At church today, during our Elders Quorum class, I was filled with the Holy Ghost, testifying to my soul of the truthfulness of what I was hearing. The lesson’s topic included the most recent General Conference sermon delivered by Jeffrey R. Holland, a modern-day apostle of Jesus Christ, entitled “Behold, the Lamb of God.” This led me to open and start reading another discourse given by him just a few years earlier, in October of 2009 entitled “Safety for the Soul.”
The part of the talk that resonated with my soul today was Elder Holland’s witness of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, that this book, which testifies of Jesus Christ, was translated from an ancient record by Joseph Smith, Jr. through the power of God. I would like to include some of his words here:
“When Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum started for Carthage to face what they knew would be an imminent martyrdom, Hyrum read these words to comfort the heart of his brother:
“‘Thou hast been faithful; wherefore … thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father.
“‘And now I, Moroni, bid farewell … until we shall meet before the judgment-seat of Christ.’
“A few short verses from the 12th chapter of Ether in the Book of Mormon. Before closing the book, Hyrum turned down the corner of the page from which he had read, marking it as part of the everlasting testimony for which these two brothers were about to die. I hold in my hand that book, the very copy from which Hyrum read, the same corner of the page turned down, still visible. Later, when actually incarcerated in the jail, Joseph the Prophet turned to the guards who held him captive and bore a powerful testimony of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon. Shortly thereafter pistol and ball would take the lives of these two testators.
As one of a thousand elements of my own testimony of the divinity of the Book of Mormon, I submit this as yet one more evidence of its truthfulness. In this their greatest—and last—hour of need, I ask you: would these men blaspheme before God by continuing to fix their lives, their honor, and their own search for eternal salvation on a book (and by implication a church and a ministry) they had fictitiously created out of whole cloth?
“Never mind that their wives are about to be widows and their children fatherless. Never mind that their little band of followers will yet be ‘houseless, friendless and homeless’ and that their children will leave footprints of blood across frozen rivers and an untamed prairie floor. Never mind that legions will die and other legions live declaring in the four quarters of this earth that they know the Book of Mormon and the Church which espouses it to be true. Disregard all of that, and tell me whether in this hour of death these two men would enter the presence of their Eternal Judge quoting from and finding solace in a book which, if not the very word of God, would brand them as imposters and charlatans until the end of time? They would not do that! They were willing to die rather than deny the divine origin and the eternal truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.
“For 179 years this book has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other book in modern religious history—perhaps like no other book in any religious history. And still it stands. Failed theories about its origins have been born and parroted and have died—from Ethan Smith to Solomon Spaulding to deranged paranoid to cunning genius. None of these frankly pathetic answers for this book has ever withstood examination because there is no other answer than the one Joseph gave as its young unlearned translator. In this I stand with my own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, ‘No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it, unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.’
Jeffrey R. Holland, October 2009
