Creator, Father, King #287

Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.

IT ALL STARTED WITH a vision about golden plates.

On September 21, 1823, a young man named Joseph Smith Jr., the fifth child of a hardscrabble and superstitious pair of farming parents, claimed to receive a vision from an angel named Moroni, who told him of supposedly special golden plates buried several miles from the Smiths’ home in Palmyra, New York. The plates, according to Smith, contained a description of America’s earliest natives and “the fullness of the everlasting gospel.”

Smith claimed to dig up the plates and began translating them from their “reformed Egyptian” text thanks to a pair of magical spectacles endowed with seer stones. Finally, in 1829, Smith and an assistant finished the “translation” and called it The Book of Mormon.

If this sounds farfetched, well, it is. Yet today, there are fifteen million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as Mormons.

Today’s verse couldn’t be more appropriate!

What’s It Mean?

The letter to the Galatians, written by the apostle Paul, was likely meant for a group of churches that Paul planted during his first missionary journey—probably Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe (Acts 13:14–14:23). But after he left, a group of false teachers started poisoning the believers’ minds. These teachers claimed salvation required faith in Jesus plus works—namely keeping certain aspects of the Old Testament law.

Paul was enraged. Using some of the strongest language in any of his New Testament letters, he excoriated the false teachers and admonished the Galatian believers.

But Paul’s point is well taken. There is no other true gospel except the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ, and it must be defended.

Any religion that teaches salvation by any other means apart from justification by faith alone in the atoning work of Christ’s death and resurrection is a false, “accursed” gospel.

In addition to Mormonism, there are many other cults and belief systems in the world—some of which cloak themselves under “Christianity”—that add or subtract from an orthodox biblical definition of salvation.

Accept no phonies. Hold fast to what is true. Don’t submit to a works-based religion. And test everything according to Scripture and whether it honors Jesus as God’s eternal Son and the substitutionary atonement for our sins (1 John 4:1-6).

Now What?

See the October 23 devotion on Ephesians 4:14 for more ways to discern spiritual truth from falsehood.

Did You Know?

The Bible never mentions an angel named Moroni.