Discernment and Doctrine
When the Laughing Emoji Became the Mocking Emoji
On the division coming to the Church, and the one test that shows which side of it you are standing on
The laughing emoji was invented for jokes. I presume that was the whole idea. Somebody says something funny, you post the little face, everybody understands each other and moves on. That is not how I see it used anymore. Most of the time now, when it shows up under something I have written, no joke was involved and none was intended. It has become the mocking emoji. It has become the scorn emoji.
Look at what it actually accomplishes. The person posting it does not have to make an argument. He does not have to cite a verse. He does not have to counter a single point, or read the thing he is responding to, or think about it for more than a second. He posts the face and he is finished. And what he has communicated is not disagreement. What he has communicated is position. He has placed himself above the conversation and placed the other person somewhere beneath it, far enough beneath that reaching down to teach or correct or persuade would be more trouble than it is worth.
I have received a great deal of this. I will come back to that briefly at the end, because it is not what this article is about. This article is about where that gesture leads, and about the people I am afraid are going to follow it there.
Lehi Already Showed Us This
Nephi describes the building and the people in it with more detail than we usually stop to notice:
"And I also cast my eyes round about, and beheld, on the other side of the river of water, a great and spacious building; and it stood as it were in the air, high above the earth. And it was filled with people, both old and young, both male and female; and their manner of dress was exceedingly fine; and they were in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers towards those who had come at and were partaking of the fruit." (1 Nephi 8:26-27)
They are well dressed. They are respectable. They are old and young, men and women, which is to say they are ordinary people and not monsters. They are up high, and they are pointing, and they are laughing. Nobody in that building is making an argument either.
And it works:
"And after they had tasted of the fruit they were ashamed, because of those that were scoffing at them; and they fell away into forbidden paths and were lost." (1 Nephi 8:28)
These were people who had already made it. They had pressed through the mist, they had held to the rod, they had reached the tree, and they had the fruit of the love of God in their hands. Nothing in the vision took it away from them. They let go of it because of shame, and shame was delivered by mockery, and that was all it took.
Nephi gives us the only defense that works, and he gives it in four words:
"And great was the multitude that did enter into that strange building. And after they did enter into that building they did point the finger of scorn at me and those that were partaking of the fruit also; but we heeded them not." (1 Nephi 8:33)
We heeded them not. They did not listen to them. They did not answer them. They did not let the tauntings and the accusations and the fingers of scorn get inside far enough to make them ashamed of something God had given them. I have thought about that phrase a great many times over the last few years, and I do not know of better counsel anywhere for what is coming.
President Oaks and a Word We Skip Over
In general conference, President Dallin H. Oaks taught on this subject in a way I have not been able to stop thinking about, and it is part of why I am writing this. He observed that many writers now describe our time as toxic, full of contempt and hostility toward opponents, and that this hostility has reached a great many people whose Christian beliefs ought to have pointed them the other direction.
Then he took up the Savior's teaching that we are to love our enemies, and he did something with it that I had never considered. He explained that the sources behind the King James word enemies reach well past armies and battlefields to include anyone who actively opposes another person. And so he said that we are commanded today to love our adversaries.
That is the word that changes things. Very few of us have enemies. All of us have adversaries. The person on the other side of the argument in the comments is an adversary. The member of your ward who believes something you find ridiculous is an adversary. The person who left the Church and now writes about it is an adversary. The commandment reaches every one of them, and it does not contain an exception for the ones who are wrong.
"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." (Matthew 5:44)
When the Savior was asked who counts as a neighbor, He answered with a story about a Samaritan, and He chose a Samaritan on purpose, because the Samaritans were exactly the group His listeners held in contempt. He built the whole lesson out of the person in the room nobody respected.
Where This Tactic Came From
I am positive Lucifer was doing this before any of us had bodies.
He came into that council with an alternative to the Father's plan, and his plan was rejected, and he had no way at all to compel anyone to follow him. Agency was the one thing he could not touch. So he did the only thing available to him. He persecuted the ones who would not go with him. He called them names. He made them feel small and foolish for standing where they stood. I have no doubt he had his own version of the mocking emoji, because the tactic has not changed in all the time since.
John gives him a title in the same chapter that describes the war:
"And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night." (Revelation 12:10)
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The accuser of our brethren. That is his name and that is his job. He accuses, day and night, without rest and without evidence and without any interest in whether the accusation is true. Anyone who takes up accusation as a method has picked up a tool with an owner, and the owner has a very long history with it.
The Savior said the same thing in plainer language when He appeared to the Nephites:
"For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another." (3 Nephi 11:29)
He stirreth up the hearts of men. Not the hearts of wicked men. The hearts of men.
Persecution Runs in Every Direction
We tend to assume persecution comes from outside, and most of the time it does. The very first case recorded in the Book of Mormon works that way. Lehi was shown a vision of what was coming to Jerusalem, he went out and told people about it, and they turned on him:
"And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him; yea, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out, and stoned, and slain; and they also sought his life, that they might take it away." (1 Nephi 1:20)
That is the pattern we expect. People who are not keeping the commandments generally do not care for people who are, and evil has never had any patience with good.
But the Book of Mormon does not stop there, and this is the part I want members of the Church to sit with. Alma had to make a law about this, and read carefully who the law was written for:
"Now there was a strict law among the people of the church, that there should not any man, belonging to the church, arise and persecute those that did not belong to the church, and that there should be no persecution among themselves." (Alma 1:21)
Both directions. Members were forbidden to persecute those outside the Church, and they were forbidden to persecute each other. You do not write a law like that unless people are already doing both. The Nephites got wealthy by keeping the commandments, and then some of them got proud of it, and pride found its way to the same tool it always finds.
There is no version of this where being right about the doctrine makes the mockery acceptable.
What I Believe Is Coming
Here is the part that keeps me up.
Revelation chapter twelve describes the birth of a kingdom. Because of the Joseph Smith Translation we know what the symbols mean, and without it people go badly astray in that chapter. The woman is the Church. She is not a constellation and she is not Mary. The man child she brings forth is the kingdom of God, and the dragon is standing there waiting to devour it the moment it is born. I have written about that chapter at length in The War in Heaven Has Not Happened Yet.
Satan has had this earth largely to himself for six thousand years. The political kingdom of God is an existential threat to everything he has built, and he is not going to wait politely for it to be established before he moves against it. He is working right now, before the child is born.
I believe Donald Trump has a role in that kingdom coming forth. I have laid out that case from Isaiah in Who Is the Davidic Servant?, and I have shown why the relentless marring of his image is itself part of the prophecy in The Marred Servant. You do not have to accept any of that for the rest of this article to matter to you.
Because here is what I expect to happen when he receives his calling from God and that calling becomes publicly tied to this Church. There are members who will not accept it under any circumstances. They have absorbed years of one continuous message about the man, and belief runs deeper than argument, and they will not be able to make themselves go along with it. Some of them will separate themselves. Some will be cast out. And a portion of them will not leave quietly, because they will turn on the members who did accept it.
Those will not be strangers. They will be people they served with. People they ministered to. People they sat next to in Sunday School for thirty years and taught in Primary and went to the temple with.
John gives that period a duration, which he almost never does:
"And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations." (Revelation 13:7)
Forty two months, he says two verses earlier. Three and a half years. And the counsel he gives the saints living through it is not to fight back:
"He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints." (Revelation 13:10)
Here is the patience and the faith of the saints. That is what will be required, and many will not survive it. I have written about the system that makes that possible in The Mark of the Beast.
And I will tell you the part that troubles me most, because it has happened over and over in history and there is nothing new about it. Persecution by association is unbearable, and people escape it by switching sides. Somebody says, "Your church is mixed up in this. Are you going to defend that?" And rather than carry the weight of that question, they put it down by joining the people asking it. That is how the persecuted become persecutors. It has never required wicked people. It has only ever required frightened ones.
Why God Would Choose Someone This Divisive
I wondered about this for years. Why would God use a man who divides everything he touches? Why not somebody moderate, somebody reasonable, somebody nobody has strong feelings about?
Then I looked at the Restoration and asked the same question. Why a young farm boy with a strange history. Why money digging and seer stones and gold plates and angels. Why not something clean that no reasonable person could scoff at.
Then I looked further back. John the Baptist lived in the desert, wore camel hair, ate locusts, and said sharp things to important people. God sent him on purpose and sent him exactly like that. And the Savior Himself was regarded as a radical by the most scripturally literate men of His generation. They had read everything. They taught it. They enforced it. And He told them what their problem was:
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel." (Matthew 23:23-24)
They were meticulous about the small things and they walked straight past judgment and mercy and faith, and it left them standing in front of the Son of God unable to recognize Him.
I have come to believe God chooses instruments like this deliberately. If He used someone the world already approved of, we could go along with it for the wrong reasons and never know the difference. When He uses someone the world has decided to hate, the only way to see anything at all is to ask Him directly and then hold on to the answer while everybody laughs. That is a hard test, and I think it is meant to be.
The Test That Shows Where You Stand
I want to give you something simpler than all of this, because a lot of people are going to want a way to check themselves in the months ahead.
Anyone who persecutes anyone is on the wrong side.
That is the test. It does not matter how correct the doctrine is, how obvious the error looks, how much scripture the person can quote, or how much damage they believe the other side is doing. Mockery is not a tool the Lord has ever handed for use on each other. Scorn has never once brought a person back. Nobody in the history of this world has been shamed into the kingdom of God, and nobody has ever read the Book of Mormon, accepted a missionary, returned to church, or changed a single belief because somebody laughed at them.
And I would say this to anyone who has been on the receiving end of it lately, and to myself as well. The test cuts both ways. Answering scorn with scorn puts you in the building alongside the person who started it. We heeded them not is still the instruction.
I take some hope from an account in Alma. When the unbelieving Lamanites came to destroy the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi, they were stirred up to it by the Amalekites and the Amulonites, who were former members of the Church of God. Those instigators never repented. But the ordinary Lamanites who had been stirred up, the ones who had been swept into somebody else's anger, were reached in the middle of the act itself. Swords already moving, brothers already dead on the ground, and the Spirit still got through to them.
"And it came to pass that the people of God were joined that day by more than the number who had been slain; and those who had been slain were righteous people, therefore we have no reason to doubt but what they were saved." (Alma 24:26)
More converts than casualties, in a single afternoon, produced entirely by people who would not fight back. I do not know of another account like it anywhere. And what it tells me is that the door stays open until the very last second, even for someone who is doing the thing right now.
Why I Bother
I will keep this short because it is not the point.
I had an experience during a serious medical crisis that changed the direction of my life, and it took me a long time afterward to understand what I had been shown about Revelation chapter twelve. When I finally saw it, I cried my eyes out, and not because it was wonderful. I saw the division that is coming. Not just to the world, but to the Church, to wards, to stakes, and to families.
I have been called deluded, deceived, ignorant, and worse, and I understand where it comes from. If I had not been shown what I was shown, I do not know where I would stand either. That is not modesty, it is the truth. Nobody argued me into this and I do not expect to argue anyone else into it.
When I first started talking about this openly, the response was close to half and half. It has moved since then, and my sense is that it is now something like two thirds against. I do not have real numbers and I am guessing, and I hope I am wrong about the direction. But that trend is the reason for this article, and for the book, and for all of it. My whole goal is to make that number smaller.
The thing I want is not agreement. It is that when the division comes, the people I care about are not standing in the building with their fingers out, and that whatever happens to the fruit in their hands, they did not let go of it because somebody laughed.
Anything worth thanking me for came from God, who gave me what I have and asked me to publish it to the world. I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Keep Reading
- The Problem of Hatred
- They Call Him a Cult Leader. Scripture Predicted That.
- What You Believe Colors Everything You See
Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman, Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy, available at FirstHorseman.World.
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