The Prophet Will Not Lead the Church Astray

Please explain what your nightmare tutor was implying.

@Zen
It means the church could still go astray with the prophet’s consent and complicity, so long as the prophet isn’t the one leading the charge, sort of like how Aaron didn’t really “lead” the Israelites to worship the golden calf but allowed himself to be carried along by the will of the people.

Zen,
I don’t think you need to take it all that seriously, it was just a nightmare after all, but the sense in the nightmare was I was thinking we had plot armor, like Macbeth thinking he was invincible because no man born of woman could kill him , which in my case meant I was thinking the individual people in the church might go astray and even large sections might have apostasized but the church itself would carry on.

And the voice was pointing out the chink in the plot armor. A promise that the prophet would not lead the church as a whole astray is not the same as a promise that the church as a whole will not go astray.

In real life I feel pretty sure that there are other statements from the prophets promising that the church as a whole will not go astray and presumably at least some of these statements are based on some independent inspiration and are not just a casual reading of President Woodruff statement.

I am still unsettled by the whole thing but that is because I was the one who experienced the nightmare

Let’s say you’re Catholic and you took comfort in thinking that the pope was the rock on which the church was founded, that the pope would not lead the church, in your case the Catholic church, astray.

And then Pope Benedict resigned and a successor was chosen under dubious circumstances where he may not even canonically be the Pope and he’s busy doing all sorts of sketchy things, you might still believe that valid Pope Benedict would not lead your church astray but also take much less comfort from that belief then you used to.

And to be perfectly clear, that is not the situation with the LDS church and I am grateful that it is not. It just occurred to me near the end of this comment that people on the internet read all sorts of things into what you say and someone might think I was claiming that President Nelson was an imposter or something. I am now second guessing myself for having posted this nightmare in the first place. I guess if there is a point to be taken from this nightmare it would be something that even president Nelson or maybe especially president Nelson would agree with, which is that though you have a prophet who is there to seek inspiration for the church you can’t outsource your temporal or spiritual salvation to him or to the saints generally. You can’t say, well, as long as there’s a prophet I can go back to sleep, he’ll wake me up if there’s anything I need to know or do. As president Nelson and the other prophets themselves have told us over and over, there is no substitute for talking to God. You must talk to God.