Friday, August 28, 2020

Brigham Young on Adam being Created in the Image of God two days before his first "Adam-God" Sermon

 

 

This reminds me of a little circumstance that transpired here a year ago last summer. You, no doubt, well recollect Elder Day, (a Baptist minister on his way to California,) who used to preach to us so nicely. I preached one day when he was present. In the course of my remarks, I brought up the subject of the Deity—at the point touching the character of our Father in heaven, upon which he desired the most to be instructed. I dropped the subject and turned to something else. He went to dinner with me, and while we sat at the dinner table, he said, "Brother Young, I was waiting with all my anxious heart, with mouth, eyes, and ears open to receive something great and glorious." "What about, brother Day?" "Why, as you were describing the Deity, and just came to the point I was the most anxious to have expounded, behold you waived it and turned to something else." I smiled and said, "After I had taught them how, I wanted the people to add the rest of the sermon themselves." He said, "I declare, brother Young, I would have given anything I possessed in the world, if you had continued your remarks until I had obtained the knowledge I desired." I inquired the nature of it. "To know the character of God." I smiled and said, "Are you a preacher of the Gospel?" "Yes." "How long have you been a preacher?" "Twenty-seven years I have been a preacher of the Gospel of Christ." "And you have been a minister so long, and have never learned anything about the character of the Being about whom you have been preaching! I am astonished! Now you want to find out the character of God. I can make you answer the question yourself in a few minutes." "Well, I do not know, brother Young: it is a very mysterious subject to mortal man." "Now, let me ask you a single question. Will you tell me what God our. Father in heaven appears like?" He sat a considerable time, while the colour on his cheeks ebbed and flowed alternately, till at last he replied, "Brother Young, I will not presume to describe the character of the Deity." I smiled, and he thought I was treating the subject lightly. "I am not making light of the subject, but I am smiling at your folly, that you—a teacher in Israel—a man who should stand between the living and the dead—yet know nothing about your Father and God. Were I in your place, I would never preach another sermon while I lived, until I learned more about God. Do you believe the Bible?" "I do." "What resemblance did our father Adam bear to his God, when he placed him in the Garden of Eden?" Before he had time to reply, I asked him what resemblance Jesus bore to man in his incarnation? and "Do you believe Moses, who said the Lord made Adam in his own image and after his own likeness? This may appear to you a curiosity; but do you not see, bona fide, that the Lord made Adam like himself; and the Saviour we read of was made to look so like him, that he was the express image of his person ?" He laughed at his folly himself. "Why," said he, "Brother Young, I never once thought of it before in all my life, and I have been a preacher twenty-seven years." He never had known anything about the character of the God he worshipped; but, like the Athenians, had raised an altar with the inscription, "To the unknown God." (JOD 6:317-18 | April 7, 1852 [note: this sermon was just 2 days before the first "Adam-God" sermon--cf. JOD 1:50-51])