Jacob is one of the most distinct personalities in scripture.

Jacob 1:8

I would … all men would believe in Christ, and view his death, and suffer his cross and bear the shame of the world;

Jacob 2:15

O that he would show you that he can pierce you, and with one glance of his eye he can smite you to the dust!

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The sun rises, the rainbow appears, the good times come again better than before, you are back home, the winter is over, singing breaks the silence, your friend and master defeats the grave.

Anderson

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Christ raised up on  a tree.

The lamb slain at the paschal feast.

We will be fasting all tomorrow if anyone wants to join us.

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The last supper.  Gethsemane.  Betrayed by  his friends and apostles.

Last year’s post.  Really excellent links on why an angel appeared in the garden and why Christ had to atone twice.

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• Second Nephi 28:30, “line upon line, precept upon precept”—it was thinking about t his verse that first opened my mind to Lehi’s Dream being fundamentally about continuing revelation. It’s a Seminary scripture mastery this year. One of my children was working on it soon after I felt directed to connect Lehi’s Dream to the rest of the Book of Mormon. https://www.jrganymede.com/2024/02/27/why-are-the-waters-in-lehis-dream-represent-filthiness-but-also-the-love-of-god/

• Given Nephi’s discussion of the Law and the Jews in these chapters, its pretty clear that however else we understand Lehi’s Dream, we should understand it as a vision of what is going to happen to Lehi and his posterity. Laman and Lemuel were not just sinners. They were proto-Pharisees. More generally, there is a class of people who are brought to Christ by the Law (the Tree by the Rod) but who “cling” to the Law and are therefore unable to fully accept the gospel. More generally, could we say that a desire for rule and order and system inevitably points to Christ, but you have to be willing to accept that Christ transcends the rule and order and system that brought you to Him?

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As you have probably heard, the Church is buying out the historic restoration era properties owned by the Community of Christ (RLDS) along with artefacts from that era.

From a correspondent:

Yesterday afternoon, the shocking news broke that the Utah-based LDS church had acquired the Kirtland Temple in Ohio and essentially all of the common-history documents of Mormonism prior to 1844. These had been in the care of the “Reorganized LDS” (later “Community of Christ”) since the 1860s. In fact, they’d been the subject of acrimony for decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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An interesting juxtaposition

Isaiah describing a decadent and fallen state

And I will give children unto them to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

5 And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbor; the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honorable.

Isaiah describing the millennial state of perfect peace

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

The coincidence here could be what conservatives awhile back used to call immanentizing the eschaton, meaning trying to create utopia using secular means. Which usually leads to dystopia.

Or it could be the old, old problem of confusing the side effects for the causes. In an idyllic small town no one locks their doors, so if we just stop locking our doors we will have an idyllic small town.

Or it could be something else.

From today’s Gospel Doctrine lesson:

• 2 Nephi 6:3-4.  General information can be as useful as tailored teaching.
• 2 Nephi 7:1-2, 11; 2 Nephi 18.  Sin brings its own punishment; or sometimes the punishment is God just leaving you to try your luck with the wicked, who can be extremely punitive.  What are some sins that bring their own punishment in your experience and observation? What protection from the wicked does God give you now?
• 2 Nephi 8:1-2.  Pit is usually a bad thing in the scriptures.  Hell, the trap laid by the wicked into which they fall at the last day.  Interesting to see it as a positive origin.  It reminds me a bit of what we were talking about recently with the water in Lehi’s dream, how it appeared to be originally clean (and in fact representing Christ) and then because dirty as it went along.  Your origin an ancestry is good, but trying just to go back to it is a trap.
• Why Isaiah chapters:  God wants us to seek the spirit of prophecy and the Holy Ghost.  Therefore the scriptures aren’t a manual and need to have more challenging sections.  This is  more important than getting all the specifics right.  We live in the  most unpoetic and ametaphorical society of all time.  Poetry and imagery sticks in your mind better.  Assume Isaiah was talking about the biggest events of salvation and world history.  Jot down the 8 or 9 biggest events: that’s his subject.  What are your 8 or 9 milestones, now or to come?
• 2 Nephi 2 and 9 are less an explanation of the atonement and more a statement of the principles about the atonement that an explanation must account for.
• The problem of leadership.  2 Nephi 13:1-7, 12; 2 Nephi 14:1.
• 2 Nephi 9:28-29.  Wo to those who are learned but not wise, etc.  Interestingly, there follows a long list of ‘woes’ but without the qualification that there is with being learned that there is a redeemable version of the trait.  There is no “wo unto the liar, but to be a liar is good if . . .”   Later, despite the earlier contrast between the learned and the wise, the chapter talks about the learned and the rich and the wise going to destruction because of their pride.
• There is a lot of stuff in Ch. 13 and later in  Ch. 15 (they call evil good and good evil) that sounds pretty crazy, but its 2024 and here we are.

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

You are sitting at your kitchen table making notes from the Book of Mormon.  Your youngest daughter finishes brushing out her hair and asks Dad, can I  brush yours.  You agree  She brushes.

Did you know, Dad, dust is partly made of human skin?

You do know.  You  are the one who told her.

She brushes some more.  Some dead skin is on the brush.  She blows it off.

Heavenly Father made us out of dirt but our dead skin is dirt, right?  Isn’t that weird?

A French movie, the Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir, was apparently panned by moviegoers and critics alike when it first came out. Since then it has acquired a reputation of being one of the best movies ever made.

It is terrible. The moviegoers and critics absolutely had the right of it. (more…)

I highly recommend these books (in translation) and these movies (with subtitles on).   By Marcel Pagnol about his childhood in Provence.  Very warm and family-focused and even stylish.

The books in particular are good enough to become part of our read-aloud rotation.

Age wise, your family’s average age needs to be at least a few years older than for, say, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

God shall give unto you knowledge by his Holy Spirit, yea, by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost, that has not been revealed since the world was until now;

. . .  Nothing shall be withheld.  Whether there be one God or many gods, they shall be manifest.

All thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, shall be revealed and set forth upon all who have endured valiantly for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

-thus D&C 121

What is your heroic narrative?  For you surely have one, whether you know it or not.

The problem with delusions of grandeur is the delusions, not the grandeur.

Most heroic narratives fail by being insufficiently heroic.  Yours should be broader in scope, further in time, higher in height, than you dare to imagine.

Elder Bednar — repentance isn’t a way of getting back on the plan.  Repentance is the plan.

Repentance is the plan.

Repentance is the way.

Repentance is the Way?

Christ was made perfect through suffering.  He repented more than anyone.  In the Atonement, He took on our sins, all of them, and repented of all of them.  Call it the Great Repentance.  “Perfect” can mean both flawless or complete/completed.  Christ was made perfect in both senses.

The people of the 1940s were apparently stark mad.  We just watched a movie from then called the Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.  The first half is slow and trying to be comic about something that doesn’t really seem comic: the distaff-half of a pair of quasi-sweethearts from a small town gets in trouble (pregnant) and is also probably married to a soldier but she doesn’t know who and has no proof.  T here is an obvious romcom direction for the plot to go but it doesn’t, hoo boy, it doesn’t, and the second half of the movie just rips the top off and goes wild, one insanity piling on top of insanity until the  big insane denouement.  You end up laughing a ton mostly because it is pretty funny but also partly from hysteria.

With my fatherly hat on,   I Do Not Approve of the film for what its worth.  Golly, what a thing.

Via Bruce Charlton, a real find: FadedPage.com, which has a number of excellent digital downloads of 50-year old works.

Unfortunately, only available for our Canadian or unscrupulous reader contingents.   We love our Canadian and unscrupulous readers, don’t we, folks?