Bob Enyart shares Chris DeVille's glowing review of The Chosen, the multi-season television drama of the life of Christ that's approaching 200 million views! That review, shockingly, was published in the influential secular magazine The Atlantic. Also, Bob gives a glimpse of a project BEL is running in order to promote The Chosen. He's NOT asking for funds to support the project, but he is asking that if you've been a major donor to the production, giving $5,000 or more, that you contact him at Bob@kgov.com. Tune in to find out more!
* Dallas Jenkins Gives Mormons False Hope: The producer of The Chosen practically blasphemes when he claims in interviews that Mormons "believe in the same Jesus" as evangelical Christians do. By that falsehood he isn't being loving, but hateful, toward LDS members, by giving them a false sense of security. Consider what Mormons believe about God, as we report at kgov.com/mormons:
* God the Father was Once a Man said Brigham Young: Not speaking of the incarnation of the Son but speaking of the Father, LDS president, prophet, and successor to Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, said, "The idea that the Lord our God is not a personage of tabernacle [body] is entirely a mistaken notion. He was once a man. Brother Kimball quoted a saying of Joseph [Smith] the Prophet, that he would not worship a God who had not a Father... He [God] once possessed a body, as we now do..." -President & Prophet Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 9 see exmormon.org
* More Brigham Young: "...the Father of Heights... Yes, he was once a man like you and I are and was once on an earth like this, passed through the ordeal you and I pass through. He had his father and his mother and he has been exalted through his faithfulness, and he is become Lord of all. He is the God pertaining to this earth. He is our Father." -President & Prophet Brigham Young, 14 July 1861 see exmormon.org
* Mormon Prophet and President Lorenzo Snow:
Again, not speaking of the incarnation but of the Father, Snow said, "I had a direct revelation of this. ... If there ever was a thing revealed to man perfectly, clearly, so that there could be no doubt or dubiety, this was revealed to me, and it came in these words: "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be." - President & Prophet Lorenzo R. Snow, Unchangeable Love of God see exmormon.org
* Mormon Church President Equivocates: LDS president Gordon Hinkley in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle lied and then equivocated...
Q: There are some significant differences in your beliefs. For instance, don't Mormons believe that God [the Father] was once a man?
A: [Lying] I wouldn't say that. There was a little couplet coined, "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become." Now that's more of a couplet than anything else. [And equivocating] That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don't know very much about.
Q: So you're saying the church is still struggling to understand this?
A: Well, as God is, man may become. We believe in eternal progression. Very strongly.
* Note on their Wives: Some early Mormons denied that their earliest leaders were polygamists and it was claimed that Brigham (liked-'em) Young introduced the practice. Young had 55 wives. He married ten teenagers while in his 40s including 15-year-old Clarissa Decker when he was 42 and 16-year-old Lucy Bigelow when he was 45. Also, from age 41 to age 66, Young married 23 women in their 20s. Finally in 2014 the Mormon "church" acknowledged that their founder Joseph Smith had up to 40 wives (some historians put it at 49), taking single and even married women. The church claims that some of these marriages were without physical relations, which they would seeing that Smith's youngest bride, Helen Kimball, was only 14, the marriage listed by Smith's own clerk as one of the women the founder married in early May 1843. Helen would later write:
[My father] asked me if I would be sealed to Joseph … [Smith] said to me, 'If you will take this step, it will ensure your eternal salvation & exaltation and that of your father's household & all of your kindred.['] This promise was so great that I willingly gave myself to purchase so glorious a reward.
Lorenzo Snow, mentioned above, the fifth president, 1989 - 1901, only had nine wives, though a number of them were teenagers half (and much less than half) his age.
Recall that the Koran includes Mohammad's warning to his first wife that she faced eternal punishment for objecting to him lying with the young Coptic servant girl whom, allegedly, "Allah" had "made lawful" to him, so too, Joseph Smith dictated a similar warning to his first wife Emma in the founder's "inspired" Doctrine and Covenants. And we see above that though 14-year-old Kimball wasn't threatened she was similarly manipulated nonetheless.
* Mitt Romney's Second Cousin Once Removed: "...like begets like [i.e., reproduction after its kind; an organism begets similar organisms] and that for the offspring to grow to the stature of his parent is a process infinitely repeated in nature. We can therefore understand that for a son of God to grow to the likeness of his Father in heaven is in harmony with natural law... This is the way it will be with spirit sons of God. They will grow up to be like their Father in heaven. Joseph [Smith] taught this obvious truth. As a matter of fact, he taught that through this process God himself attained perfection. From President Snow's understanding of the teachings of the Prophet on this doctrinal point, he coined the familiar couplet: "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become." This teaching is peculiar to the [LDS] restored gospel of Jesus Christ." -Elder Marion G. Romney, General Conference, October 1964 see exmormon.org
Today's Resource: Chosen - It's Not What People Think
With this resource, we're going beyond our standard 30-day money back guarantee! This three-part series carefully notes the lessons from the chosen priests, the chosen kings, and the chosen people. For our repeat customers and for any devout Christian, we are offering a double-your-money back guarantee on this particular Bible study! (That is, atheists and others who just want to make a quick buck need not apply. But for our Christian friends... ) Regardless of how much you've studied the Bible, and regardless of your doctrinal view on predestination and free will, we are confident that you are currently unaware of the astounding Bible verses in this study. So, we will give you double your money back if within 30 days of receiving these presentations, you watch them and then write to us saying that you were not satisfied and that you were not significantly informed by these overlooked scriptures. Then we will give you double your money back. So, order now! And prepare to be amazed!
* No Cities, No Money: Archaeologists and historians have confirmed the existence of scores of biblical cities. However, the No true Scotsman informal fallacy notwithstanding, not a single one of the 38 cities mentioned by Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon have been recognized by any notable secular historian or archaeologist. And while every coin in the Bible has been found and documented, none of the monetary units described in the Book of Mormon have ever been found.
* Mormonism Falsely Claims that Indians are Jews: One of the central historical claims of the Book of Mormon, as stated in its introduction as late as 1981, is that Jews were "the principal ancestors of the American Indians" and that would include the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Navajos, etc., are Jews. This false teaching states that some Jews left Jerusalem by ship in about 600 B.C. and built a great civilization in the Americas. Also wrongly about the Americas, "The whole face of the land had become covered with buildings" (Mormon 1:7) including with “fine workmanship… in machinery, and also in iron and copper, and brass and steel, making all manner of tools” (Jarom 1:8; 2 Nephi 5:15) with “silks… oxen… cows… sheep… horses… donkeys… elephants…” (Ether 9:17-19) and "shipping and their building of ships, and of synagogues" and “swords… shields… head-plates… armor…” (Alma 43:18-19; Ether 15:15). None of this is true.
* The Lembas: An African tribe, the Lembas, have long been believed to be descendants of the Jews, for they circumcise, keep the Sabbath and the dietary law, and in their DNA they possess the Jewish genetic marker, being perhaps the descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. DNA research shows that American Indians are not related to the Jews, nor closely related to any Semitic peoples or the descendants of Shem, but rather, that they are primarily of Hamitic stock, from Asian people, having migrated to the Americas not by sailing the Atlantic but by crossing the Bering Straight.
* Genetics Confirms Actual Biblical Relationships: In contrast to genetic predictions based on the Bible, those based on the Book of Mormon fail. Regarding the origin 4,000 years ago of people groups descended from Abraham, Dr. Jonathan Sarfati quotes the director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, Dr. Harry Ostrer, who in 2000 said:
Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham … And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years.
This familiar pattern, of the latest science corroborating biblical history, continues in Dr. Sarfati's article, Genesis correctly predicts Y-Chromosome pattern: Jews and Arabs shown to be descendants of one man.
* Likewise, Jewish Priests Share Genetic Marker: The journal Nature in its scientific correspondence published, Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests, by scientists from the University of Arizona, Haifa (Israel's) Technical Institute, and University College of London, who wrote:
These Y-chromosome haplotype differences confirm a distinct paternal genealogy for Jewish priests.
As expected, genetic science does not reinforce but rather contradicts Mormon claims. The obvious falsehood extends beyond genetics to culture, religion, and history. Contrariwise, because the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are true, mountains of evidence corroborate their historic claims. Regarding Jewish priests, Dr. Sarfati adds to the above that, "These Jews have the name Cohen, the Hebrew for priest, or variants like Cohn, Kohn, Cowen, Kogan, Kagan, etc." and that, "Even today, it is possible to identify the Levites, because they have names such as Levy, Levine, Levinson, Levental..."