This talk was given sometime in 2010 and it was given to a group of people who were interested in the Constitution and our role in saving the Constitution as a member of the LDS church.
00:02 Okay, so my name is Brent Larsen. Everything that we’re going to talk about here tonight, I don’t have any earthly credentials for, I don’t have any heavenly commission for; this is stuff that I’ve spent many, many years of my life studying. But the words will speak for themselves. It’s something that you can take, you can ingest, incorporate into your life, incorporate in your way of thinking. But other than that, I’m not claiming any type of authority or anything like that.
00:35 Shakespeare, “words, words, words,” that’s going to be a big focus of tonight is words and what their definitions are. Heaven wants us to learn things, and Heaven uses symbols to do that all the time. And words are just symbols. And as soon as, as the adversary can take a symbol that has been given to us properly, he will immediately do everything he can to obscure that as much as possible. So for us to understand what heaven is trying to teach us, we, we’ve got to start to learn the language of Heaven. How is this word being used? How is, how is this coming into play? A long time ago, I read a B.C. comic for those of you that remember that. And B.C. came up and he said, “mankind will never master the art of communication.” And the responses were “whatever, hogwash, poppycock” all that, you know, everybody has something different to say. So when we sit down it goes, Okay, what’s this? They said, “earth, dirt, land, soil.” And he just turned around. Yep.
01:45 Alright, so that’s the problem. Every one of us uses words differently. For example, I don’t care how many people see this on video, or how many people are here. If I say the word truck, and I asked each of you to picture that truck in your head. Nobody’s picturing the same truck. I can start to modify that a little bit. I could say things like, red truck. And now you’re all picturing different trucks that are all red. I could say, red semi truck. And everybody’s modified their truck. I could modify the truck again to make it a low rider. Let’s make it yellow. Because I want you to picture a Tonka truck. Now make it whatever color you want, but make it a matchbox. Every one of those things drastically changes the truck that you’re picturing.
02:40 It’s in those modifications that we began to come together, the more that we can narrow down the words. The more that we are all visualizing the same thing. We’re all the symbol that we’re using to just truck, in this case, is becoming more and more defined on what it is we’re actually supposed to be taught. So how you do that is in; the way that heaven teaches us what its meaning is in the conflict.
03:12 So for example, if I say cup, you may think that you know what this is. But when I say, orange, I’ve really defined, I’ve narrowed it down. And it doesn’t matter whether you understood the language or not. You’ve learned what orange is, you’ve learned what cup is. Because of the conflict, because of the difference. Then I could hold up these two and say cup and you know exactly which one I’m talking about. Even if you had no idea what I was saying with the language, you just learned what I meant. So this whiteboard is going to represent law. The entire thing. It’s actually the universe, it is to scale but we don’t have to cover that today.
04:12 Law is essential to understanding the concepts of agency, bondage, freedom, choice. It’s absolutely critical. Law is one of the words I’m going to define. Commandments is one of the words I’m going to define God’s law, natural law, agency, liberty, bondage, these are the words. I’m going to try to bring in maybe some conflict maybe you know, here’s, here’s how it’s used here. Here’s how it’s used here. So that you can understand the difference in the way that they’re used. What this represents right now is the way you think about choice, agency, freedom. This is the way Babylon wants you to think and basically what we have here is. This is you. Under Law, everything has an action and an outcome, or a path and a destination.
05:12 This represents the path, this represents the destination. In this instance, this represents you. And when I say to you, you have choices. This is the way that most people think of that. I can choose between path one or path two or destination one or destination two. Freedom is the, you know, the ability to pick which one of those that you want to follow. The problem with this, is this doesn’t match what the Scriptures tell us about agency. This works okay for choice, but it doesn’t work for agency. And the reason for that, agency tells us that we have a path and a destination, and that we can only choose one or the other. So if, if I want to be free, that’s my destination, this is the outcome that I want. And we have to be morally righteous people. The Scripture is very clear that law has fixed outcomes that are not subject to change at all.
06:36 What we try to do with science, and what we try to do with the Gospel, is we try to map the path to the destination. For example, if you don’t do your homework, you get bad grades. If you only eat Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, you gain weight. But let’s say that you decide that you want to live healthy. So you would change your diet to match that. You don’t have a choice in how these things are related to each other. There’s, in the scriptures, there’s a couple of ways a law is used. The one that I’m going to focus on today is what I call natural law. This is how I’m going to define this: “natural law” is a law which cannot be broken. Pretty simple definition, “natural law” cannot be broken. That’s also God’s law. Now, this applies to spiritual law, but the reason I call it natural law, because we see, we think of the laws of nature, we see really good examples of this.
07:42 Sometimes it’s difficult to understand the law. It’s not always the easiest thing in the world. But you can’t break it. This nail is always subject to the laws of gravity, absolutely cannot break the laws of gravity. I mean, even thinking, Oh, it’s gonna go break law, and then we’ll have to throw it in jail and fine it or something. It doesn’t make any sense. Okay, that’s natural law. But just because I hold it up with this magnet, doesn’t mean that it’s not being subjected to the laws of gravity right now. It’s not breaking the laws of gravity, nothing has changed. It’s not falling to the earth. But nothing has changed. I put it on the table, it’s still not falling to the earth, it’s still 100% subject to the laws of gravity. But there’s something that’s preventing it from going down. Now, by the same token, this cup is not going to be held up by this magnet. It’s not subject to the laws that hold that nail, with this magnet. Laws, sometimes can be difficult to understand. And sometimes they can, they can take so much time, and there can be so many factors coming into it that we can’t always see the law.
09:02 Which brings us to commandments. What are commandments? Well, commandments are based on law every time. Commandments can be broken. Plus, they can change according to a situation. For example, you would not need to tell Noah to put seven year supply of grain in silos. It wouldn’t have done Noah any good. It wouldn’t have done Joseph any good to build an ark to get them through the famine. So Commandments can change based on the situation. We do this all the time. We do this with our children. The laws don’t change. A child puts his hand on a hot stove, gets burned, handles sharp knives, gets cut, opens the oven, when it’s hot. All these things are laws that can’t be changed.
09:52 So we tell a little child, we give the little child the commandment, “stay out of the kitchen.” As they get a little bit older, we start to work with them and say, “Okay, I’m going to teach you how to make macaroni and cheese.” And then later on, “we’re going to make cookies.” You know, you step it up, by the time that child’s 18, the command is no longer “stay out of the kitchen.” It’s, get in the kitchen, do the dishes, make dinner, clean up afterwards. But none of the laws have changed. So when we think of God’s commandments, oh, why, why would it change here? Why would it be different here? It’s because it’s based on laws and those laws, God’s looking at, at the path that is bound to the outcome. And saying, I know that you want the outcome of eternal joy and happiness. And so I’m always going to command you to do those things that will result in that outcome. Always, always, always, always.
more coming soon…
Part 1: A Christ Centered Relationship
Part 2: God’s Laws vs Commandments of God
Part 3: Laws of Men vs. Laws of God
Part 4: To This End Was I Born
