Once again, Facebook helped me find something I'd like to blog about. I need to brainstorm good ideas and refill my idea list.
It's amazing to think that the scriptures are thousands of years old. The Book of Mormon starts in 600 BC. All my life, that's just been a number, but now I'm realizing that the "newest" scriptures we have are actually older than the New Testament, which was written about 2000 years ago. Those were the days where people wore robes and sandals. Those were the days where, if you wanted to spread a message to lots of people, you'd have to write down each copy by hand and deliver it in-person, or pay someone else to do that for you. You couldn't copy-and-paste something from off the internet into an Email and Send it to everyone in your contacts list, because none of those things existed then. Back in those days, spreading the word was hard.
And yet, they did it. They wrote things down (by hand), and preserved those messages for hundreds of years through many generations. The stories in the scriptures are older than the dust under our shoes.
Over the years, they haven't changed much. There have been a few alterations in the many translations, but mostly, the stories and messages are the same now as they were a thousand years ago, and they're certainly the same now as they were the last time you read them. Theoretically, a person with a perfect memory could read a book once and never have to read it again, but we read the Book of Mormon and the other scriptures repeatedly, not because they keep changing, but because we keep changing, and reading the scriptures can change us even more.
2 comments:
Mostly true. and rather amazing.
Don't forget, however, the newest scriptures the Doctrine and Covenants. They are within the last couple hundred years. And then there's our other scriptures - the words of modern prophets - often recorded in the Ensign.
Most of our scriptures are ancient, but ancient or modern, the messages are unchanging. Our needs and our understanding do change so that we can find new answers as we search them.
How blessed we are!
Yeah... You're right. I keep forgetting about the D&C and the PoGP, possibly because they're all sewn together in the Triple-Combination, which I primarily think of as the Book of Mormon plus some other stuff.
Still, it's that same idea. A hundred years is a long time, and two-hundred years is twice that long. Those scriptures are almost ancient. But, you're right, we keep getting new messages, so not all of our scriptures are as old as dust, or even as old as this calendar year.
We are very blessed to have such an abundance of scripture, both ancient and modern.
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