GIFTS: The Unknown Christ

We often hear in classes, comments, talks, discussions, and testimonies "doctrines that have no roots in scripture [or] those that have been grafted into the tree of life. It is important that we separate the wheat from the chaff. One cannot make good bread with chaff, and certainly not the bread of life."

Our beloved teacher and brother Joseph Fielding McConkie wrote this in 1987. In the generations before and since, his has ever been the voice of defense of good doctrine. He is a great advocate for the truths we possess because of Joseph Smith and the Restoration. He is a prime example of a true defender of the faith. We love him and thank him for it.

Do you readily see the Christ in these words from Joseph McConkie? For me, when I see these words --- doctrines, roots, scripture, tree of life, bread of life --- I immediately think of the Christ and the doctrine of Christ.

Truly, unless one sees the true Christ everywhere in the Old and New Testaments, and in all the other scriptures, then there is no understanding of the scriptures at all. And lacking that understanding we really do not know the Christ at all, for the scriptures and prophets were given to testify of Him.

Jesus the Christ is "the key of knowledge, the fulness of the scriptures" --- the reason and the purpose that we have prophets and scripture. For that matter, He is the reason we have eyes and ears and intellect.

And yet we are largely blind to Him. And He is unknown to us. Why so? Because the scriptures are largely unknown to us. And we are left, for our knowledge and understanding of Him, with the common ideas floating around in the world about Him. We are left with hearsay testimony, with half-baked ideas, secondary notions, guesswork and folly.

This truth was known to the prophets. Isaiah especially warned of it. He said that the true Messiah would have the most distorted image of any and all men. That we, the children of men, would consider Him beneath us, and would esteem Him not.

When we are steeped in self esteem it is hard to esteem Him who truly deserves our esteem. Such are the dangers of the philosophies and the precepts of men.

Nephi too, a friend and an echo of Isaiah, foretold that we --- natural mankind --- would trample Him under our feet, set Him at naught by neglecting and ignoring His voice and His counsels.

The simple fact that we struggle to be drawn to His voice in the holy writ He has revealed, that we think we are doing Him and angels a favor by reading His words at all, is evidence of this sad fact.

We neglect the scriptures because they are hard to understand. It takes work, hard work, to study and understand them. So we are left with a faint, misty, distorted image of their Author.

The scriptures can only be understood and fully appreciated when we have the same Spirit that inspired their prophet-authors in the first place: the Holy Ghost. That Spirit does not serve everyone, only those who hunger and thirst after righteousness and revelation. Only those who "have esteemed the words of His mouth more than their necessary food."

It is not the work of scholarship, so much as a love affair with the work of the Lord, as President Gordon B. Hinckley boldly affirmed.

In 1611, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible, 400 years ago this year, said of the scriptures: "If we be ignorant, they will instruct us; if out of the way, they will bring us home; if out of order, they will reform us; if in heaviness, comfort us; if dull, quicken us; if cold, inflame us. . . .

"The scriptures then being acknowledged to be so full and so perfect, how can we excuse ourselves of negligence, if we do not study them?"

These translators added, "Tolle, lege; Tolle, lege!" Latin for "Take up and read; Take up and read" the Scriptures.

A surface skimming or scanning of the scriptures won't do. We will come short unless our best efforts cause us to go deeper, below the surface. Precious gems are not found on the surface. Only gravel is found there. We must go deeper. We must, in humility and tears if need be, pay the price.

Pay the price. Out of honor and justice to Him of whom they speak.

Only then can we expect to come to know Him so that we can emulate Him, imitate Him. How serious a matter is this?

Twice in the Gospel, or Testimony, of Matthew we find the Lord chiding His disciples---the Saints---because they did not know Him or trouble themselves to find Him. More accurately, He speaks of the Last Days, when He comes in glory, when He will chide or rebuke those who considered themselves His people. "Lord, Lord, open unto us," plead the foolish virgins. But His reply comes, "Verily I say unto you, Ye know me not." And the door remains shut, even locked, as the footnote shows.

The other instance is near the end of the Sermon on the Mount: "And then will I say, Ye never knew me; depart from me ye that work iniquity."

Each time, to His disciples, or Saints, who wanted in to the feast, who had done many wonderful works of service in His name, but who, after all, knew Him not! . . . Truly, works without faith are dead, quite as dead as faith without works. And faith comes by hearing the word of God---by seeking to know the word and thus coming to know the Word.

Are not these things plain? Don't you love Nephi who delighted in plainness, who cried out for His help to be strict in the plain road! ---who began to close his record thus:

"And now I, Nephi, cannot say more; the Spirit stoppeth mine utterance, and I am left to mourn because of the unbelief, and the wickedness, and the ignorance, and the stiffneckedness of men; for they will not search knowledge, nor understand great knowledge, when it is given unto them in plainness, even as plain as word can be."

Nephi, who had just written, "Wherefore, now after I have spoken these words, if ye cannot understand them it will be because ye ask not, neither do ye knock;" nor work hard at it.

Do you know of things more vital than these? --- for our children, our families, our posterity, ourselves. I have been unable to find more vital matters, and I am looking hard all the time.

We began here with doctrine, roots, bread---even the sustaining Bread of Life. Also the Tree of Life, from which comes the fruit that is most delicious and pure and sweet of all fruits, which was desirable to make one happy.

Know ye not that this Tree of Life is the Savior? It is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. It is not merely some fuzzy abstract notion like Love, as the world would have us believe. Search the scriptures---go deep---you will find this to be so.

Let's go deeper, so we can find Him whose visage or face was so marred, obscured, distorted by the foolish ideas of the world that He is unrecognizable, unless we seek deep to find and know Him.

More on this later.

God bless.

Steve

P.S. Sources and references have been purposely left out of the article. If you wish to know them, or to go deeper (!) in any way on this noble theme, please let me know. As always, feel free to share this around.