Doubt your doubts

If you have not read my first blog post called “imaginary defender”, then reading it would help to put this post into context.

I learned an important lesson in my New Testament class that relates to my blog post about the imaginary defender. In summary, my imaginary defender idea is that we imagine how a scenario is going to be, and when it is not that way, it confuses and frustrates us. However, there is no reason that the situation should have been that way. Just that our imagination created a false scenario. This exact same mindset can harm us with the gospel. I will use a story from the New Testament to illustrate.

After Christ was resurrected, He appeared to two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus, but He kept His identity hidden for a bit. He appears to them and asks them why they were sad. They were surprised that He had not heard the news of Jesus’s death. Acting slightly facetiously, He kept on asking them questions about it (pay attention to the words that I have bolded).

Luke 24:19, “And he said unto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet might in deed and word before God and all the people:”

Later in verse 21, “But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done.”

The disciples were expressing their disappointment because they had thought that He was the Messiah, but they were implying that He was not the Messiah because He had died without redeeming Israel. Here comes the part of the assumptions. They had imagined that the Messiah would come to free them from Rome. That is what they had been taught their whole life. It was a societal misperception. However, when did God ever say that the Messiah would free them from Rome? They had interpreted the scriptures in that way, but we know now that it was referring to a spiritual not temporal redemption. Therefore, they did not believe that He was the Messiah because He did not do as the Messiah had always imagined, just as I was shocked when my defender did not defend as I had imagined.

This applies to the gospel because we have assumptions that we make about the prophets that seemingly disqualify their worthiness from being a prophet. I have heard many times “Joseph Smith cannot be a prophet because he did polygamy!” Or “Brigham Young was not a prophet because he said racial remarks!” or you could fill in the blank with many reasons. The same answer applies that applied to the Jews back in Jesus’s day. Where did God say that His prophet wouldn’t do polygamy? Or where did He say His prophet wouldn’t say racial remarks? This can be applied to whichever other complaint one might have. Is it really something that disqualifies one from being a prophet? Or is it something that society has planted an image in our heads of what it should be like?

Just because something is a common belief does not make right. The grand majority of the Jews thought that their salvation would be temporal when that is not what God ever said. This also does not mean that a person can do whatever they want and say they’re a prophet. However, I have prayed, and God has answered my prayers that Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young, and every prophet after that followed them are prophets of God, and that although not perfect, does not disqualify them from being prophets. Let us separate what we have imagined from what God has actually said. As President Uchtdorf famously said, “Doubt your doubts, before you doubt your faith”.