What do Mormons Believe about God?

We believe that there is a God.  God is our loving Heavenly Father who knows us personally.  We are all his children.  He cares about us and knows the struggles that we go through.    God is perfect, all righteous and all knowing.  He is full of love, mercy, charity, truth, power and knowledge.   All good things come from God and everything he does is to help us, His children, to become like him.  He says, “Behold, this is my work and my glory – to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39)

It is important to know who God is and to have a personal relationship with Him.   We can build this relationship with God by doing the following.

  1. Believe that He exists and that He loves us (Mosiah 4:9)
  2. We need to study the scriptures (2 Timothy 3:14-17)
  3. Pray to Him (James 1:5)
  4. Obey his Commandments (John 14:21-23)

As we do these things, we will come to know God and become closer to Him.

Does God Know Me?

One of the most amazing blessings that came to me when I was a missionary for the LDS Church was feeling an intense amount of love for perfect strangers.  When I had been in one place only 3 weeks, I remember having this epiphony: “God knows everyone!  He knows their problems, He helps them in their lives.  Everyone is interesting.  Everyone has a story and a path.”  I think in my 21 year old selfish brain, I had really only considered that I and my family and friends were important to God, because that was all that I knew.  I couldn’t fathom that He would know everyone in the entire world.  It was enough that He took care of several dozen people in my little universe.

 

But as I committed to doing His work for a year and a half, meeting with people who were strangers to me, but beloved to Him, it became so clear to me that He really does know everyone.  And He doesn’t just know you.  He loves you.  I was humbled to feel that love on many occasions, it was perfect and gentle and caring.  I know that it came from God because these were people that I didn’t know–I had nothing in common with them, no ideas of becoming life-long friends–they were literally strangers.  But the love that I felt for them was powerful and it made me want to hold them tightly and take away all their problems.  Like a parent.  Like a loving, all-powerful heavenly parent.

 

If you are curious to know if God knows you too, invite the LDS missionaries over for a sincere talk.  Be open to them and they will be open to you.   Ask them to pray with you about this question and you will know, from the source, that He does know you.  You will see the love reflected in their eyes that God has for you, and you may feel the same sort of compassion and love for them.  It all comes from the same source.  And then you’ve got to realize that if God loves these two little 19 year old boys from southern Idaho who haven’t seen much of anything in the world yet, He loves you too.

 

Related Articles and Links:

The Sons and Daughters of God
What Do Mormons Believe? – God the Father
Does God still speak to us today?
mormon.org – God’s Plan of Happiness
How Do You Pray?
Is Jesus the only son of God?
The Plan of Salvation
Where Do Babies Come From?
Scriptural Evidence of a Pre-Existence

Question Box: Divine Visitations

Question:  Do Mormon’s believe that non-eartly beings, divine or otherwised, have visited the Earth?   Thank you.

Yes, we believe that both God and angels have visited the earth.  All Christians, if they stopped to think about it, believe the same thing.   Some of the most well-known examples are

1) When God visited Moses in the burning bush (Exodus ch. 3),

2) When an angel told Mary that she would be the mother of Christ (Luke ch. 1), and

3) Angels visiting shephards in the fields announcing that Christ had been born (Luke ch. 2).

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is unique in that we believe that God still speaks to men today.  In the early 1800’s, a young boy named Joseph Smith was concerned about which church he should join.  After much study, he finally realized that there was no way he could figure it out.  One night he read a verse in the book of James, which stood out to him (James 1:5).  He realized that the only way he could find out what to do would be to pray and ask God for direction.  In response to his sincere prayer, God the Father and Jesus Christ visited him and told him that none of the churches were true.  They told him that they were calling him as the next prophet to restore the true church to the earth again. (To see a short video representation of this story, click here.)

We believe that God has called prophets and apostles again to the earth.  Just as God visited Moses and gave him directions on how to lead His people, He has a prophet on the earth today who can receive guidance on what we should be doing now – President Thomas S. Monson.  Just earlier this month, we had the opportunity to listen to the prophet and apostles in a General Conference of the Church.  I love watching conference.  As I watch and listen, things stick out to me and I write them down, so I can work on them.  I know that God speaks to prophets today, because I receive help and guidance with my life as I listen to their messages.

The Origins of God

Q. The origins of God

Wow that’s a big topic; perhaps too big for us mortals to deal with. The creation stories of many cultures begin with the gods already in place. The Jewish/Christian story is one such example Geneses 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The Greeks with their highly developed mythology explored the question of where their gods originated; Edith Hamilton in her book Mythology begins by stating: “The Greeks did not believe that the gods created the universe. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods. Before there were gods heaven and earth had been formed. They were the first parents. The Titans were their children, and the gods were their grandchildren. Yet that still leaves the mystery of how the heaven and earth were formed and who might have had a hand in that process.

Every good story needs a beginning. A puzzle I used to present to my high school history students was: “What should the starting date of United State’s History be?” I would get dates  as recent as 1776 and as old as 30,000 BC. Another thing to consider is that for a story to make sense we have to be able to understand it. So the story in the scriptures begins with God in place and creating the world, and there isn’t much detail about the physics of the whole exercise.

Mormons believe in prophets and continuing revelation. From my study it appears that every age or so one of the main prophets gets the “Big Revelation”. They get to take a glimpse of the whole story and sometimes it can help us gain a better understanding of the eternal perspective. One of these revelations was given to Moses and is recorded in the Book of Moses found in the Pearl of Great Price. Allow me to capture the essence of the conversation as it was later revealed to Joseph Smith which is in Chapter 1.

God introduces himself to Moses and tells him that he is eternal and that his works and his words are endless and that no man can behold all his works or his glory and remain in the flesh. The Lord did however show Moses this world and all the children of men which were created. After a brief interlude the vision is again opened up to Moses and Moses begins to question how all these things could be. God then gives him the short answer to the question saying that all these things were created “by the word of my power, which is his Only Begotten Son.” He then says that, “worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose”. Essentially telling Moses that the vision of the earth on which we dwell is all he’s going to go into and that the bigger picture is just too much for Moses to comprehend.

So for our purposes all we need to consider is that God the Father exists and is eternal, that he has created the earth and the people of the earth through the power of the Son. We also know why He did it: “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). Of course our curious minds want to know more details and some hints are available both in the scriptures and through modern revelation, but it isn’t terribly important to our salvation, which we probably should be more focused on. We are asked to live by faith, which means trusting God before we have all the details.

So that is what Mormons believe…

…as for what they speculate: that belongs on a different website.

Does God still speak to us today?

First Vision

While preparing for a class, I came across this talk given by Hugh B. Brown, a member of the First Presidency of our church, who passed away some years ago.  It details a conversation that he had with a member of the British House of Commons and a former justice of the supreme court of Britain regarding our belief in the reality of modern-day prophets.

I will never understand why people reject the doctrine of God still being able to call prophets.  He has always done so and will continue to do so.  I firmly declare that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that there is a prophet today who speaks for God.  Prophets are essential to us knowing who God and Jesus Christ are—their characters and their teachings that will bring salvation.  You too can know of this truth if you will sincerely ask God in prayer with faith to act.

“[This man] called me on the phone one day and asked if I would meet him at his office and explain some phases of my faith. He said, “There is going to be a war [World War II], and you will have to return to America, and we may not meet again.”

When I went to his office, he said he had been intrigued by some things I had told about my church. He asked me if I would prepare a brief on Mormonism and discuss it with him as I would discuss a legal problem. He said, “You have told me that you believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that you believe that God the Father and Jesus of Nazareth appeared to him in vision.

“I cannot understand,” he said, “how a barrister and solicitor from Canada, a man trained in logic and evidence and unemotional cold fact, could accept such absurd statements. What you tell me about Joseph Smith seems fantastic, but I wish you would take three days at least to prepare a brief and permit me to examine it and question you on it.”

I suggested that, as I had been working on such a brief for more than 50 years, we proceed at once to have an examination for discovery, which is briefly a meeting of the opposing sides in a lawsuit where the plaintiff and defendant, with their attorneys, meet to examine each other’s claims and see whether they can find some area of agreement and thus save the time of the court later on.

I began by asking, “May I proceed, sir, on the assumption that you are a Christian?”

“I am.”

“I assume that you believe in the Bible—the Old and New Testaments?”

“I do!”

“Do you believe in prayer?”

“I do!”

“You say that my belief that God spoke to a man in this age is fantastic and absurd?”

“To me it is.”

“Do you believe that God ever did speak to anyone?”

“Certainly, all through the Bible we have evidence of that.”

“Did he speak to Adam?”

“Yes.”

“To Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and to others of the prophets?”

“I believe he spoke to each of them.”

“Do you believe that contact between God and man ceased when Jesus appeared on the earth?”

“Certainly not. Such communication reached its climax, its apex at that time.”

“Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God?”

“He was.”

“Do you believe, sir, that after the resurrection of Christ, God ever spoke to any man?”

He thought for a moment and then said, “I remember one Saul of Tarsus who was going down to Damascus to persecute the saints and who had a vision, was stricken blind, in fact, and heard a voice.”

“Whose voice did he hear?”

“Well,” he said, “the voice said `I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.'”

“Do you believe that actually took place?”

“I do.”

“Then, my Lord”—that is the way we address judges in the British commonwealth—”my Lord, I am submitting to you in all seriousness that it was standard procedure in Bible times for God to talk to men.”

“I think I will admit that, but it stopped shortly after the first century of the Christian era.”

“Why do you think it stopped?”

“I can’t say.”

“You think that God hasn’t spoken since then?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“May I suggest some possible reasons why he has not spoken. Perhaps it is because he cannot. He has lost the power.”

He said, “Of course that would be blasphemous.”

“Well, then, if you don’t accept that, perhaps he doesn’t speak to men because he doesn’t love us anymore. He is no longer interested in the affairs of men.”

“No,” he said, “God loves all men, and he is no respecter of persons.”

“Well, then, if you don’t accept that he loves us, then the only other possible answer as I see it is that we don’t need him. We have made such rapid strides in education and science that we don’t need God any more.”

And then he said, and his voice trembled as he thought of impending war, “Mr. Brown, there never was a time in the history of the world when the voice of God was needed as it is needed now. Perhaps you can tell me why he doesn’t speak.”

My answer was, “He does speak, he has spoken; but men need faith to hear him.”

(President Hugh B. Brown, Conference Report, October 1967, Third Day—Morning Meeting 118.)