The Iron Rod Podcast

One of the most divisive topics to come out of Nauvoo is polygamy. One challenge, however, is that the spiritual polygamy that was taught during and after Nauvoo was completely different than the temporal polygamy that is mentioned in the scriptures. In this first of three episodes polygamy, we review what the scriptures actually say and don’t say about polygamy in their original context to understand what scriptural polygamy was all about and what that means for us today.

The history of the modern LDS Church portrays Sidney Rigdon in a generally unflattering light. His decision to not acquiesce to Brigham Young after the death of Joseph and Hyrum, and his resulting excommunication are often the primary “evidence” used to write Sidney off. But there are over twenty sections of the Doctrine and Covenants in which the Lord speaks about Sidney by name, and what the Lord says is quite interesting. In this episode, we scratch the surface on who Sidney was, both before and after finding the Book of Mormon, and why the Lord considered him equal with Joseph Smith.

After the Kirtland temple dedication, the church proceeded on a much different trajectory than in the preceding years. Financial troubles in Kirtland, internal strife and conflict with non-members in Missouri, relocation to Nauvoo and the introduction of radical new doctrines were key indicators that something had changed. This episode discusses these tumultuous years and puts the events into a historical and scriptural context.

One cannot truly understand the Doctrine and Covenants without understanding the historical context in which they were received. A challenge we all face is that the history of the church that we have been taught is incomplete and in some instances, inaccurate. In this episode we briefly cover the seven years leading up to the Kirtland temple dedication, filling in gaps in the record with documented accounts that paint a much fuller, more complex, and more coherent history than the “official” history.

Next week’s episode will cover what happened after the Kirtland temple dedication.

We dive deeper into the nature of God as described in the Lectures on Faith and corroborated by the rest of the scriptures, and discuss how we got D&C 130 which contradicts all these scriptural witnesses. How many personages comprise the Godhead? How many have bodies of flesh and bone? Is the Holy Ghost a personage? All these questions and more are addressed in this episode.

Lectures on Faith were added to the scriptures in 1835 by a general assembly of the church. They were removed in 1921 by a committee of six men. In this episode we review the history of how and why the Lectures were created, rebut some of the reasons given for their removal, and discuss a few of the key doctrines taught in the Lectures.

We discuss the different roles of a prophet, including bringing forth the word of God and testing the people. We also review and test “The Fourteen Fundamentals of Following the Prophet” against the scriptures.

We discuss the reformatted scriptures recently published by MD, including examples of issues they address as well as Watcher’s plan for taking them to the next level.

Watcher shares a few of his first word searches. Searcher discusses the importance of historical records and tools like the Joseph Smith Papers project. MD talks about using BibleHub to analyze the Greek and Hebrew origins of the Bible.