July 29, 2011 - The Great Restoration

[john doe]

Thus, the great Restoration is also a refutation of our increasingly doubting and secular society. Our society has its jaded cynicism, humdrum hedonism, and pleasure seeking, and it is swamped in situational ethics. No wonder some, unaware, fulfill Peter’s great prophecy by saying, in effect: “Where is the promise of [Christ’s] coming? … All things must continue as they are, and have continued as they are from the beginning of the creation” (Joseph Smith Translation, 2 Pet. 3:4).

People have lost much of the capacity to believe. No wonder today’s permissiveness and immorality resemble symptoms of an earlier time: “And thus [Korihor] did preach unto them, leading away the hearts of many, causing them to lift up their heads in their wickedness, yea, leading away many women, and also men, to commit whoredoms—telling them that when a man was dead, that was the end thereof” (Alma 30:18).

Without the acceptance of the Restoration, it will become increasingly as it was in ancient Israel when “every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 17:6; Judg. 21:25). Already in our time, as prophesied, “every man walketh in his own way, and after … the likeness of the world” (D&C 1:16).