BOM 2 Nephi 2

In 2 Nephi 2, the exceptionally rich chapter that is today’s reading, many passages deserve attention.  But the day has been long — beginning with an early morning return visit, this time with a group of friends, to the Provo City Center Temple open house, followed by an excellent breakfast at a nearby cafe, and ending with dinner with other friends and attendance with them, at a performance of The Nerd at the Hale Center Theater in Orem — and it’s late, and I’m tired, so I’m simply going to mention one of the most famous and beloved verses in the entire Book of Mormon:

Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.  (2 Nephi 2:25)

This is in stark contrast with the same chapter’s description (just two verses later) of the devil, who “seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself”  (2 Nephi 2:27).

And what a contrast it is to the sentiment expressed in the famous early-eighteenth-century Colonial American sermon of Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God”:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Terryl Givens has spoken about the God of Jonathan Edwards, as well:

One of my favorite stories concerns a woman named Sarah Edwards, wife of the famous Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards. He was best known perhaps for his sermon that every early American schoolchild had read: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He told his audience:

The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present. . . .

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you.

And, for the unregenerate, he continued:

When God beholds the ineffable extremity of your case, and sees your torment to be so vastly disproportioned to your strength, and sees how your poor soul is crushed, and sinks down, as it were, into an infinite gloom; he will have no compassion upon you . . . ; there shall be no moderation or mercy.¹⁵

I cannot help but wonder how such excesses struck the hearts and minds of tender people everywhere and of Edwards’ own devout and loving wife in particular. It so happened that on one occasion when Edwards was out of town, another local preacher came to visit Sarah and her children. He offered to have a prayer with the family, and she agreed. Afterward, she recorded in her journal that while the Reverend Peter Reynolds was offering his prayer, she found herself feeling “an earnest desire that, in calling on God, he should say, Father.” She asked herself, “Can I now at this time, with the confidence of a child, and without the least misgiving of heart, call God my Father?”

In consequence of this reflection, she recorded, “I felt a strong desire to be alone with God,” and withdrew to her chamber. In the moments that followed, she continued:

The presence of God was so near, and so real, that I seemed scarcely conscious of any thing else. God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, seemed as distinct persons, both manifesting their inconceivable loveliness, and mildness, and gentleness, and their great and immutable love to me. . . .

The peace and happiness, which I hereupon felt, was altogether inexpressible.

Long before Joseph Smith offered his first prayer, thousands and millions of people must have yearned, as Sarah did, for the assurance that God is not the severe, distant, impersonal deity of Jonathan Edwards but the kind, loving, and very personal God that Joseph found in the Sacred Grove.

The Latter-day Saint understanding that God is our loving Heavenly Father, and that, as Moses 1:39 explains, it is “[his] work and [his] glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man,” breathes a very different spirit from that of Rev. Edwards’s sermon.

But it is very much  the spirit of Paul’s letter to his quasi-adopted son Timothy, in which the ancient apostle wrote of “God our Saviour, who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4).

Perhaps it shouldn’t be very surprising that Mormons often seem to radiate what has been called “ruthless optimism.”