider knowledge of stock market ups and downs.

The biggest problem with this whole practice, honestly, has to be the giant double standard of it all. It was the twelve Apostles that Jesus told specifically to work to support themselves on their missionary travels whenever they didn’t have someone offering them free food and board; the worker is worthy of his hire.

Whereas the original tithe established in the Law only applied to landowners, and it was ten percent of your surplus of crops and increase in livestock. Meaning that if you had a 100 cows, and they had 20 baby calves that year, you give 2 calves to the priests at the end of harvest that year, and you have 118 cows total. That’s your tithe.

And the priests would store what they needed to survive for the next year, because they essentially lived a vow of poverty, and they would give all the rest of it to the poor, the widows, the orphans, the debtors, etc., who as non-landowners were exempt from tithing, and there was a large harvest feast when the storehouses were full right before winter.

And Jesus actually reaffirms this idea when he says render unto the Kaiser what belongs to the Kaiser, and render unto God what is God’s.

What is God’s? Crops and livestock. Natural things. One could even argue, by extension, clothing and basic shelter.

You pay your taxes in the coin of the realm, and you pay your tithes in food, clothing and shelter above and beyond what you need, to the needy, especially those in your own community and nation. And I believe part of what Jesus condemned the pharisees for is playing the profit-taking middle-man, exchanging charitable services for monetary donations. We’ll do all your charity for you, just pay us a donation or let us take ten percent of the ten percent as an agent’s fee.

But the New Testament church took actual charity to the next level, because except for the first couple of decades in Jerusalem, there was no need to support a temple priest-class any longer. The tithe stopped being an annual obligation like the political tax and became a daily attitude of selfless service; being always willing, as both individuals and a Christian community, to help the needy around you, leading naturally in many cases to various types of communal living.

The modern LDS church, on the other hand, essentially expects a 10% flat tax of its membership (plus extra charitable giving) no matter how poor they are, while exempting the top leadership, whom are funded by the LDS church, from any and all financial obligations!

And what’s worse, recent financial reports have shown that less than 2% of tithing revenue received by the LDS church goes to actually helping the needy. This is essentially the opposite of the tithing system described in the Bible.

The LDS church is now so wealthy that the annual interest received on just the Ensign Peak stock fund alone (originally funded by tithe money) is more than their entire annual worldwide operating budget. In other words, they definitely don’t need any tithing funds from the membership. All that tithe money (approx. $7 billion/year) could actually go to helping the needy.

Alternatively, the LDS church owns over 20,000 meetinghouses across the world that sit empty most of the week. Instead of collecting tithes that mostly don’t help the needy, they could easily run every LDS chapel in the world as a homeless shelter and soup kitchen, run entirely from donations of food, clothing and time from the local LDS membership (instead of money), and do more infinitely more good in the world than they currently do.

Jesus was clear that those he called as Apostles were not to set themselves above anyone else. They weren’t to have any special titles. They were all brothers and sisters along with everyone else. And as they out into the world preaching the gospel wherever they went, they were to rely on either charity or they would work to cover their own basic needs and expenses.

If the LDS leadership were really Apostles like those that Jesus called, then one or two of them would permanently live in China and spend all their time in relations with everybody they could in the Chinese government, greasing their ears with compliments and sound gospel teaching, until the entire government is converted to Christ.

But that’s not what we see at all. Not only do the LDS apostles NOT go out into the world preaching the gospel as emissaries, but they live entirely off the the fat of the common-folk, they “sit in Moses’ seat and enjoy the prestigious seats at the feast table”.

And the fact that the LDS church still claims that they have no paid ministry when the leaders profit so very much from the lay folk, actually seems to be the exact sort of abuse of trust; scamming or conning the people for personal enrichment, warned against in 1 Peter 5.

It’s honestly disgusting.

In short, the LDS church definitely cannot claim to conform to this actual Biblical standard. Unfortunately, there are likely also many Christian mega-churches whose millionaire pastors don’t meet this standard either.

7. The “true church” must practice baptism by immersion.

Matthew 3:13–16

Then from Galilaias to Iordanen came Iesous to Ioannen, to be baptized (literally: submerged) by him.

However, Ioannes prevented him, saying, “I have business being baptized under you, and you come to me?”

But, responding, Iesous said to him, “Let go now, or it’s conspicuous for us to complete all justice.” Then, he let him go.

But Iesous, having been baptized, went up from the water and behold, the heavens opened up to him and he saw the Spirit of God come down like a dove/pigeon and land on him.

I suppose if you’re looking for qualifications you can use to disqualify “untrue” churches, because they institutionally promote a false baptism, then yes, you can argue that immersion is important. ie. I don’t know many non-Catholics who think the squirting a little water on a baby’s head constitutes a valid form of baptism.

As you saw in the translation above, the Greek word baptizo literally means “to submerge”. It’s not even really a question of whether or not you need to go fully under.

And immersion is definitely a lot more symbolic of rebirth. When you go down completely under the water it’s like your old self is being laid down in the grave, and then when you come up again out of the water, you’re born again in Jesus. I quite like the significance of that.

However, it’s really not as simple as all that.

Why did whoever wrote this “true church” list stop there? At immersion, I mean.

Why didn’t they also say for baptism to be valid according to the scriptures, you have to do it in a natural water source, ie. river, creek, pond, lake, ocean, etc.

Jesus went to John — who apparently had the Holy Spirit with him from infancy, which is the only necessary authority to baptize — and John was baptizing people in the Jordan river.

But wait a second. We know they had Roman baths and pools in Jesus’ day. So, why did John baptize people in a dirty river instead of a spring-fed Roman bath or pool? Surely, it’s a lot cleaner.

They also had systems of ritual washing in the outer courts of the Jerusalem temple. Why wouldn’t John be at the temple baptizing people?

I bring this point up because some LDS will try to claim it was the Aaronic priesthood John received from his father Zachariah that gave him the authority to baptize. But if John was a priest, why was he out in nature, living off the land and baptizing people in a river?

Could it be that being baptized in God-made flowing water sources is equally as important as (or more important than) immersion? A lot of other Christian churches only baptize people in natural, God-made water sources because they’re copying Jesus’ example.

Can’t we, therefore, by the same logic used to disqualify non-immersive baptism, disqualify everyone baptized in LDS baptismal fonts? Most LDS baptismal fonts get filled up with chlorinated, fluoridated and heated town water. From experience, I tell you, the whole environment seems artificial and really disconnected from nature.

If I had never been baptized as child, and I got to a point where I decided within me I was going to commit my life to following Jesus, I really think I would have chosen to get baptized in the ocean near where I grew up, because that would have made it an authentic experience to me.

Christ was also an adult when he got baptized. Why don’t we disqualify everyone baptized before the age of 18? The LDS church discounts infant baptism, as I think they should, but then they turn around and baptize young children!

Is baptizing 8-year-olds (which make up the majority of LDS baptisms) really any more valid than baptizing infants?

It’s not like they’re conscientious adults making a life-long decision here. I mean, we wouldn’t let them get married at age 8. If the New Testament covenant with God is most frequently likened to a marriage, why then would we let them consent to baptism if they can’t consent to marriage?

I got baptized at 8 years old because I grew up Mormon and that’s just what we did. I even knew at the time, on some level, that I didn’t possess the critical thinking skills necessary to really independently analyze everything the missionaries told me. I didn’t have any counter arguments I could offer. I was a little kid. I really didn’t feel like I actually had a choice here. There was only one “right thing” to do, as far as I knew, and that was just going along with what everyone else, particularly my parents, expected of me.

Perhaps if I had felt like it was a completely legitimate option, that it was okay to say “no”, then it would have been okay.

I really wish I could go back to my 8-year-old self and say, “hey, you really, reeeaally don’t have to do this if you’re not sure about it. It’s a big decision. You should be really sure that this is actually what you want before you do it. You can choose to be baptized any time you feel ready for it for the rest of your life, but you can’t choose to unbaptize yourself. Do really think God would want you to go through with this if you don’t 100% mean it?”

Just to feel like it was actually my own choice, that I was loved even if I said no… that would have been so emotionally healthy.

If I could do it over again, I really wouldn’t have wanted to get baptized that young. I would have looked at everything Jesus did, the fasting, the adult maturity, the natural water source, the Spirit-filled man doing the baptizing, and yes, the immersion, and I would have wanted to copy THAT procedure, not the way the LDS church does it.

And that’s another point! Christ also fasted for 40 days after his baptism. Should we disqualify all baptisms in which people didn’t fast as long as they could afterwards? I certainly didn’t fast after my baptism at 8-years-old. And when I was a Mormon missionary, we certainly didn’t recommend it to people getting baptized.

All things told, I honestly don’t see LDS baptism as any more valid than Roman Catholic baptism. The only thing the LDS church seems to have going for them baptism-wise is a) immersion and b) their claimed priesthood authority, which I no longer find any more valid than the Roman priesthood claim to authority.

I do think baptism is great. I do think it’s an important thing. Not only is it powerfully symbolic, but Jesus did say that we needed to be born of both water and the Spirit in order to enter heaven. But I really don’t understand why anyone would read the New Testament and conclude that immersion alone is the single important aspect of this to copy, and that we can use that parameter specifically to qualify or disqualify potential churches as either true or false.

It just seems like bogus ignorance or obvious propaganda.

8. The “true church” must bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands.

Acts 8:14–17

But the emissaries in Ierosalymois, having heard that Samareia had welcomed the Creator’s word, sent unto them Petron and Ioannen,

Praying for whomever came down that they might receive the Holy Spirit,

Because it was not yet come upon any of them, but they had only been baptized unto the name of Iesous the Lord.

Then they put hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

Again, the wording on this point sounds immediately red-flaggy to me. It sounds like something I’ve heard thousands of times in an LDS context, but almost never using that phrasing outside of the LDS zeitgeist.

Now, from a translation perspective, one major thing that jumped out at me was the indirect nature of the passage. We’re talking about two third-person plural pronouns, “they” and “they”, and it’s not explicitly clear in the text just who is putting hands upon whom.

Are Peter and John putting hands on the Samaritans or are the Samaritans, all crowding around Peter and John and each putting a hand on them, receiving the Holy Spirit through contact with them, in much the same way the woman with the blood condition received healing touching the hem of Jesus’ clothing in a crowd.

So, while I don’t have much of a problem with someone coming to the “laying on of hands” conclusion from reading the passage, I do think that if it actually mattered who did the touching, or how it was done, Luke could have easily been more explicit in his wording.

My major problem, however, is that this pattern of things is not nearly so universal or black-and-white as the conclusion appears to be. Anyone searching the New Testament for consistent, identifiable patterns to model the church after would not conclude that the Holy Ghost could only be received through someone else laying hands on you.

Just a few chapters earlier in this same book of Acts, we see Peter and the other Apostles at the temple on the Feast of Weeks/Pentecost and thousands of people receive the Holy Spirit without the laying on of hands.

Hang on a second…

Just how did those four Bible-college kids get to Acts 8 and conclude that the “true church” needed to do things this one very particular way, and miss the part a few chapters earlier where thousands of people had a very different and miraculous baptism of fire experience another way?

Sounds like total BS to me.

And the most glaring problem is that it sounds overly religious and ritualistic. Anyone who studies Jesus’ gospel message knows that he regularly pulled people up for being far too concerned with the letter-of-the-law and loophole obedience, as opposed to the actual underlying point of the Law in seeking the good, the true and beautiful and helping others around us and meeting everyone where they’re at.

If we look at Jesus’ miracles, we can see that Jesus heals the same maladies in a number of different ways, showing us that people are different, circumstances are different and there’s not always a one-stop-shop solution for everybody.

And we see this as well with Acts 10 where a bunch of gentiles just from hearing Peter’s preaching (again, no laying on of hands) received the Holy Spirit before being baptized by water, even though many churches, including the LDS church, say that water baptism MUST come first.

No. It doesn’t actually seem to work that way. Our intent and where we stand individually with God are way more important in the scheme of things than executing these rites and rituals in the exact way somebody says they need to be performed. It’s not a performance! It’s the lives of real men and women who need oneness with God.

Jesus fulfilled the ritualistic aspects of the Law and brought us into potential oneness with God, so that we can all have his Spirit within us if we are willing to make room for him.

The LDS church attempts to turn the simple gospel of Jesus into an Old Testament-style series of ritualistic steps in which we cannot have actual oneness with God without their church structure and alleged priesthood. The LDS gospel essentially undoes what Jesus accomplished for us as our intermediary, by placing their whole institution between us and God.

And one of the ways they’ve managed to pull this off is by baptizing young children and confirming them in church by the laying on of hands, and then telling them they’ve now received the Holy Ghost because of the authority of the LDS church, and not only that but they should trust any good, happy, peaceful or comforting feelings that they have in relation to church as evidence that this baptism of fire really happened.

I’m sorry to tell you this, LDS church, but that’s not how it happens. There are other actual “true” Christian churches out there that are whole bodies of born-again believers active in the gifts of the Spirit, because they’ve actually received their baptism of fire, and none of them were little children when that happened.

While laying hands on someone does seem to have some relevance or connection to the baptism of fire some of the time, and it does actually seem to work with some LDS adult converts, it’s NOT always required, and neither the hands themselves nor the “priesthood” bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost.

And I’ve certainly never heard of an eight-year-old child who actually received it. The youngest was maybe eleven or twelve, and they were very mature for their age. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, these are way more common.

So, no, LDS church, you don’t bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands in probably 95% of cases. You mostly baptize young children that need no repentance because they still lack the criminal intent required to sin under the Law/Torah.

And you convince those adult converts that do have a genuine born-again experience that it means something else; that it proves they need to keep deferring their personal relationship with God to your alleged authority as religious middle-managers, instead of shepherding them in fellowship to help them get their own answers from God directly.

9. The “true church” must practice divine healing.

Mark 3:14–15

And he caused twelve (whom he even named as emissaries/apostles) that they might be with him, and that he might send them to proclaim,

And have liberty to banish demons.

Okay, this is obviously a weird scripture to pair with divine healing, because it doesn’t even mention divine healing, unless you claim that all illness/disease is actually demon possession (which, side topic, there’s an interesting connection between parasites in the body and most diseases, but that’s not for right now).

So, I’m really curious. What “divine healing” or deliverance from demon possession did these alleged four guys witness in LDS churches to convince them that the spiritual healing power was in the LDS church?

Honestly, this is a very interesting topic. Here’s some background:

People in the LDS church grow up believing in divine healing, but that it only really happens associated with the claimed power of LDS priesthood authority. And so we grow up seeking blessings of healing from members of the LDS priesthood when we’re sick, and then attributing healing that occurs to priesthood power.

There’s also a number of alleged miracles and healings written about in the history books of the early days of the LDS church, which the modern LDS church has represented in movies they’ve made to bolster people’s faith.

However, I’ve recognized more and more as I’ve grown and matured, that there are some major contradictions in the messaging.

While the modern church leadership talk of scriptural and historical miracles and healings as though they are facts, the majority of their direct messaging to LDS church members over the last few decades (in relation to healing) is that in order to actually be healed, you need to have the faith not to be healed, if that’s God’s will for you.

Even in the propaganda film for the previous church president, Thomas S Monson, On the Lord’s Errand, the film depicts an event in which a chronically ill young girl in Louisiana named, I kid you not, Crystal Methven (sounds completely bogus) wants a blessing from the “apostle” (Monson) visiting to speak at their local church conference. In the film, Monson decides they don’t have time, but then “the Spirit” convicts him not to neglect the little children, so he travels an hour out of the way late in the night or early the next morning, and as an “apostle” gives her a LDS priesthood blessing.

And then… SHE DIES!

The whole thing is presented like it’s such a blessing and a mercy from God that she was able to get a special blessing from an “apostle of the Lord” right before she passed on.

But, hang on a second…

Was there not a single miraculous healing experience from Monson’s life they could share in which someone was actually healed at the brink of death or brought back from the dead?

And this experience is already after the film recounts another earlier experience in which Monson as a young Bishop keeps feeling impressed to leave a church meeting to give a priesthood blessing to one of his flock in the hospital, but he doesn’t; he waits until after the meeting to go, only to find out that the man had died calling out his name. The implication being that if he’d only gotten there earlier, the man wouldn’t have died. Allegedly then he vows he’ll never not listen to the voice of the Lord again.

It’s all very carefully made to illicit emotional responses from the viewer, but what most LDS people miss — and I was one of them, I must have watched that film two-dozen times — is that not a single example was shown of any real miraculous power and authority or healing being wielded by the alleged “apostle of the Lord”. In fact, every example of him going to give a priesthood blessing of healing did the exact opposite! They died!

Anyone looking at things objectively must ask themselves: If Jesus and his twelve apostles did many miracles and healings, and healings are one way we identify true churches, why then do the LDS apostles not have countless stories of healings attributed to them?

It’s certainly not “casting pearls before swine”, because the “swine” are the heathen, the unclean, the unsanctified, the non-born-again, the unbelievers.

The LDS church members themselves, as so-called “saints”, should be brimming with accounts of miraculous healings from church priesthood leaders that they share amongst themselves all the time. And yet, the prevailing messaging from the church leadership is “have the faith not to be healed”.

And the most recent worldwide health situation brought this problem to the awareness of many questioning minds.

If the LDS church is indeed Jesus’ true restored church with divine power as they claim, why are they shutting down like everybody else, when a lot of other Christian churches are ignoring it and continuing to meet together? Pastor Greg Locke has a 2000-seater tented church in Tennessee and he never shut down once.

So, why do the LDS church congregations (which average 100 members each at church on Sunday) shutting down?

And why were we actively discouraged from going to hospitals to give healing blessings?

And why did we do two church-wide fasts for healing and protection to no seeming effect?

And why did they call this unsafe and ineffective hokey-pokey thing a “literal godsend” and the answer from God to our joint fasts? What god sent that in response?

And why are they telling everyone to get it in their arm, when it’s provably putting more LDS church members in the hospital than any flu-related illness in the media ever did?

Where is the so-called “divine healing”?

Certainly not in the LDS church, it seems.

10. The “true church” must teach that God and Jesus Christ are separate and distinct individuals.

John 17:11

“And I am no longer in the creation as they are in the creation, and I am coming to you, holy Father. Watch over them in your name which you have given me, that they may be one just as we are.”

John 20:17

Iesous says to her, “Don’t touch me, for I have not yet gone up to the Father. However, go to my brothers and tell them I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my Creator and your Creator.”

So, again, we have an immediate red-flag issue here in which the entire premise seems too overly Mormon for this list to have been compiled by four Bible-college students training to be pastors.

Why?

Simply put, because the verses in question here delineate a separation between the Father and Jesus, not God and Jesus.

The mainstream Trinitarian view is that: while the Father and Jesus Christ are separate individuals or persons, as stated in these verses, both ARE aspects or modes or roles or faces of same supreme being; God. God the Father in heaven above and God the Son on earth in the flesh.

For example, your friend Joe Cooper might be an actor who goes by the stage name Jack Money, and you attend his movie premiere with him, sitting next to him, watching him as the actor up onscreen playing a character called James Franklin. Simultaneously, he’s Joe to you, Jack to those around you and you’re all watching him be James up onscreen and interacting with other characters as James. He’s still the one guy, but he appears in our subjective experiences and limited perspectives to be 2 or 3 different guys in multiple places at once. Joe/Jack might even have the good humor to call out publicly to James up onscreen for the benefit or enjoyment of those around him. None of that necessarily makes them separate and distinct individuals.

When Stephen was being stoned to death, he looks up in his last moments and sees the glory of God in heaven, with Jesus standing on the right hand of God, like the royal mouthpiece. Growing up, I misunderstood this, thinking he saw something like the Mormon church portrays Joseph Smith seeing: two Gods, the Father and the Son, and that it was proof that Joseph saw both the Father and the Son. But no, it never says Stephen sees two people. He sees God’s glory, which I imagine to be this brilliant golden energetic light, either without obvious form or perhaps in a human-like form, at once familiar and unfamiliar, and then as the spokesman or avatar of God able to interact with us, we have Jesus, the form of a man, who may very well only exist as a projection or hologram emanating from the light of God. I can think of several ways that might work, without them being two individuals.

Likewise, neither of these verses really prove a non-Trinitarian view or disprove the idea that Jesus is also God. When Jesus goes to heaven to be one with God, he might literally merge into God’s being, and then come out again from God when it’s time for his Second Coming. All these superhero movies we’ve seen have given us plenty of ideas for how an all-powerful being might split themselves into multiple beings.

So, best case scenario for their argument, in these verses, we have Jesus praying to the Father, asking that his followers might be one with each other in the same way he is one with the Father.

That raises some interesting questions. In what way(s) are the Father and Son one? And how can/does that apply to the rest of us?

Well, the Greek word monogenes (often translated “only begotten” due to the Father-Son descriptors) would be more correctly translated as “one in blood/DNA/family with” or “one-flesh with”.

Note: the exact term “one flesh” is not translated this way in the Greek, but this a simple case of the way words are translated. (ie. “offspring” is a compound word and neither of the smaller words have anything to do with genetics or progeny.) In this case, they use the literal Greek words “flesh” and “a”, meaning that husbands and wives become “of a flesh” with each other, which we do use to describe the “one-flesh” relationship between a husband and wife, that the act of consummation and procreation joins them together by blood through their joint children.

(There’s an even more subtle layer to this in which it has been scientifically shown that women retain DNA from any man they let inside them. So, it’s more than just an energetic imprint he leaves on her, he is able to physically disseminate his essence into her and that makes them one-flesh even before they have children and are bonded by blood.)

So, a husband and wife, when they become one-flesh with each other, are in spiritual, physical, energetic and electrochemical connection with each other.

I think most of us can agree that Jesus and the Father would be connected in those same exact ways, whether you’re a Trinitarian and believe the Spirit of God sparked new life inside Mary’s virgin womb, or you’re Mormon and believe that the Spirit of God carried God the Father’s semen into Mary’s virgin womb and impregnated her making Jesus a literal demi-God, or even whether you’re Messianic/Torah/Israelite/etc., and believe there was no immaculate conception, Jesus was the rightful Messiah through his Father Joseph and became one-flesh with God when the Holy Spirit of God came into him immediately after his baptism, unlocking the path for all of us to do likewise.

And all of us, already one in blood through Adam, can also be connected as one in all those other ways through the reception of the Spirit of God or baptism of fire into our body temples, which is what makes us one joint body of born-again believers. When two or more of us gather together, the Spirit of God is there with us, among us, connecting us as one.

So, ultimately, I can’t disagree more with this point. It’s a total non-starter. These two verses alone don’t convey a clear and coherent doctrine. They don’t prove anything. The conclusion allegedly reached is inaccurate with the scriptures themselves. Dozens of hundred-page books have been written on this one topic. And even though there’s still a dozen different ways we interpret this stuff, we still do all generally agree on the basics.

So, this really isn’t the LDS “win” that most Mormons erroneously assume it is.

11. The “true church” must teach that God and Jesus Christ have bodies of flesh and bone.

Luke 24:36–39

But as they were telling them these things, He stood among them, saying to them, “Salaam (peace to you).”

But they became filled with fear and terrified, thinking they saw a ghost.

And he said to them, “Why are you agitated, and what reasonings arise in your hearts?

See my hands and my feet, because I am him. Feel me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see me having.”

Acts 1:9–11

And having said these things, they saw him ascend and a cloud took him away from their eyes.

And while they were gazing intently as he went into heaven, and lo, two men stood beside them in white clothing,

And who said, “Men, Galilaioi, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Iesous, having been taken up away from you unto heaven, will likewise come in the mode you perceive him travelling to heaven.

In light of the previous point, I’m a little baffled.

If the LDS allegedly just proved that God and Jesus are two separate and distinct individuals, why do they think these two verses about the resurrected physical body of Jesus on earth mean a) that Jesus has a physical body in heaven, and b) that the “God” in heaven (who “isn’t Jesus”) has one too?

Where’s the coherent logical follow-through?

Oh, that’s right, it’s not there because the story is almost certainly complete BS.

These verses say nothing about God the Father having a physical body. In fact, we have other Bible verses saying that opposite — that God the Father is a Spirit-being — that this list totally ignores.

In fact, it’s a much more rational position to conclude, based on scripture and the fact that Holy Spirit wasn’t added to the Godhead/Trinity until the 393 update of the original 325 Nicene Creed, that the Holy Spirit is not actually a third being or person in the Godhead, but is actually just God the Father’s all-encompassing Spirit dwelling within our body temples; literally the Spirit of God. God’s Spirit.

Likewise, there’s no clear evidence from the Bible that beings in heaven can have physical bodies at all. It might be a purely spiritual realm. Jesus vanishes into a cloud. If God formed Adam from the dust of the earth, and Jesus immaculately conceived inside of Mary, can’t Jesus’ body dissolve into dust inside the cloud?

I mean, what if Jesus’ physical body gets up to the cloud, and then he ascends all physical/temporal form, his physical body atomizes into water, C02 and some mineral salts (which bond to the water in the cloud), and his spirit/Spirit goes onwards to the spiritual realm of heaven that exists outside our physical and temporal reality?

Why would anyone, without Mormon pre-programming, conclude from scripture that Jesus is in heaven right now in the same physical body he was resurrected in?

I mean, you can present it as a plausible theory or interpretation, sure. But these verses don’t do nearly enough to substantiate the idea doctrinally.

In fact, the idea that any group of people would build a specific doctrine around it, and make that a core aspect of their theology is terribly contrived.

The elephant in the room here is the Book of Mormon and some other aspects of Mormon theology.

If you assume those as foundational, then maybe you can contrive to say these Bible verses imply something to that effect (that God and Jesus are, right now, two separate flesh-and-bone beings in heaven), but it’s definitely not coherent or logical. You’re working from the assumption that the Bible is lacking, incomplete, misleading or fraudulent. And so, in that sense, it’s inherently antithetical to Protestant/reformed theology, which is not a position or conclusion anyone would naturally come to in Bible college.

So, again, this is a big, fat no.

12. The officers must be called of God.

Hebrews 5:4

And nobody takes the weight (of being high priest/Kohanite) upon themselves, but are called by the Creator as was Aaron.

Exodus 28:1

“And present your brother, the Light-bringer (Aharon), and his sons with him, among the sons of Israel, to serve as Kohanite to Me; Aharon, and Nadab, Abihu, Elazar, and Itamar, Aharon’s sons.”

Exodus 40:13–16

“And you shall clothe the Light-bringer (Aharon) in the sacred clothing, and anoint him and sanctify him and he may serve as Kohanite to Me,

And present the sons, and clothe them with tunics,

And anoint them as you anointed their father and they may serve as Kohanites to Me, and becoming so, they shall be to me ‘anointed ones’, a Kohanitehood, for as long as they live throughout their generations”.

And thus did Moseh; all that the Word commanded him, so he did.

Uh-oh. Another red-flag right from the premise.

“Officers”?

Why would a body of born-again believers, who meet together in each others homes after the pattern established in the New Testament, in which Jesus said there was no special statuses among them and they were all to be brothers and sisters, on level ground with each other, and of whom Peter said they were all to be a royal priesthood, possessing the Spirit of God within them, just why would they need “officers” at all?

I certainly don’t see anything in these scripture passages about “officers”. I see references to the Old Testament “priesthood” or Kohanitehood, which I intentionally translated this way to help draw attention to the true origins of Arthurian Knighthood.

The Levites, the tribe of Moses and Aaron, were a warrior tribe. Levi’s violence was counted as a curse upon him and prevented him having his own lands of inheritance. However, the service of the Levites in slaughtering all who worshiped the golden calf was their redemption. They were given the sole responsibility of slaughtering all animals for sacrifice, guarding the tabernacle and later the temple, and they were promised residence in forty-eight holy cities across all the lands of Israel, four from each tribal territory. From among the Levites, only Aaron and his descendants were specially anointed to be Kohanites, which we now call priests, but they’re exactly what the medieval knights were based on. That’s where the word Knight comes from.

Knights, we know, were holy warriors for God. They wore tunics. They were specially anointed after proving their worthiness through years of preparatory trials, pilgrimages, benevolent deeds, valor, and so on. There’s even a connection between the “Round Table” (or Rotunda) and the original Tabernacle which engineers have proven in recent years was a dome-shaped tent. Also just look at the Knights Templar or Temple Knights! Some fringe historians even speculate that the pseudo-historical figures of Arthur and Merlin and Morgan le Fey are based on Aaron and Moses and Miriam (the prophetess).

But whatever the truth may be there, the Kohanitehood or priesthood was exclusive to the descendants of Aaron until Jesus became the great and final atoning sacrifice, and made way for all of us to have the Spirit of God dwell within us and be a royal priesthood or Knighthood unto God.

There shouldn’t be any “officers” in a body of born-again believers, because ALL born-again believers ARE the Knights of the New Covenant.

So, I guess, in that sense, yes, the modern-day Knights of the New Covenant should be called of God, yes. But that literally occurs when you’re baptized by fire/the Holy Spirit. That’s God anointing you as a Knight of the New Covenant.

And that’s the whole actual church. The whole body of believers. There is no separation between the “officers” and the “common folk”. You’re not “in” the church until the Spirit of God comes into your heart and sanctifies you. It’s an individual thing. And you literally can’t create a worldly corporation or organization based on that deciding criterion.

So, this whole LDS way of interpreting the New Testament church as needing a presiding leadership authority with their two different priesthood classes is, again, vastly incorrect and a-Biblical.

13. The “true church” must claim revelation from God.

Amos 3:7 (I’m actually going to quote verses 1–8, with verse 7 in bold, because it’s all the one idea, and cannot be understood correctly without that context.)

Hear the matter here that the Word has spoken against you, sons of Israel, upon the whole nation whom I brought up from the land Misrayim, saying,

“Of all the clans of the earth, only you have I had relationship with. On that basis, therefore, I will hold against you all your iniquities.

Can two people travel together if they have not met (or agreed to do so)?

Will a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey? Will a cub cry out of his den if he has caught nothing?

Will a bird fall into a snare where there is no bait, or a snare trigger if it has caught nothing?

If a trumpet of warning is blown, will the people not tremble? If a calamity of warning occurs, will God not have caused it,

Whether the Word of the Lord makes no claim to it or whether he disclosed his counsel to his servants of the prophets/proclaimers (beforehand).

A lion roars, who will not fear? The Word of the Lord has spoken, who cannot proclaim it?”

The inclusion of this verse in the list is one of the main reasons I believe this whole 17-point list and story is a BS LDS concoction. No Bible-college students went through this chapter in the Hebrew and came to the conclusion that it means exactly what the LDS church claims it does.

Most Bible-colleged-trained Christian pastors would contend that it is specifically referencing the Old Testament prophets, who made up a full third of the Hebrew Old Testament (or Tanakh), named, coincidentally, “the Prophets” (Nevi’im), and that Amos is telling Israel that everything they really need to know about what God is going to do in their lives and in the future has already been revealed to them in warnings from the Prophets (Nevi’im) and in nature, and so they just need to be better acquainted with the Word of God that they already have.

The LDS church, on the other hand, quotes the King James version of this one out-of-context verse ad nauseam to support that idea that God reveals all things (past, present and future) to “prophets” (past, present and future) who, metaphorically, float high above us lesser folk on their shiny pedestals sipping knowledge from God, the source of all light and truth, directly. (I’m being a little hyperbolic, but that’s the imagery that you’re indoctrinated with as a LDS child.)

I would contend that neither interpretation is technically correct. I’ve explained this issue in more detail elsewhere, but what you can hopefully all see from my translation is that, when you actually read this passage in context, it presents verse 7 as a ‘whether A or whether B’ grammatical structure attached to the previous idea, and that when you don’t read it in the broader context, you might conclude some other, less correct way to translate it.

It’s clear that from the beginning of the chapter, Amos is telling the people that because of their covenant relationship with God, he holds them to a higher standard than everyone else and he will hold them accountable and send them calamities as warnings when they as a people neglect that covenant relationship.

And, in that context, Amos is telling the people that God’s ways and works are manifest in the world for us to see. In other words, we don’t actually need prophets telling us every little thing ahead of time in order to know that God was working in the background as the First Cause or Unmoved Mover or Creator of All Things. We should know, because of the promises we made to him and the prophecies we already have, that if we’re disrespecting him in the relationship, he’s going to call us out on our behavior.

When you think about it, this actually shoots the whole LDS argument for this point in the foot.

The “true church” of born-again believers does NOT need people claiming new revelations from God because what they already have (the revealed word of God and the Holy Spirit of God within them) is everything they need.

The ten virgin brides (born-again believers) in Jesus’ parable had their lamps (the Word/scriptures) and their oil (the Holy Spirit). However, half of them didn’t continue to replenish their oil and their spiritual fire went out, and so, their lamps became useless to them; they went off elsewhere looking around in the dark and missed the sign of the Master’s return, and were therefore shut out of what should have been their own marriage feast.

The top-down structure of the LDS church teaches the church members from a young age to be spiritually reliant upon the church, instead of spiritually independent with the Spirit of God alive in their hearts. In essence, most LDS live on borrowed light, believing their own lamps have been lit, because most were convinced as children they had already received the Holy Ghost, and in their minds, the fact that they can see at all in the darkness, however dimly, is proof of that.

And I say this from experience. I was baptized with spiritual fire at seventeen years old inside an LDS church meeting, because of my own independent spiritual work with God. Nobody laid their hands on me in that moment.

I was baptized, confirmed and told I had already received the Holy Spirit half a lifetime before that at eight years old, like most young Mormons. And I didn’t understand the experience of receiving the Holy Spirit for what it really was until my thirties, because until that point I had only had an LDS lens through which to interpret it that experience.

At the time I received the Holy Spirit, I just assumed that most LDS adults must have had the same experience at some point, or that was how everyone already felt the Spirit and I was just the weird outsider; that they were all the same. However, as I matured, mentally and spiritually, I came to realize that it just wasn’t true.

It was actually far less common than I thought.

In fact, I’m now certain that most LDS adults have not actually been born again; they just believe their good or happy or comfortable feelings to be evidence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, even though those same feelings can be created artificially or even maliciously (through abusive and narcissistic love-bombing tricks, in which victims are backhandedly threatened through groomed language designed to sound loving and benevolent).

ie. “Oh, you’re so blessed and lucky and special and God loves you so much that you’ve stayed in the church” (or, in other words, that you’re not rotting in hell or outer darkness right now like those apostates will be who leave the LDS church and whom God therefore hates).

The words contain an implied threat, but so long as you do exactly what they say and don’t ever question their “authority” over you, you should feel perfectly safe and secure.

But, actually think about that for a second…

Imagine you were in a bank during an armed robbery. The robbers tell you to do exactly as they say and nobody will get hurt. Does that actually make you feel safe and secure?

Of course not. You’re in trauma because your life is being threatened. You’ll probably comply out of fear for your life. You might tell yourself it’ll all be okay, but what if someone fallible makes a mistake? What if you need to sneeze, and when you move to cover your mouth with your hand, someone mistakenly thinks you’re pulling a gun and you get shot?

This is the same scenario with the LDS church. The LDS church just tries to plaster on a happy face and keep the gun hidden in their jacket pocket, so you don’t actually see it and startle. Then they reassure you that God’s in control and everything is going to work out exactly as it should.

But you are still constantly under threat.

And so, most LDS adults comply with everything the church asks or expects of them, living in a level of unconscious fear and stress and brokenness that they’ve been conditioned to accept and interpret as safety and security, when it’s not.

The LDS church tells them that “they’ve already got the Holy Spirit and any peace they feel is proof of it”, and they just nod their heads and say, “yes, masser, I feel it”.

The LDS church tells them that “this Bible verse in Amos means that because the leadership claim to be prophets they must therefore be God’s true servants leading his only true church”, and the members just nod their heads and say, “yes, masser, I believe it”.

14. The “true church” must be a missionary church.

Matthew 28:19–20

Therefore, having traveled, make all the nations disciples, baptizing them unto the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,

Teaching them to keep anything and everything I commanded you. And lo, I am following you all the days until the end of the world.

So, the Mormon church would have you believe that their large and publicly visible proselytizing efforts are a fulfillment of this mission that Jesus gave his disciples. In other words, because the Mormon church are clearly a “missionary-focused” church, they must be a candidate for the “one true church”.

However, this interpretation of the scripture clearly ignores the broader context of the chapter.

Jesus gave this mission only to the eleven emissary disciples. That was their calling. The vast majority of born-again believers are given a different calling (which I already went through in more detail earlier). And while I can’t prove this, it is my belief that those five callings from God are listed in order from rarest to most common, because that seems to be the sensible way of understanding it.

So, yes, in an actual church body of born-again believers, you might expect to see some people called by the Spirit of God within them to be modern emissaries of the gospel, traveling to nations that don’t know Jesus, and spreading the good word.

However, in practice, this would look very different than the missionary efforts of the modern LDS church. As I explained earlier, the modern LDS church does not send out their apostles to be emissaries of the gospel. They only send out their young adults whom they name elders as though that somehow gives them authority.

It doesn’t.

I’ve been a Mormon missionary in a non-Christian country. I can tell you from experience that it’s a well-meaning but weird logistical nightmare. Most LDS missionaries have never been born again. And those, like me, who had, have almost certainly not been called by the Spirit of God to be there. (I know my calling from God. It’s not to be an emissary or a preacher or a pastor. It was not for me to be there.)

And deep down, I think most of them know it. They feel obligated to be there, because they’ve been taught since early childhood it was their duty. It’s not really what they want, but they would feel too guilty never going at all, or going home early before their allotted time is up. So, there’s a lot of business-like team-building and salesmanship practice, trying to pump people up and make them feel positive about the whole experience (which tells you, deep down, they don’t). But the main job of a mission president is admittedly to try and prevent as many missionaries as possible from leaving before they’ve done their time/finished their full term of service.

Sound a bit like prison? Ya-huh. They literally take your passports away from you when you arrive and lock them in the safe at the mission office under the guise of “keeping them safe”, so you, an adult, don’t lose your most important identification.

They try to keep these stories hush-hush but I personally knew a half-dozen or so missionaries, who decided they were leaving, went to the mission office to demand their passport back, and they got stuck in meetings for a day or two with the mission president and his support staff, until they grudgingly decided they would try to stick it out to the end of their service period.

Abusive relationships 101: if you aren’t allowed to leave freely, you’re almost certainly being abused.

In fact, I know now that God actively tried several times to lead me away from serving an LDS mission, but I wasn’t listening because I had my Mormon blinders on, interpreting all opposition to my being a missionary as either a test of my faith or the schemings of Satan trying to stop me doing God’s work.

I’m certain now that it would have been better for me not to have ever served.

So, no, LDS church. The “only true church” is NOT a missionary-focused church. There are some emissaries or messengers of the gospel, but the calling of most born-again believers lies at home, in their own communities, and it is you, those who deign to call yourself apostles, who should be abroad converting people to Christ and establishing the church.

And the very fact that you aren’t tells us all we need to know about whether or not you are Jesus’ “one true church”.

15. The “true church” must be a restored church.

Acts 3:19–20

Therefore, change your mind and turn again towards the erasing of your offenses,

So that seasons of revival might come from the presence of the Lord, and that He might send to you the appointed one, Iesous the Messiah.

This is another bizarre stretch of the imagination that any thinking mind should be able to easily dismiss.

I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but in what made-up world would four guys in Bible college read these words (studying the Greek) from Peter in the temple about the “seasons of revival” or “times of refreshing” that come from God as a direct result of repentance, and reach the conclusion that God is going to restore a specific church organization that has been lost to the world?

Nothing about this passage refers to a “restored church”. I was Mormon for over 3 decades and I can’t even conceive how any Mormon would read this and honestly claim it’s talking about a restored church.

Honestly, it’s not like I ever actually went through all the scriptures on this list as a teenager or missionary to verify them. I just took the story and the scripture references at their apparent word. I naively trusted exactly what I was told, because “a Mormon just believes”.

And when I read this list maybe 20 years ago, I literally just believed. It was confirmation bias of what I already believed. Of course the Bible said exactly what the LDS church told me it said. Why would they misrepresent the truth? It’s not like they were profiting from it…

Well, I certainly believed nobody was profiting from it. ’Cause that’s what they told me.

Yeah.

Feel pretty stupid about it now.

But there’s actually another really interesting side to this whole revival vs. restoration thing. Funnily enough, when I was going through my whole Mormon religious deconstruction, I spent a lot of time digging into LDS church history, trying to figure out what was what. And even though I uncovered a whole lot of problems, a whole of things that just weren’t what I’d been taught growing up, there was still this seemingly pure core to the original church between 1829 and 1834, that looked a whole lot like a Holy Spirit-filled Pentecostal revival.

I kid you not.

They called themselves the Church of Christ, no “latter day saints”, no “Mormons”. They believed they were all equal, all brothers and sisters, and that everything in the church was to be decided by common consent of the whole church body, with no special leaders dictating the policies for the masses. Their meetings had praise and worship and people speaking in tongues and being baptized by fire/the Holy Spirit. Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon preached exclusively from the Bible. And they genuinely tried to live in a communal way in which they could share all property and goods between them, so everyone’s needs were met and all excess could be used for charitable giving in the community.

In fact, there’s such a goodness and a purity about the whole thing that it was really difficult there fore me for a while to correctly parse the information and figure out where things went wrong.

I have three leading theories, but this is my current take (and I could totally find out tomorrow that I’m mistaken):

• Sidney Rigdon, the preacher, who had access to the publishing house where the Spaulding manuscript was stored, reworked the idea, with the help of Oliver Cowdrey (whom he met in 1827) and, later, Joseph Smith, into a work of historical Christian fiction (like Ben Hur), the Book of Mormon. Realism was a big trend in historical fiction of the time.
• Joseph and Oliver were both at times before then door-to-door salesmen. I think they came up with the whole “translation from an ancient golden plates” idea as a sales gimmick, and managed to get it printed with Joseph listed as the Author and Proprietor. Their sales story and the book itself were so compelling to people who were hungry for a revival, that it grew organically into a church that, in many ways, was a whole lot like an actual New Testament church, a body of born-again believers, which was totally fine by them, because people donate money to churches.
• And so, they invested more energy into producing revelations from God. However, they were still figuring it all out as they went along, so a bunch of doctrines changed and flip-flopped over the next fifteen years, things like priesthood and temples were invented and retroactively added in to earlier revelations. Joseph’s reputation as a “prophet” grows and grows, and he’s forced to keep adding in details to the story that were never there in the first place to justify his reputation. Ultimately, he and his brothers Hyrum and Samuel were assassinated and the church splinters into several different factions.
• Being a 33rd-degree Freemason with connections to the Rothschilds through Edward Harriman, Brigham Young marketed himself as a “latter-day Moses” and brought a group of Mormon pioneers to Utah, gaining a lot of power and influence, opening up the new state of Utah for the transcontinental railroad, opening up Zion’s bank, and becoming in the process the first millionaire of the Western United States (followed closely by another Mormon, Samuel Brannen, who was California’s first millionaire and one of Brigham Young’s agents) making Young the most influential and prosperous Mormon leader of all the break-off churches following Joseph’s death, even though he kept changing and inventing doctrines and documents for decades after Joseph’s death.
• That money and those connections (and that un-Biblical missionary policy) gave the Utah church the marketing and printing power to control the historical narrative surrounding the foundations of the LDS church, which they used heartily to their own benefit until the internet came along and soured things.

And that brings us to today when the LDS church (which claims 17 million members worldwide) provably only has between 2.4 and 3 million actual self-identified members, with increasing exponential losses, that they’re doing everything about to try and hide from the members themselves.

And so, it’s actually fascinating when you see the big picture of it, because there was definitely something true and genuine about the original 1829 church of Christ which was building momentum like any revival for 6–8 months before the Book of Mormon was even printed, just based on the Bible and the belief that God was moving in the United States and there was this great Spirit-driven work underway. The faith of the people was on fire, and that bore some really good fruit.

But because there were always problems with the root from the get-go, as it grew, the problems with the tree became more and more obvious, and many different people took it upon themselves to attempt to fix the tree whose fruit appeared to be good. But then you have too many gardeners all with their own vision for how this thing is supposed to grow, and some staking it up, and some are pruning it, and some are planting clippings elsewhere to regrow it how they want to, and now, we have this whole Mormon mess of churches, the most prominent of which is the Utah LDS one.

However, they’re all still trying to be someone else’s vision for the tree, not allowing it to be what the Creator actually intended when he created it, which I believe most accurately is the early Jerusalem church under Jesus’ brothers, James and Jude.

So, no, the “only true church” is NOT a “restored church”. Flat out wrong. Just, no.

16. The “true church” must practice baptism for the dead.

Corinthians 15: 16, 29–30.

Because if the dead are not awakened, neither has the Messiah been awakened.

In that case, what will those that are baptized accomplish more than the dead? If all are utterly dead, none awakened, what then, are those that are baptized more than them?

What then, are we in peril every hour?

So, there’s this whole funny debate thing over the meaning of this one random verse from Paul.

In standard English Bibles, it’s translated something to the effect of: Else, what will they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?

Now, this is quite controversial because this concept isn’t taught anywhere in the Bible but this one verse from Paul, so, already we don’t have the two witnesses needed to establish a true doctrine. But more than that, it’s so random and seemingly out-of-context with the rest of chapter and epistle that it’s been the cause of a lot of debate.

Most pastors and theologians will tell you some story suggested in an old commentary about some heathen people in Ancient Greece who baptized the dead, and that this is a vain, heathen practice.

There’s also some Mormon folk gossip of old Vatican documents detailing Rome baptizing dead bodies after they passed in the first few centuries AD, however, I haven’t found the evidence online to back up this claim.

Now, Joseph Smith, always brimming with unique prophetic revelation about obscure Bible passages, did claim that this baptism for the dead concept was an early New Testament church practice that he was restoring, however, what he taught about it was also very different than what the modern LDS church practices.

Joseph taught that baptism for the dead was basically only something to do for immediate family and relatives you personally knew, if they’d died before being able to be baptized in the LDS church, and it was only if you were certain they would have received the LDS gospel. There’s a few tales of people traveling to come join the early LDS at Nauvoo and dying en route without having been baptized, or a few people who claim to have seen their dead family members in dreams or visions asking for vicarious baptism. Joseph gave them permission to be baptized vicariously for those deceased relatives. They weren’t performed in temples. And Joseph announced a few months before his death that their baptisms on behalf of the dead were no longer acceptable to God because they’d delayed building the temple past God’s deadline. And that’s about it.

Now, however, the modern LDS church spends billions of dollars a year in family history research to perform baptisms and all these other religious rituals on behalf of the dead in almost 200 temples across the world, because they’ve convinced their followers that they, as members of the one and “only true church”, are needed to do all the missionary work and rituals for all the dead who have ever lived.

And the caveat to it, so they don’t die of discouragement at such a monumental task, is that angels in heaven keep the books of the names of all the people who have ever lived, and that whole coming thousand years of peace, the Millennial reign of Christ on earth, is basically only because that thousand years will be needed to do all the temple work of everyone who has ever lived.

Now, that we’ve covered the basic history of the issue, let’s fix this mess, because this is one of those cases where we’ve very obviously painted ourselves into a sola scriptura corner, because we’re unwilling to question false traditions brought about by translation errors.

This is actually really simple. The Greek word that has been erroneously translated “for” as in “baptism for the dead” in this verse is the word: hyper, meaning over, above, more than, etc.

It also allegedly happens to be the word for “in behalf of”, and is used elsewhere in the New Testament in this context, such as talking about Christ paying the price for us on our behalves.

However, it’s much less commonly used that way elsewhere in Greek literature. Outside the New Testament, the meaning is pretty standard, and we English speakers understand the difference between our Greek prefixes; hyper (more than) and hypo (less than).

And when you make that one little change from this bizarre practice of being baptized on behalf of dead people, to what do they that are baptized accomplish more than the dead? It fits so much better into the broader context of the chapter here, and nobody needs to scramble to invent excuses for this “inspired word of God”.

So, could four Bible-college students read this and erroneously think they need to find a church that practices baptism for the dead? Maybe.

But that’s clearly not what the verse is talking about in Greek.

17. By their fruits ye shall know them

Matthew 7:20

Therefore, you will recognize them from the fruits they produce.

This is a really odd one to throw in at the end there. I mean, I get why, from a Mormon perspective, it seems to support their arguments that they are the “one true church”, but if you look just a few verses earlier, you’ll see the whole context of this passage is about identifying false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing. Those are the them that you will recognize by their fruits!

And how? You actually look deeper into their fruits — what they produce and offer — and the tree that the fruit came from. Are the grapes they are offering you coming from thorny vines? Are the figs they are offering you from thistle bushes? Because a truly good tree will not produce the thorns and the thistles.

Growing up LDS, I was taught to shove down or brush aside anything that appeared to be negative or dangerous or hypocritical within the church. Oh, that’s not the church’s fault, that’s just lax or lazy members.

But that’s actively doing the opposite of what the Bible tells us to do! We’re supposed to beware of false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing. We’re meant to trust in God more than man. We’re supposed to be skeptical of religious leaders, hold their feet to the fire, and test the quality of their fruits, analyzing where they actually came from.

We aren’t just supposed to trust people who claim to be prophets!

The more I’ve reflected on this repeated message, the more I think we’ve unfairly castigated and stereotyped the apostle Thomas as a doubter, because he said he wouldn’t believe Jesus was risen until he could see and feel it for himself. But he’s literally doing what Jesus taught! If anyone says, lo, here is Christ, there is Christ, believe it not… …If anyone says they’ve seen me privately in the wilderness, don’t go, or in secret rooms, believe it not. For just as lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man (ie. seen by all).

The correct context of this passage in Matthew 7 about fruits is that suspect someone might be a false prophet, and so you look for confirming evidence of that premise that they’re a false prophet. The absence of confirming evidence doesn’t disprove the premise. They could still be a false prophet.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s just accept this inference that you can not only identify false prophets but also identify true prophets or a “true church” by digging into their alleged fruits and scrutinizing where they actually came from.

All we need then, according to Jesus’ words, to disprove the claim that the LDS church is “the one true church” led by “true prophets” is find some thorns or thistles or rotten fruit, because, according Jesus words, a “good tree” doesn’t produce bad fruit.

Well, here are some of the alleged fruits of current LDS church president and alleged “prophet”, Russell M Nelson. Not his words, but the apparent results of his choices, actions and policies. If you consider any of these to be bad fruits, that’s reason enough to justify disbelief in the claim that he is God’s prophet leading the “one true church”.

1. He has presided over the single largest loss of membership the church has ever experienced, half or more of which have become atheistic or agnostic, meaning that he has turned far more people away from God than he has helped come unto Jesus.
2. He either intentionally or ignorantly failed in his duty to protect his flock, actively deceiving them into getting an experimental medical procedure that chronically injured and killed millions of people, and will seemingly eventually kill or sterilize a significant portion of those of his “sheep” that followed his example/counsel over their own better judgment.
3. He enriched the LDS church corporation by somewhere between 50–100 billion dollars (partially as a result of the church’s investment in large pharmaceutical companies), despite claiming to add over a hundred new multi-million-dollar temple construction projects, including shutting down the historical Salt Lake City and Manti temples to destroy the old murals, craftsmanship and live performances, turning them into featureless, effective ritual machines like in Provo.
4. He brought the church into line with the UN globalist beast agenda, thus putting the LDS church institution clearly in the broad church-of-the-devil column of the there-are-save-two-churches-only binary claimed in the Book of Mormon itself, the church’s “most correct book”.
5. He publicly lied on multiple occasions, both telling stories in General Conference that provably never happened and formally repeating and promoting mass media lies upon the people, thus bolstering them up with whatever perceived credibility his name and alleged status bring to the table.
6. He actively worked to cover up and repress public knowledge of connections between his family and SRA pedophile rings, specifically by inviting all the women in the church to fast from social media for 10 days while the statute of limitations in Utah was changed and the case subsequently thrown out of court.
7. He has, allegedly, been personally accused by at least half a dozen people of far greater crimes than anything ever leveled at Joseph Smith, ie. Nelson has been accused by multiple victims of being personally involved in the SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) of women and children in rooms deep underground LDS and Roman Catholic church buildings and temples in Salt Lake City, and utilizing his medical background during torture and ritual sacrifice, allegedly flaying people alive with scalpels and experimenting with anesthetics during torture to keep people alive longer. (The severity and horrificness of these claims does mean that a lot of evidence is required to certify or prove these claims, certainly beyond the word of the multiple alleged living victims, however, the fact that we have multiple people claiming they were pricked by thorns or thistles from this tree, makes it all the more important that we investigate the tree ourselves instead of blindly trusting the “fruit” we’re being offered.)
8. He, along with several other LDS “apostles”, was a member of the Utah chapter of the Skull and Bones fraternity, and its sister fraternity, Owl and Key, whilst in college, or in other words, “secret combinations”.
9. He, under the guise of refocusing our attention on Jesus Christ, pioneered a new corporate symbol, logo or “image” of Jesus to represent the church, introducing a new level of idolatry into the LDS church, not in keeping with the Ten Commandments they claim to follow.
10. He, when meeting and shaking hands with the Pope, provably used elite Freemasonic secret handshakes on camera, recognizable to any Mormon temple-goer as secret tokens he promised he would never reveal outside the Mormon temple, implying his allegiance to a much larger secret club of elites over his allegiance to Mormon “temple covenants”.

Obviously, I’m not the deciding authority on this matter — everyone’s spiritual walk is their own — but, speaking just for myself, this all stinks like rotten fruit.

I will add to that observation, the recognition that I now have as an adult, that some of the fruit I was fed as a child were poisonous or prickled. I was emotionally, mentally and spiritually harmed by certain emotionally abusive teachings from the LDS church that I’ve been working on healing within myself for the better part of a decade.

As some LDS reading this will surely take umbrage with that claim, I’ll give you just two witness examples to back it up.

In the book The Miracle of Forgiveness, by former LDS church president, Spencer W Kimball — which was heavily promoted by the church institution upon the youth for decades — here are just two of the many abusive, anti-Biblical things it taught to minors, as the alleged “words of God through a living prophet”:

a) touching parts of your own body (made wonderfully, in God’s image) is self-abuse. Allegedly, you are literally sexually abusing yourself by touching your own body and feeling any arousal (though it’s a natural function of that body God made for you).

b) your virginity is more important than your life. The book literally told impressionable youth it was better for them to die than to lose their virginity out of wedlock. (Some have alleged that this teaching has led to multiple suicides and even more suicide attempts within the LDS church.)

If you need a third witness, coupled with these teachings, the LDS church has also promoted for generations the popular mistranslation of Matthew 5, teaching their young men that to look upon any woman and feel aroused as a result is equal to adultery which is next to murder.

These blatantly abusive teachings have damaged millions of young Mormons, and they’re frankly non-Biblical.

Firstly, Leviticus 15 says that if you have an emission of semen (specifically separate to sexual intercourse), wash yourself and you’ll be clean by sundown. Therefore, masturbation is provably not a sin according to the Bible.

Secondly, Exodus 22 says that if you deflower an unbetrothed virgin (have sex outside of wedlock) there’s no sin in it at all so long as, after the fact, you do eventually pay the bride price (engagement ring) and observe the usual wedding customs (presumably, before a baby is born). The New Testament sin of “fornication” is a mistranslation of the Greek word “porneia” meaning harlotry or prostitution. So, sex outside of wedlock is not a sin according to the Bible so long as you do eventually have that wedding. Commitment is expected, but it doesn’t need to be so black and white. You’re definitely not better off dying than losing your virginity outside of wedlock, and I can prove that from the Bible because the commandment against murder precedes the commandment against adulterating your countryman’s wife. Life is more vital than “chastity”.

And thirdly, in Matthew 5, the Greek word translated as “lust” is epythimeo and it means “covetousness” or “possessive greed”. The word is specifically about property ownership, not sexual lust. And the whole passage is inherently referencing the commandments of adultery and covetousness, and it only applies to other men’s wives, proven by the reference thereafter to your right hand (your ownership hand). According to the Torah (the Law of God given through Moses), you can’t adulterate a virgin or a harlot, only another man’s wife. Therefore, looking on a virgin or a harlot cannot be likened to adultery. It’s provably not a sin to look at a woman and feel aroused. However, looking on another man’s wife and being willing to take her for yourself is also being willing to adulterate her in your heart, because, hey, she’s not just property, she’s a living being too.

(It’s offensive to say it in this day and age, but it’s important to understand how ownership was understood in Biblical times. You owned something if you claimed it and could defend that claim. A man therefore had even more claim to his wife and children than he did any land or animals he claimed as property.)

So, in my opinion, the more I’ve looked at this “tree”, the more rotten fruits and thorns and thistles I’ve seen. This confirms to me what Jesus warned us to look out for, and it doesn’t do the LDS church any favors whatsoever in their claim to be Jesus’ “one true church”.

Why are these things important?

Hebrews 13:8

Iesous the Messiah, the same yesterday and today, and unto the ages.

So, in case you didn’t notice, there was a low-key 18th point to the list giving you a verse for why these 17 points matter in the first place.

I can still remember reading this list almost 20 years ago, and this was the only verse I actually looked up because the point wasn’t apparent from the list itself. Intentionally or unintentionally, they pull a sneaky sneaky marketing trick in which they leave a question hanging in your mind at the end, with an attached reference of where you can go to find the answers.

And so many people might read this list and be primed to disregard it, but then you read that question last and you think, okay, well, why do they claim these things matter? …and so you go check Hebrews 13:8 and read something to the effect of “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever”, and you’re meant to think, oh, well, that’s a very good point. I should want to be part of a church that’s the most like Jesus’ original church as I can find.

But as I hope we can all agree at this point, it sure ain’t a high demand religious corporation like the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”.

But, just in case there’s any confusion, let’s present it like a multiple choice question.

A New Testament church is:

a) a body or group of born-again, Holy Spirit-filled believers who all have individual relationship with — and calling from — the Creator. They meet together regularly in each other’s homes to break bread together, pray, worship, sing, and support each other along their spiritual walks with God. Beyond that, they keep the ten commandments or “Covenant” and seek both individually and collectively for opportunities to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless and provide for widows and orphans.

b) A multi-billion-dollar corporation with non-profit status and a Jesus logo run by very old multi-millionaire doctors, lawyers and administrators (who are exempt from all the standards and checklists they hold their membership to) who claim a divine status from God above the common folk and provide a complicated, ritualistic and never-ending checklist of tasks for penance and/or personal progression towards godhood-status.

c) the Roman Catholic church.

If you answered b or c, sorry, but you need to go re-read your Bible. The answer was a. And neither the LDS or RCC, these monolithic and super-wealthy globalist corporations based in the Rome and Salt Lake City, fit the bill.

And, to be fair, there are many Protestant churches that, in my opinion, don’t either. Culturally, a lot of churches throughout the 20th century became little non-profit corporate community hubs for the emotionally immature who wanted religious middle-managers to do all the spiritual work for them.

However, the internet age is turning things around quickly. I really believe we’re on the brink of what I call Reformation 2.0 Christianity, which is what I think the early Mormon church thought they were, and in a sense what they still claim to be.

Except it’s not a top-down institution.

It’s a ground-up movement. The people themselves, hungry for truth and genuine community connections, are building for revival in a big way.

We don’t trust the government has our best intentions at heart anymore. They just want our tax money.

We don’t trust the religious institutions are going to be honest with us about corruption or abuse. They just want our tithe money.

We don’t trust the big six mega-parent companies (which own almost all the other corporations in the world) to provide us with quality things that actually benefit our quality of life. They just want us to keep having to spend the rest of our money as we work away our lives like dependent, seemingly insignificant cogs in a much larger machine.

People are hungry for truth, meaning and connection, and that means big opportunities for actual churches and actual spiritual revival.

There’s been a broad sifting process going on for a while now. Some religious institutions are slowly dying, like the Mormon church (though they do their best to convince everyone otherwise). Others are madly chasing the trends of each younger generation trying to stay the cultural hub they’ve been for a hundred years. Many smaller, independent, non-denominational churches, home churches and online churches, however, are growing.

People want a New Testament church.

Before the internet, the LDS church did have a lot of success and growth, convincing many Christians that they with their “prophets” had the answers that their old pastors didn’t. I was born into that church. It seemed like this amazing, unstoppable movement.

However, the internet, the information age, has brought us so much potential. We have access to hundreds of different Bible translations. We can compare and cross-reference verses. We can look at the Hebrew and the Greek and the Aramaic and the Latin. Anyone with an above-average IQ, some multi-lingual abilities and time on their hands can do their own Bible translation.

We don’t have to be reliant upon people with Bible-college degrees to be religious authorities over us. And that’s what the whole New Testament was about!

Jesus was a revolutionary figure. He told us to stick it to the religious authorities of the day. They’re vipers. They’re hypocrites. They want to manage you like children. He said, I’ll be your atoning sacrifice. Now you no longer need them to come unto God. You can have God’s Spirit and Law alive in your heart. You can get your answers from God directly.

So, yeah, Hebrews says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. In that case, maybe we should do like he said and timelessly follow him, not the hypocrites and religious middle-managers and pharisees of our day.