Continuing from “Spiritual Lightening” —‘The Veil of Unbelief’, M. Catherine Thomas shared:
The sobering message in these verses is that not only people in general but also many Saints would be led by the precepts of men. This prophetic insight offers a compassionate warning and a call to receive greater lightening. If relatively few of the Saints have discerned these precepts of men, these errors are probably rather subtle and hard to detect. But scripture describes them, and prophets point them out. President Ezra Taft Benson taught: “God, with his infinite foreknowledge, so molded the Book of Mormon that we might see the error and know how to combat false educational, political, religious and philosophical concepts of our time” (“The Book of Mormon is the Word of God,” Ensign, May 1975, p. 64).
The real problem with false ideas, as Nephi reveals (see 2 Nephi 28:5), is that they influence many to deny the power of God in their lives. The precepts of men partake of the philosophy of Korihor the anti-Christ, who taught that man prospered only by his own genius and strength and not by God’s power (see Alma 30:17). It is not so much that we have denied the existence of the power of God as it is that we have denied ourselves of that power by implementing false ideas. The Lord warns of that latter-day “spirit which hath so strongly riveted the creeds of the fathers, who have inherited lies, upon the hearts of the children” (D&C 123:7). To some greater or lesser extent, each of us is one of those children.
Not by deliberate consent, but mostly inadvertently, we all have the precepts of men riveted on our hearts just by virtue of being born into a fallen world. It is part of the heritage of the natural man. And we may have embraced additional false ideas because of our ignorance of God’s revealed laws—“My people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge” (2 Nephi 15:13). The Lord, knowing our dilemma better than we do, compassionately warns: “Beware concerning yourselves, to give heed to the words of eternal life. For you shall live by every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of God” (Doctrine and Covenants 84:43-44).
But we may need to learn more of what the Lord has actually said in order to live by it. (continued) ~ Catherine Thomas, Spiritual Lightening (Deseret Book/Bookcraft, Inc. 1996) p.2-3
