Jesus Christ is physically NOT in the Spirit World

                 Jesus Christ will appear in all-red attire when he returns for his "Second Coming."

    

  THE Spirit World seems to a confusing doctrine for many Latter-day Saints.

 Latest example: A High Council member speaks in my ward and he is not 30 seconds into his talk when he states that Jesus Christ will look very familiar to us when we see him in the Spirit World.

What?

  Although there's little doubt Christ's spirit and influence can be felt in the Spirit World, he is NOT there physically.

Why?

  After all, the Spirit World is a realm created just for spirits. Jesus Christ himself spent just three days there after his death, but could only be there because he was in spirit form there, before his resurrection.

   Spirit World residents still have to live by faith there, as we do on Earth. Prayer is also likely our communication tool in the Spirit World, as it is here.

  It just seems strange that members can't seem to grasp this doctrine.

  Other church members hold to the inaccurate "he was called home" idea too, regarding the Spirit World. How can it be "home," when one has never been there before and it is certainly not a permanent place of residence in the afterlife. Other than deceased friends and family are in the Spirit World, the "called home" idea is not correct either.

 

Not enough Church members partake of the ‘meat’ of the Gospel?

                           One of W. Cleon Skousen's doctrinal books (and still for sale on Amazon).

NOT enough members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints partake of the meat of the gospel, W. Cleon Skousen, Church author/scholar, said.

He spoke on April 3, 2003 to the B'nai Shalom group of Jewish converts at their semiannual meeting on "Lessons I've Learned from Life" at the Capitol Hill First Ward Chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Skousen, then age 90, was energetic and focused. (He died less than 3 years later in 2006.)

"I plead with you," he said. "Take the time to get into the meat."

Skousen has written 42 books on Church doctrine and teachings, and he said they all touch on meaty aspects of the gospel. It was Elder John A. Widtsoe, a Church apostle from 1921 to '52, who taught him to study. Skousen believes Elder Widtsoe understood the gospel of Jesus Christ better than any other apostle of his time.

He said a key difference is that milk eaters of the gospel only ask "what" to do next, while meat eaters also ask "why."

"A few Saints get to the meat level," Skousen said. "The why and the how people are the ones that are really progressing in the gospel."

Why don't more get into the meat?

"Because most people aren't interested in meat," he said.

"There are some boring speakers. That's 'cause they get on milk and can't get off it. . . . It's the duty of everyone to be a good sacrament meeting speaker."

He said the big test in life is to endure to the end, but many are too busy with sporting events — even on Sunday — to do that.

"Don't let the holy day become a holiday."

Exercise, or just doing what the Lord has told you to do, is also essential.

"Church service is so important, and we should be active in the community, too."

Skousen also said he's a firm constitutionalist and initially believed it was wrong to be pre-emptive with Iraq and go to war over there.

"But I feel good about it now. . . . Serve your country."

Regarding keeping a year's supply of food, he advises those with old and outdated storage to just throw it away and start over.

"The wonderful thing is that you didn't have to use it," he said.

Skousen also advises church members to keep journals and said he has 150 journals outlining many details of his own life.

"We have a lot of things we have to sharpen up."

He's keen on both the leadership and progress of the church today.

"What a magnificent (church) leadership we have today. I see nothing but progress happening in the kingdom."

Skousen also touched briefly on his service as Salt Lake City's police chief in the mid-1950s by saying it wasn't his idea — Church President David O. McKay asked him to do it.

He also was a longtime professor in the department of religion at Brigham Young University.

-Witten by Lynn Arave and published in the Deseret News, April 12, 2003.

NOTE: This article and all of the NighUntoKolob blog are NOT an official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are the author's conclusions and opinions only.

Journal of Discourses: Treasure Trove of Doctrine

The Journal of Discourses is not some shady, unreliable source of doctrine.

  After all, what's not to like about the equivalent of vintage General Conference talks from more than a century and a half ago?
 Put in context with an early, doctrinally evolving church, the "J.D." is not something to be shunned, or ignored, but rather embraced.
Sure, there are some speculative and opinion kinds of doctrines found within its 26 volumes, but then there was no Correlation Committee back in the 1800s either!
 Talks were often impromptu in the 1800s. I doubt most speakers of the era even had a written text. (Imagine how your own Sacrament meeting talk might go if did not have written notes, or notes on your smart phone!)
 The Journal of Discourses are generally under-rated and yet offer glimpses of pioneer life in Utah and reveal what doctrines the church leaders and members at the time of the mid-19th Century were wrestling with.

I've even noticed that in the past 10 years, occasionally, an official church manual has quoted from the Journal of Discourses.
Now to be accurate, all the J.D. is are re-prints of talks by church leaders as originally published in the Deseret News.
  (A game played in many past church manuals would be that instead of listing the more easily found Journal of Discourses as a reference, the actual/original Deseret News reference would be cited instead, as if that was more accurate ... when it was the same thing.)
  Scribes, or clerks, (like George D. Watt), tried to write down the talks of leaders, like Brigham Young, and they were printed in the Deseret News for a wider, regional church audience to read.
The 26 volumes of Journal of Discourses compiled many of those talks. It was Brother Watt who received clearance from the First Presidency to publish the Journals, mainly as a way to provide him income, but also to send these talks overseas, to church members in Great Britain.
  I've read all 26 volumes of the Journal of Discourses.
  I've also made my own index of each volume, since the official index for the Journal of Discourses is very lacking.
  Sure, I came across some "there is life on the moon" kind of things talked about therein, but if you've read the Standard Works and 
have some solid doctrinal foundation, then the J.D. would do nothing but expand your gospel understanding.
I've compared many of the key Journal of Discourse talks, particularly those by Brigham Young, with the Deseret News and found no disagreement between the two.
However, I once in a while noticed that Brigham Young would come back a week later in the Deseret News and state he thought he was misquoted, or didn't make a point clear the talk prior and then he would briefly try to clarify or correct it.
 Those "corrections/clarifications" are NOT included in the Journal of Discourses, however.

  Some on social media have taken potshots at the J.D., in the summer of 2026, comparing them to the Apocrypha. That is an inaccurate comparison. I've read and studied both and the Apocrypha is extremely poor in both doctrine and history.

 The J.D. is a good supplemental history source, a good look at the lives of Latter-day Saints in the second half of the 19th Century.

Some on social media have made claims that many of the talks were exaggerated in their prophetic nature by the scribes. I've found no evidence of that. If it did happen, it was rare. 

As stated earlier, Brigham Young read what the Deseret News published, He was a busy man, but the Deseret News was the only media around for decades in Utah Territory. (And, the newspaper's original motto, was "truth and liberty.")

  President Young's clarifications I found occasionally in the Deseret News, a week or so after some discourses, proves he was paying attention to what the scribes wrote. If a scribe was embellishing talks, I think President Young would have noticed and even had them removed.

   Some on social media also preach that studying the Journal of Discourses will downgrade your integrity of Brigham Young. Again, I found the opposite. In one line of a sermon, President Young might be explaining some deep doctrine and in the next he's talking about farming, the lifeblood of pioneer life back then.

  I've concluded that when President Young delved into some strange doctrines, he knew what he meant, but that meaning didn't always come across clearly in his discourses. (Again, today's General Authorities have weeks to prepare General Conference talks; some even have script writers/advisors; and they have days after a discourse was given to still make changes before the permanent printed/on-line version of their talk is set.)

  Brigham Young, like any man, had his own opinions and he was only a prophet when acting as such. Move him into the 20th or 21st Century and I'm certain he would not speak off the cuff, or speculate as much.

(You also should not try to bury your own history, but learn from it, though you need to learn to read the J.D. in the context of the 1800s...)

  Today's church leaders have also found it wise to not speculate like their 19th Century counterparts did in the Deseret News/Journal of Discourses.

  Yes, some critics of the Church might use strange ideas from the J.D. against the Latter-day Saints, but the J.D. has more solid doctrine therein than oddball ideas.

  But anyone who takes a shot at the accuracy of the Journal of Discourses is also taking a swing at the accuracy of the Deseret News.
  No newspaper, even today, is free from errors, but even the opinion pages in newspapers spur thought and reflection.

  (I worked at the Deseret News for 32 years and had access to its archives and so I know the newspaper's history -- and I spent my extra time for two decades scouring in the newspaper's vaults.)
  So, keep reading the Ensign and General Conference talks, today's counterpart for the old Journal of Discourses.
  Yet, if you have the time, you will not regret reading the Journal of Discourses, for the doctrinal rewards they offer.

  Yet, note that the J.D. are a place for advanced doctrine, not a place for gospel beginners. A Latter-day Saint ideally needs to know basic church doctrine and have at least some years in the church under their belt, BEFORE that launch into the Journal of Discourses.

   The J.D. printed books are a lot easier reading than the cumbersome newspaper microfilm reading too!
  Note that while virtually all of the past 3 or so decades of the Deseret News are on-line and searchable by Google, the Journal of Discourse's era of the Deseret News issues are not -- and may never be.
 (That's probably because Google-searchable would make some of the off-the-wall segments of the Journal of Discourses too easily found by church critics. Also, old Deseret News of the early 20th Century used to contain lists of excommunicated members and some church leaders have indicated they don't want their descendants finding an ancestor's name on those lists. Hence the blackout on old Deseret News editions.)

NOTE: This article and all of the NighUntoKolob blog are NOT an official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are the author's conclusions and opinions only.