Discernment and Doctrine
Another One Bites the Dust
Every one of them follows the same script, and I have watched it happen too many times now to pretend it is a coincidence.
Every one of them follows the same script, and I have watched it happen too many times now to pretend it is a coincidence.
I went to a lot of BYU football games in the early eighties, though not all of them, and the one everybody still tells me about is one I missed.
The score was something like fifty-seven to six. Somewhere in the second half the tuba section came down out of the stands, marched around the field, and stopped right in front of the visiting fans, where they turned, pointed their tubas straight up at that whole section, and played “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Everybody knows that song. Four notes and you already know what is coming. The friend who told me about it said the student section came up out of their seats.
That was the fun part of those years, and it is the only fun thing in this article, because what I want to write about has nothing to do with football.
I have seen this too many times
For years now I have watched members of the Church build audiences online, on YouTube and podcasts and in groups and channels, and some of them get very large.
I am not going to name anybody. There are too many of them, and naming them only sends people their direction.
But I have watched enough of them, long enough, that I can tell you exactly what happens, because it is the same every time. Different faces, different topics, same script.
It usually starts out good. I watched one man years ago and I remember thinking, that was interesting, I have never heard that before. He was reading closely, he was careful, and he was teaching things that held up when I went and checked them.
Then he said it.
He was laying out a principle with a lot of force, and somewhere in the middle of it he said there had been deception that entered into the highest leadership of the Church.
I stopped the video right there. You have no right to say that.
From that day forward I watched him come apart, and it went fast. His hair got longer, his beard got longer, and the teaching got louder and bolder and further out with every video he put up.
He started telling everybody about his experiences. Four angels came down from heaven and blessed him. He saw Jesus. He touched the marks in His hands, in His feet, in His side, and he felt them, and he wanted you to be certain that he had received all of that, and the reason he wanted you certain was so that you would follow him.
At the beginning he defended the Book of Mormon and taught out of it constantly. Then he started leaving the living prophets and saying they had fallen. Then he threw out every prophet except Joseph Smith. Then he denounced Joseph Smith too. Then he dropped the Book of Mormon altogether and taught only the Torah. Then he started his own church and asked for donations, because this message has to get out.
Where he finally ended up was sitting on other ministries doing six and eight week anti-Mormon presentations, walking people point by point through everything supposedly wrong with the Church and with the Book of Mormon.
When a person falls, they fall quickly, and the Lord already told us how quickly.
“And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”
Luke 10:18
The comments are what scared me
There is another one going right now, running the same script, telling people the Church has fallen, baptizing them, organizing something new, asking for financial support, and describing the angels he has seen and the times he has stood in the presence of God.
I went and read the comments.
That is the part that got me. It is one thing to watch somebody destroy himself, and it is another thing entirely to scroll through hundreds of Latter-day Saints telling him how grateful they are, how long they have waited for someone with the courage to finally say it, and how they intend to keep supporting him because he is the chosen servant sent in the last days to straighten everything out.
The Savior warned us about this exact day.
“For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.”
Matthew 24:24
Anybody can start a channel now, and no matter what you teach on it, somebody will follow you.
It is not only men
I have written “he” through most of this because the loudest channels tend to belong to men, but I would be leaving out half of what I have watched if I stopped there. Women do this too, and when women do it, it usually looks different on the surface, which is exactly what makes it harder for people to see.
It rarely opens with somebody announcing that the Church has fallen. It opens much softer than that, in a class or a retreat or a paid private session, with energy healing, or Reiki, or some other method that promises access to power and to knowledge about you and your family that the gospel supposedly cannot reach.
The Church has addressed this directly. The General Handbook, in section 38.7.8, counsels members away from seeking miraculous or supernatural healing from any person or group claiming special methods of accessing healing power outside of prayer and properly performed priesthood blessings, and it points out that these promises are usually made in exchange for money. Elder M. Russell Ballard said it plainly in October 2017, warning that too many of our people are looking beyond the mark and seeking secret knowledge in expensive and questionable practices.
None of this requires anybody to denounce the prophet, and that is precisely why it spreads so easily among good, faithful sisters who would never click on one of the channels I described earlier. But the direction is the same direction. You are being taught that there is power available outside of prayer and priesthood blessings, and that the person teaching you has access to it while you do not, and there is almost always a price attached.
That is the same trade Korihor took, and it did not end well for him either.
The Book of Mormon already showed us this
We talk about three great antichrists in the Book of Mormon, though Korihor is the only one the text actually gives that label, and Sherem and Nehor and Korihor came at the Church from three different directions that turn out to be one pattern underneath.
Nehor is the one that matches what we are watching. He was a big man, physically strong, a powerful speaker, and he built a following and started a church and people gave him money, and when Gideon stood up to him he killed him, and that is what he was executed for.
Then read the very next verse.
“Nevertheless, this did not put an end to the spreading of priestcraft through the land; for there were many who loved the vain things of the world, and they went forth preaching false doctrines; and this they did for the sake of riches and honor.”
Alma 1:16
They killed Nehor and it did not kill what Nehor taught. The order of the Nehors keeps turning up for the rest of the book. He died in a single afternoon on the hill Manti and his doctrine outlived him by generations.
Korihor gives us the other half, and this is the half that matters most if you are impressed by big spiritual claims, because after he was struck dumb he finally wrote out what had actually happened to him.
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“But behold, the devil hath deceived me; for he appeared unto me in the form of an angel, and said unto me: Go and reclaim this people, for they have all gone astray after an unknown God.”
Alma 30:53
An angel came to him. He was sent to reclaim a people who had gone astray. He had real success doing it, and he says in that same verse that he had so much success he came to believe it himself.
And it was Satan the whole time.
None of this is hidden. It is written down, it is repeated, it is free, and it is sitting on your phone in any language you want. The people following these teachers are members of the Church who read the Book of Mormon every day, and they are falling for the exact thing the book was compiled to warn them about.
It makes no sense to me.
The one question I ask
I know how all of this might sound coming from me, because I have been accused of the very same thing.
I have a YouTube channel. I have a Facebook group. I have a book. There are people who say I am off base, that I have been deceived, that I am doing exactly what I am describing here, and I do not brush that off, because I have never asked anybody to take my word for anything.
But there is one thing I did that almost none of these people will do.
When I learned things I had never heard taught anywhere in my life, and when God asked me to publish a book about them, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with any of it, so I made an appointment with my stake president and sat down with him and told him the whole story from the beginning. I told him plainly that he was going to get phone calls from people demanding my excommunication, because I am not the prophet and I am not supposed to be able to know these things. And then I asked him the only question I actually had, which was what am I supposed to do now.
He told me he had never heard it before either. He counseled me to follow the Spirit and to never present it as doctrine of the Church, but as my own understanding, and that is exactly how I have taught it ever since. The whole story is written out in The Question I Couldn’t Walk Away From, and the counsel itself is in How to Avoid Deception.
So now, when somebody makes a large spiritual claim in public, I ask them one question. Did you take this to your stake president?
Almost every time the answer is no, and usually it is more than no. It is, I do not need to do that. I follow the scriptures. I follow the Spirit. I answer to God.
That answer is the whole diagnosis. Bishops and stake presidents hold keys, and they are given to us for exactly this, including questions of doctrine, so anyone who has placed himself above that has already told you where he is going.
Hiram Page had a stone
The Lord dealt with all of this in the first year of the Church.
Hiram Page was one of the Eight Witnesses. He handled the plates, he was a good man, and he stayed true to his testimony of the Book of Mormon until the day he died. He also found a stone, and through that stone he began receiving what he was convinced were revelations about Zion and about how the Church ought to be governed, and he filled pages with them, and members believed him. Oliver Cowdery believed him. Whitmers believed him.
The Lord’s answer was section 28.
“But, behold, verily, verily, I say unto thee, no one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., for he receiveth them even as Moses.”
Doctrine and Covenants 28:2
And then this, given to Oliver about how to handle it.
“And again, thou shalt take thy brother, Hiram Page, between him and thee alone, and tell him that those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me, and that Satan deceiveth him;”
Doctrine and Covenants 28:11
Satan deceiveth him. Not a bad man, not an enemy of the Church, but a witness of the Book of Mormon writing down things he was certain had come from God, and the Lord said flatly that Satan was behind all of it.
A few months later it happened again with a woman in Kirtland, a Mrs. Hubble, who presented herself as a prophetess and claimed she was receiving commandments and revelations for the whole Church, and enough members believed her that Joseph took the question to the Lord. The answer came in section 43, and the Lord gave both the law and His reason for giving it in the same breath.
“And this shall be a law unto you, that ye receive not the teachings of any that shall come before you as revelations or commandments; And this I give unto you that you may not be deceived, that ye may know they are not of me.”
Doctrine and Covenants 43:5-6
The line is not where people think it is
I need to be careful here, because it would be easy to read those two revelations and conclude that revelation belongs to the Brethren and the rest of us are only permitted to sit and listen, and that is not what the Lord said and it is not what the Church teaches.
Look at what He told Oliver Cowdery in that very same section, only a few verses before the correction about Hiram Page.
“And if thou art led at any time by the Comforter to speak or teach, or at all times by the way of commandment unto the church, thou mayest do it. But thou shalt not write by way of commandment, but by wisdom;”
Doctrine and Covenants 28:4-5
And then a few verses further along, this.
“and thou shalt have revelations, but write them not by way of commandment.”
Doctrine and Covenants 28:8
Thou shalt have revelations. The Lord was not shutting Oliver down, He was telling him plainly that revelation was coming to him, and the only thing He restricted was the one thing that would have put Oliver over the head of the Church.
The line has never been drawn between leaders and members. It is drawn between what God gives you for yourself and your family and your calling, and what is binding on the whole Church, and those two things were never the same thing.
This is old. When the Spirit rested on Eldad and Medad and they prophesied in the camp, Joshua wanted them stopped, and Moses would not do it.
“And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!”
Numbers 11:29
John was shown the same principle on Patmos and reduced it to one line.
“for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”
Revelation 19:10
If you have a testimony of Jesus Christ, you already have the spirit of prophecy. Elder Dallin H. Oaks laid all of this out in October 2010 when he described the personal line and the priesthood line, and made the point that we need both of them and that neither one works properly without the other.
Which brings me back to what my stake president told me, because he was not telling me to be quiet. He told me to follow the Spirit and to present what I had as my own understanding rather than as doctrine of the Church, and that is the identical line the Lord drew for Oliver Cowdery in 1830. Teach it. Do not write it by way of commandment.
Every person I have described in this article crossed that line, and almost none of them noticed they were crossing it, because they started with something true and personal and then decided the whole Church needed to receive it from them.
The correction is the whole test
Here is the difference between Hiram Page and almost everybody I have described in this article. Hiram Page took the correction. He surrendered the stone at the conference that September, and he stayed, and he kept his testimony for the rest of his life.
Watch what happens now instead.
When the Church finally acts, these people do not go quiet and they do not reconsider anything. They film it. They announce the excommunication themselves, with music and a thumbnail, and they present it to their audience as the proof that everything they have been saying is true, because why else would the Church come after them. The discipline becomes the marketing. Subscribers go up, donations go up, and the followers who were already committed dig in harder, because now their teacher has been persecuted for righteousness the way the prophets were.
That is not persecution. That is pride, and it is out in the open for anyone willing to look at it.
Pride is what took down Satan, and he was in the presence of God when it happened.
“Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.”
Moses 4:1
Read what he was actually asking for. Not the salvation of anyone. The honor. He wanted the credit, and he wanted the glory, and he was willing to take away the agency of every person who ever lived in order to get it, and he had every advantage a created being could possibly have and it still was not enough.
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Proverbs 16:18
Pride is the number one thing that brings down anybody who becomes popular online. It does not matter whether the subject is the gospel or politics or fitness or finance. The audience grows, the praise comes in, the money follows, and somewhere in there a person stops asking whether he might be wrong. Once that question is gone, there is nothing left to stop him.
And that includes me
I ended my book with something I meant every word of, and I will say it here too.
I am worried about this happening to me.
I have watched enough good people go down this road to know that not one of them saw it coming, and none of them woke up one morning and decided to be deceived. It came in slowly, through attention and praise and the feeling of being right, and by the time anybody could have told them, they were no longer able to hear it.
So I asked the readers of my book to watch me. If you ever see me getting bold instead of humble, or building a following instead of pointing people to Christ, or treating correction as proof that I am right, or setting myself up as somebody with knowledge that the prophets and apostles do not have, then find that paragraph, print it out, and hit me over the head with it until I come to my senses.
I would rather be corrected and stay than be flattered and fall.
Watch how they teach, not only what they teach
These teachers come with tremendous boldness, and boldness is attractive, because it sounds like conviction and it sounds like courage, and a great many people are drawn to it for the simple reason that it is nothing like what they hear on Sunday.
But that is not how the gospel arrives. Go watch general conference and pay attention to the delivery rather than the content, and then go watch the best teachers online, and there are plenty of them doing excellent work, and you will find that they teach quietly and let the Spirit carry the weight. The power of personality is not the power of the Spirit, and if a teacher’s confidence is the main thing you are responding to, then you are responding to the wrong thing entirely.
The Lord gave us the test Himself, back when the Saints in Ohio were having all kinds of manifestations they were certain came from God. He gave section 50 to sort it out, and He did not soften it.
“Behold, verily I say unto you, that there are many spirits which are false spirits, which have gone forth in the earth, deceiving the world. And also Satan hath sought to deceive you, that he might overthrow you.”
Doctrine and Covenants 50:2-3
“And if it be by some other way it is not of God.”
Doctrine and Covenants 50:18
“And that which doth not edify is not of God, and is darkness.”
Doctrine and Covenants 50:23
Run that on anybody you follow, and run it on me. Does it build you up? Does it send you back to your covenants, your family, the temple, and the Savior? Or does it leave you angry at the Church and dependent on the person who told you?
Elder Ballard put the whole matter into one sentence in October 2014: stay in the boat, use your life jackets, hold on with both hands.
Be careful of anyone who tells you the Church has fallen, and be careful of anyone building a following on their own visions, and be careful of anyone starting something new who needs you to pay for it. Be careful of the cruises and the conferences and the gatherings where you are promised in advance that you will feel the Spirit, as though it could be scheduled and sold. And be careful of the quieter version too, the private session that comes with a price and offers you power the Lord has already said comes another way.
A few days ago I wrote about the wall that never got built, and how nobody ever spends a little bit up front to prevent the disaster they can already see coming. An hour in your stake president’s office is that wall. It costs almost nothing, and almost nobody builds it.
The trumpets
I have very little hope that this reaches the people I am describing, because once pride gets in, correction only convinces them that they are being persecuted.
But it might reach somebody down in the comments, somebody three videos in and feeling the pull, thinking that this person is finally saying what nobody else has the nerve to say.
Stay with the scriptures, stay with the living prophets and apostles, talk to your bishop, and talk to your stake president. If you want the larger picture of how the last days actually fit together, I laid that out in The One Framework That Keeps You From Being Deceived, and I answered the most common objection raised against my own work in Would God Tell You Before Telling the Prophet?
The other road always ends the same way. It ends in destruction, and the person walking it is always the last one to figure that out.
God is not going to send a tuba section to announce it. He has His own trumpets, and when they sound, everybody will know which side they were on, and it will be far too late to change the answer.
Stay humble. Stay on the path. Stay in the boat.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
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