Sunday, December 17, 2023

Roy E. Weldon (RLDS) on the Fulfillment of 2 Nephi 28:9-10 and Mormon 8:41

  

The Blood of the Saints

 

The Nephite record predicts that many of the Gentiles would carry their animosity toward the Book of Mormon and the Restoration beyond epithets and ridicule.

 

Yea, and there shall be many which shall teach after this manner, false, vain, and foolish doctrines, and they shall be puffed up in their hearts, and shall seek deep to hide their counsels from the Lord; and their works shall be in the dark; and the blood of the Saints shall cry from the ground against them.—II Nephi 12.11 [LDS: 2 Nephi 28:9-10].

 

Speaking of this same day when the record of their people should come forth to the Gentiles, another Nephite prophet says: “And it shall come in a day when the blood of the saints shall cry unto the Lord, because of secret combinations and the works of darkness” (Mormon 4:35 [LDS: Mormon 8:41].

 

Here we have a strange prophecy declaring that the book shall come forth in a day when the “blood of the saints” shall cry unto the Lord because of secret combinations and works of darkness.

 

In 1830 when the Book of Mormon was published, America was regarded as a haven of religious freedom. Our constitution guaranteed to every man the privilege of worshiping God according to the dictates of his own conscience. The land had been settled by a people who came mostly in search of religious freedom. Who would ever have thought that people’s blood could be shed here in the United States because of religious principles and beliefs? Yet that is exactly the thing that happened in Missouri and finally in Illinois, where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were mobbed and murdered. If Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon and concocted it himself, what strange idea led him to put a prophecy like that in a book? Yes, and stranger yet, what unholy urges prompted the people in Missouri and Illinois to go ahead and fulfill this prophecy by mobbing, murdering, and plundering the Saints? (Roy E. Weldon and F. Edward Butterworth, Book of Mormon Deeps, 3 vols. [1979], 3:75; italics in original; comments in square brackets added for clarification)

 

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