by Andrew Sutton
BYU (Brigham Young University) is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often mistakenly called the “Mormon Church.” BYU students take nearly a semester of spiritually uplifting, stimulating religion classes.
In this series (see below), students enrolled in scripture study classes have shared their thoughts, insights, and reflections on the Book of Mormon in the form of letters to someone they know. We invite you to take a look at their epiphanies and discoveries as they delve into the scriptures.
In publishing these, we fulfill their desire to speak to all of us of the relevance, power and beauty of the Book of Mormon, a second witness of Jesus Christ and complement to the Bible. The Book of Mormon includes the religious history of a group of Israelites who settled in ancient America. (The names they use are those of prophets who taught the Book of Mormon peoples to look forward to the coming of Christ—Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Helaman, and other unfamiliar names. We hope those names will become more familiar to you as you read their inspiring words and feel the relevance and divinity of their messages through these letters.)
Let us know if you’d like to receive your own digital copy of the Book of Mormon, and/or if these messages encourage and assist you spiritually as well.
Mormon Bible: A Book for Our Day
I posted this on a blog.
This week in Book of Mormon we finished talking about the war chapters in Alma and began to talk about Helaman. Near the end of Alma, Brother Griffin told us a quote from Abraham Lincoln. He said that when Lincoln was asked why he tried to make friends with his enemies instead of destroying them he said that by turning his enemies into friends he was destroying his enemies at the same time. This is interesting because all of us have people who we don’t get along with or who we consider “enemies.” A lot of the time we think of ways we can get back at them or “destroy” our enemies. The better way to go about this is to try to look past the things we dislike about others and try to make friends with our enemies, thus “destroying” them.
In the beginning of Helaman we talked about how the devil shifted his tactics to destroy the children of God. He introduced secret combinations which are more sneaky and subtle from within, and he was also more bold and straightforward on the outside with the example of the Lamanites walking straight through the Nephite territory to the main city and killing the king Pahoran. This shows how the Book of Mormon really is meant for our day. In the 1900’s there were a lot of wars and contentions with clear boundaries, just like the war chapters at the end of Alma. Now we face more sneaky and subtle contentions with the devil in our day where the lines that divide good and evil are harder to find, just as the devil introduced secret combinations in the beginning of Helaman. This just shows us how the Book of Mormon has so many applications to our day and will continue to help us with the struggles we will face in the future.