I was able to find some quiet time in my office to study my lesson for Gospel Doctrine tomorrow. The topic is the First Vision. In the Church, this relates to Joseph Smith's first vision of God the father and his son Jesus Christ.
As a young boy in his fifteenth year, Joseph was disturbed by the religious commotion in his community. He spoke of the conflict that existed between the preachers of various faiths. Everybody claimed that their religion was the true religion. At the time, he was inclined toward the Methodist faith; his mother and some of his family had already joined the Presbyterian Church, because of their desire to be baptised.
On a spring day in 1820, Joseph retired to a grove of trees not far from his home to ask God which church he should join, having been impressed with a scripture that he had read in James 1:5, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God..."
This was his experience written by his own hand:
Joseph Smith History 1
15 After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.
16 But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
17 It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!
This is the beginning of Momonism. At this very moment, the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times was ushered in. This was the beginning of the Restoration of the Church that Jesus Christ had established on the earth, nearly 2,000 years ago. The Great Apostasy was over. Revelation was on the earth again, as it had been foretold by the prophets of old:
2 Thessalonians 2: 2-3
2 That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.
3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first...
Amos 8-11
11 ¶ Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord:
12 And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.
Act 3:21
21 Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.
The events that followed, according to Oliver Cowdery, a young man who served as Joseph's scribe when he translated the Book of Mormon, "were days never to be forgotten--to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, awakened the utmost gratitude in this bosom! Day after day I continued, uninterrupted, to write from his mouth, as he translated...the history or record called the Book of Mormon.
So, tomorrow, we will study these events and how they have affected mankind and our families.
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