D& 96:6-9 and the contingent nature of being "ordained"

In D&C 96:6-9, we read the following:

And again, verily I say unto you, it is wisdom and expedient in me, that my servant John Johnson whose offering I have accepted, and whose prayers I have heard, unto whom I give a promise of eternal life inasmuch as he keepeth my commandments from henceforth--For he is a descendant of Joseph and a partaker of the blessings of the promise made unto his fathers--Verily I say unto you, it is expedient in me that he should become a member of the order, that he may assist in bringing forth my word unto the children of men. Therefore ye shall ordain him unto this blessing, and he shall seek diligently to take away incumbrances that are upon the house named among you, that he may dwell therein. Even so. Amen.

This passage recently stood out to me as it shows that being ordained to “x” does not mean that “x” has been foreordained/predestined, but instead, while one may be ordained to something (in this instance, a blessing), it is still contingent (note the use of conditional language such as “may” and how John Johnson is to obey to be a recipient of the blessings of this ordination).

A parallel  can be seen in the textual history of D&C 81:1. The current text contains a promise given to Frederick G. Williams calling him to be a high priest; however, in the earliest text, it was addressed to Jesse Gause. However, Gause left the LDS Church due to apostasy, and, as a result, the promise was transferred to Williams, as well as resulting in an editing of the pertinent text.

For more, see, for e.g.:

Grant Von Harrison on Being "foreordained" is not infallible and not the same as "predestination"

Shawn Lazar on "Election" in the Bible

Mosiah 13:27 shedding light on 2 Nephi 25:23 and "After all we can do"

In his debate with the wicked priests of King Noah, the prophet Abinadi is recorded as having said:

And now ye have said that salvation cometh by the law of Moses. I say unto you that it is expedient that ye should keep the law of Moses as yet; but I say unto you, that the time shall come when it shall no more be expedient to keep the law of Moses. (Mosiah 13:27)

Here, Abinadi informs them that, as he (and they) were living during the Old Testament side of salvation history, they had to keep the Law of Moses; notwithstanding, keeping the Law of Moses is not salvific. Such helps shed light on the phrase "after all we can do" in 2 Nephi 25:23.

My friend and fellow LDS apologist, James Stutz, has written an excellent article on this topic, and one I am in agreement with:

“After All We Can Do” as a reference to the Law of Moses

Jonathan Stapley, Defending the Temple and Priesthood Restriction as God's Will

Jonathan Stapley, the author of the excellent The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology (Oxford, 2018), has just posted a great article:

Defending the Temple and Priesthood Restriction as God's Will

It refutes the main arguments LDS often (errantly) make to defend the Priesthood/Temple restriction.

Request for Article on Pro-Life Issues

As readers of this blog know, 70% voted to repeal the 8th Amendment here n Ireland, which will now, to our nation's eternal shame, legalise abortion (what is also sad is that many LDS, including some leaders in this country, voted to support the pro-abortion side). As a result, I wish to include articles addressing pro-life issues on this blog. For those who are informed about the relevant issues (e.g., medical science; philosophy of ethics, etc) wish to contribute articles (one does not have to be LDS) you can contact me at:

IrishLDS87ATgmailDOTcom

Rabbinic Sources Discussing Genesis 1:1 and the Preposition בְּ in בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית and Related Concepts

In his King Follett Discourse, Joseph Smith briefly discussed the first word of the Hebrew Bible, ‎בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית (“in the beginning”), focusing, in part, on the preposition בְּ:

I shall comment on the very first Hebrew word in the Bible; I will make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of creation in the Bible—Berosheit. I want to analyze the word. Baith—in, by, through, and everything else. Rosh—the head, Sheit—grammatical termination. When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the baith there. An old Jew without any authority added the word; he thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head! It read first, “The head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods.”  (Source)

It might seem odd for anyone to focus on something to rather minute, but interestingly, many Rabbis and other Jewish commentators focused on deconstructing ‎בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית in such a manner. As Ephraim Urbach noted:

Anonymous homilies came to explain why the story of creation begins with the letter Bêt: ‘Why was (the world) created with a Bêt [that of ‎בראשׁית Bê-rē’shît]? Because it is an expression of blessing (ברכה bĕrākhā, ‘blessing’, begins with a Bêt]. And why not with an ‘Ālef? Because it belongs to an expression of cursing [ארור ‘ārûr, ‘cursed’, begins with an ‘Ālef]. Another explanation is . . . in order not to give the sectarians an excuse to say: How can the world stand, seeing it was created by a locution of cursing’. A different homily explains that the shape of the letter Bêt implies that ‘He that is above created us . . . and He . . . the Lord is His name.’ The sectarians are Gnostics, who claimed that the created world was evil, for, according to Simon Magus, it was not the work of the Good Most High God but of the Demiurge, who was originally sent by the Good God to create the world, but he rebelled against him and proclaimed himself the supreme god. Marcion argued that the transcendental god of lovingkindness stand facing the god of judgment and righteousness, who is the god of the world and is evil, and hence the world is also evil. Clearly the second homily is likewise directed against such views, and stresses that the God of Israel, whose name is the Lord [the Tetragrammaton], is ‘He that is above’, and there is none superior to Him, and He is also the Creator of the world. The letters of the Torah, with which the world was created, were used by the Amoraim as symbols and intimations, in which they found support or the basic concepts, which were the heritage of generations, concerning the Creator and the created world, but they were forced to defend these ideas anew against the sectarians and deviationists. The testimony of the verse ‘And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good’ (Genesis i 31) is reiterated in the Prophets and mentioned again in the Hagiographa.  Although Philo relies on Plato when he declares that the cause of Creation was the wish of God to vouchsafe of His goodness to the world and to make it more perfect, yet it is obvious that he could have based his words on the Holy Scriptures. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the Sages reiterated this thought in various forms. The verse ‘The Rock, His work is perfect’ (Deuteronomy xxxii 4) is expounded in the Sifre:

His Work is perfect in regard to all the inhabitants of the world, and there is not the slightest reason for questioning his works. There is not one of them who would speculate and say: If I had three eyes, or three hands, or three legs, or if I walked on my head, or if my face were turned backwards, how it would befit me!

The homily appears to be directed against people who did, in truth, question ‘the perfection of the work’ in the creation of the world. Indeed, in a parallel source, where the dictum is attributed to R. Simeon Y. Yoḥai, the polemical aim is underscored by ‘An analogy to a human king who built a palace, and people entered it and said: If the pillars were taller it would have been more beautiful; if the walls were higher, it would have been more beautiful; if the ceiling were loftier, it would have been more beautiful. (Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbis of Talmud [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, 1979], 201-2)

Ephraim Urbach on the Difference between the Miracles of Jesus and Miracles in Rabbinic Literature

Commenting on the difference between the miracles of Jesus and those in Rabbinic literature, Ephraim E. Urbach wrote:

An outstanding feature of the miracle stories in Rabbinic literature is the fact that the personality of the miracle-worker is not emphasized. The Sages were careful not to turn the person himself, who performed the miracle, into a wonder and marvel. The prayer ‘He who answered Abraham’ (M. Ta’anit ii, 4) is evidence of this. We do not pray to Abraham, our father, but to Him who answered Abraham. This point established a difference of principle between these stories and the tales about the miracles of Jesus, whose entire purpose is to accentuate his might and power. It will suffice to set aside by side the following two narratives, which are similar in detail, but differ in their basic aim:

John iv 46-54 And there was an official, whose son was ill at Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come . . . he went and begged him to come down and heal his son . . . Jesus therefore said to him: ‘Unless thou seest signs and wonders thou wilt not believe.’ The man said to him . . . ‘Sir, come down before my child dies.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go, thy son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoken to him and went his way. And as he was going down, his servants met him, and told him that his son was living. So he asked them the hour when he began to mend, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.’ The father knew that was the hour when Jesus said to him ‘Thy son will live’; and he himself believed, and all his household.

T.B. Berakhot 34b Our Rabbis taught: Once the son of R. Gamaliel fell ill. He sent two scholars to R. ḥanina b. Dosa to ask him to pray for him. Upon seeing them, he [R. ḥanina b. Dosa] went up to an upper chamber and prayed for him. On coming down, he said to them, ‘Go for the fever hast left him’. Said they to him: ‘Are you a prophet?’ He answered: ‘I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet; but I have this tradition: if my prayer is fluent in my mouth, I know that he [the sick person] is accepted, and if not, I know that he is rejected. They sat down and wrote down the exact moment; and when they came to R. Gamaliel, he said to them: ‘I swear by the Temple service! you have stated the time neither too soon nor too late, but so it actually happened. At that moment the fever left him and he asked us for a drink of water.’

The Christian story seeks to confirm ‘that this is indeed the Christ, the savior of the world’ (Ibid., v. 45), while the Jewish narrative puts into the mouth of R. ḥanina b. dosa . . . the words ‘I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet’. (Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbis of the Talmud [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, 1979], 116-18)

Thoughts on the Recent Referendum

I would like to thank everyone who prayed for the recent Referendum. Sadly, the 8th Amendment will be repealed. About 70% of the electorate has voted “yes.” A few thoughts:

Abortion is still a moral evil, even if a minority or a majority supports it as it is an intrinsic evil.

One reason the Pro-Life movement in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, etc has failed so much is that many tend to be too nice. People who support abortion are not “nice people who happen to be wrong about something important”—they are morally reprehensible individuals. Neo-Nazis who hate Jews and wish Hitler killed all of them are not “nice people” (who knows, they might be good employees and good parents, etc) in spite of being dead-wrong about this—they are reprehensible, and so are those who support legislation allowing for abortion.

Many Latter-day Saints voted “yes” and many Church leaders were apathetic (or even supportive) of Repealing the 8th Amendment. I know I will be active in ensuring those who support abortion will not hold any calling or ecclesiastical office by my not sustaining them if/when the occasion arises. I call upon other LDS who take Church teaching seriously to do the same, here in Ireland and globally.

Please do continue to pray, as I will, for Ireland, and that God will grant the Irish people and the LDS Church here repentance--many are now calling good "evil" and evil "good" (cf. Isa 5:20).

As an aside, once the 8th Amendment is replaced with new government legislation (near the end of this year), I will be protesting outside local abortion mills. I also wish to work, full-time, in the pro-life sphere, so if any pro-life group wishes to hire me, you can email me at irishlds87ATgmailDOTcom