- The things of God really are of deep import. Only time, experience, and careful, ponderous and solemn thoughts can find them out, provided, of course, there is a real desire to know the things of God accompanied by obedience to His commandments. If you don’t desire them, you won’t ask and won’t receive. And if you do desire them, you will ask and you will obey. It is self-regulated, in that sense. Everyone decides for themselves just how much of an advantage in the world to come they are willing to acquire here.
- Freedom of agency really means accountability. That is its chief meaning. Unfortunately, because of political debate, it has assumed a much less rigorous meaning. We are free, therefore we are accountable before God for all our acts. The Atonement alone affords us relief from that accountability. Taking advantage of the Atonement for that purpose, however, does require us to obey Christ’s conditions.
- It is not true that “seeing is believing.” Rather, believing is to see. Belief will open your eyes. The Voice, three levels removed from us, is regained by your election to remove the veil that bars your hearing and your sight.
- It is a veil and not a wall you must pass through. You elect whether or not you will pass through.
- There is no one, other than you, who can make the decision to go forward. It is far more frightening to persist through the veil than to remain without a view of Heaven.
- Revelation from Heaven is also a revelation of yourself. For as you see Him, you see most clearly how very limited and dependent you are upon Him. You cannot be prideful after seeing yourself alongside Him.
- Heaven is steeped in ceremonial rites intended to preserve and declare the Glory of God and the wisdom of His acts. The depth, heights, and majesty of His undertakings are beyond man’s comprehension. Words fail in the attempt. It is best understood by seeing and not to be otherwise understood.
- God wants for us to understand Him. He is eager to meet with and touch us, as we should be to know and touch Him.
- God loves His children equally, but we love Him unequally in return. If we would love Him as he loves us, we would leap into His open arms and rejoice in the touch of our Lord.
- He bears seven wounds on His person: Two in His wrists, two in His palms, two in His feet, and one in His side. Seven is the symbolic number of completion or perfection. Seven wounds reflect the completion of His sacrifice and of that sacrifice’s complete perfection.
- Christ’s sacrifice has completely healed all that the Fall of Adam brought to pass. As Adam went before, so Christ came after, the one the antithesis of the other, and both making this creation a chiasm of Fall and Redemption. We stand in the center, where it is all in balance about us.
- The balance between Adam’s Fall and Christ’s sacrifice provides a neutral balance of opposites. We choose what we are willing to do with this balanced universe.
- We tip the scales by our choices, and by so doing, we change all eternity. We change eternity by the choices we make here.
- There is an eternal balance, with infinite results, hanging on our every choice. We stand in peril or stand in glory depending upon our every thought and deed.
- Five minutes of mortality are more precious than all the prior eternities of pre-earth life. Only here can you demonstrate the faith from which creation itself was born.
- Our failures are mourned in the corridors of Heaven with groans for our shortcomings. We have angels and gods wishing our choices were always tipping the scale of balance in this life in favor of obedience to God.
- Our noble acts and righteous deeds are celebrated in joy and song in the corridors of Heaven. As we choose God and His ways, the Hosanna Shout rings out in Heaven for such choices. We are the place where eternity’s conflicts are now being played out. We are the battleground between infinite good and infinite failure.
- Life is an open book test. We only need to realize the test is underway to be able to pass it.
- Joy cannot be found by subordinating the spirit to the flesh. Joy, peace, and freedom come only by subordinating the flesh to the spirit.
- The meekness of the Lord as he supplicates us to follow Him is because of the great worth of souls. That great worth has been poured into us by the bitter cup from which He drank. Every person who has ever lived is an infinite creation.
- Within the coupling of the man and woman in the Lord there is found all eternity. They together are infinite. The temple rites are intended to establish this infinite and eternal union.
- Adam and Eve were given by God to each other before death entered into creation. Had there been no Fall, the man and woman would have remained together for ever.
- The eternal union of man and woman is a return to Eden before the Fall. The Temple and the ordinances found there are, for us, the return to Eden before the Fall and the completion of creation through the union of man and woman in an infinite covenant.
- Heaven does not need to await the afterlife, but you can be redeemed from the Fall here and now. Receiving the presence of God is to be redeemed from the Fall.
- The Millennium will happen as people prepare themselves for it. When the wheat is fully ripe, the Lord will return. You can receive Millennial blessings through the Second Comforter now.
- It would do little good to have the Lord return if there were not people prepared for His presence awaiting Him. If that were to occur before people are prepared, the whole earth would be wasted at His coming.
- If you would have Him return, then you must prepare individually to abide His coming. When you are ready, He will return.
- There is nothing hidden but what will be made known, but it is up to you to be willing to see and receive what is hidden.
- God hides most things in plain sight. It is up to you, therefore, to be willing to draw back the veil and see them.
- The religiously blind refuse to see. Blindness born from religious error is the most recalcitrant form of the disease.
- Knowledge of the mysteries of godliness is obtained only through obedience to God. He ordained this method to make His greatest truths universally available to all His humble followers. If it were otherwise, we would all have to go to college to receive training for the ministry.
- Education is no real advantage in receiving light and truth from God. Humility is the only real, great advantage that any soul ever possesses.
- Since God is no respecter of persons, He has ordained truth to come to us without respect to persons. Whatever truths may exist, His true followers seek after these things and find they are freely given.
- In order to go forward, you must go back. Without a return to the humility and faith of childhood you will not be able to see Him.
- When we elect to receive Him, He elects at that moment to receive us. We determine whether we are “elect” by our own election to receive Him.
- The proud will fail. Their failure will come as a natural consequence of their unfitness to be in God’s presence. Their pride will keep them from doing what is required to be in His presence. Had Naaman not returned to wash himself seven times in the Jordan River, he would have died a leper. Many of us die lepers because we find such things as dipping in rivers childish. Too often we join Naaman in asking, Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? May I not wash in them, and be clean? — and join him too in reacting, So he turned and went his way in a rage. Be humble enough to do as the prophets ask you and submit to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel. You will be healed if you do. For the Apostles and Prophets are Christ’s chosen ministers.
- You must choose your world: this one or the next. You cannot choose both.
- Your past controls your now. You can only control the future by what you do now. But what you do ‘now’ controls all of eternity.
- The most important lessons in life, shedding the greatest light, are almost invariably the most painful as well. That is as it must be. Christ learned the most because He suffered the most.
- Things which seem perfectly normal here in mortality are completely mad when viewed from eternity. Had the rich man a broader view of things, he would have treated his beggar Lazarus more kindly. By the time his omission became clear to him, it was too late to repair.
- While mortal, we are all rich because it lies within each of us to help others.
- We are better off taking advice and instruction from God than giving it to Him. Most of mankind is so unwilling to accept advice and instruction from Him, however, that they never hear Him.
- The restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith contains His tools for approaching Him.
- We are told to study out of “the best books.” In this dispensation, apart from the scriptures themselves, very few have been written.
SECTION 159
THE PROVERBS OF DENVER SNUFFER JR.