The end of all things

I've been meaning, on an off, to get into blogging. I like writing, and the process "forces" me to put ideas floating around in my head into some sort of coherent form.

But I also have a number of hangups with the process. I don't want to blog and portray something that I'm not. So, if I blog primarily about spiritual things, does that portray me falsely as being more spiritual than I actually am? (I suppose it may give away what I would like to become, at the very least, which is far less of an issue!)

In any case, while visiting North Pine Ward earlier today, Bro. David Milne spoke about Pride. In it, he spoke about the type of pride where we are concerned about what others think of us, instead of worrying about what God is thinking. Ultimately, I would love to have a testimony that I please God, as Enoch did. This is a similar state, I suspect, to that described my Mormon in the book of Moroni - that when Christ comes, we shall be like him.

So, my intent in blogging needs to be about sharing what is helping me, and sharing my love of holy things. It's not meant to suggest I'm perfect or better than others. For that reason, I don't expect to make this public.

The title of this first post is "The End of All Things", and is based on the scripture in 1 Peter 4. Lately, I've been reading the New Testament backwards, and it has been interesting to kind of read about the apostasy in reverse. I'm into the Gospels now, but time and again during Revelation and the various epistles, you come across these references to the apostasy. At the same time, I've listened to and read various materials by Hugh Nibley, and some of the works of the early Christian leaders following the death of the Apostles (Clement, Irenaeus, Polycarp, etc). One of them wrote of the change in the church along the lines of "In Asia, the lights went out". Nibley has an excellent talk on it in 2 parts called "The Forty Day Ministry". Highly recommended. (On an unrelated topic, his speech "How to write an anti-mormon book" is highly entertaining and very insightful - and yes, it is about exposing the shoddy methods common to anti-mormon literature.)

Back to the scripture in Peter. It talks about the End of All Things. Nibley's study of apocryphal sources suggests that the early church knew that the church would not last, and that it would furthermore be corrupted by those of the fold within 2 generations. In light of this, consider the scriptural account following Christ's transfiguration:

10 And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?

11 And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias shall truly first come and restore all things.

(Emphasis added.) Just as the ancient church understood that the End of All Things (speaking of the apostasy from the Gospel, loss of the keys, etc), they also understood and had Christ reaffirm that Elias would come to restore all things.

What a blessing it is to live in a time when the truth has been restored!