The Unsealed Portion

At the beginning of Elder W. Mark Bassett's October 2016 talk, he talked about a model of the gold plates which he had when he was young. Both the model and the original had many metal pages with writing on them, some of which were sealed and thus impossible to read.

Now, I could spend a minute or so talking about what's written on the sealed portion of the plates, as we have been given a little bit of information about that, and Elder Bassett admitted to having been intensely curious about that sealed portion when he was young. But in his talk, Elder Bassett argued that more important than learning what's in the sealed portion is paying attention to the portion that isn't sealed. We have a lot of scripture available to us. We would do better to read and learn from the scripture we do have than speculate on what we might learn from the scripture we don't have.

Besides, in many of the places in the scriptures where we learn about the sealed portion of the scriptures, we are also told that there will come a time when all things will be revealed, including what's written in that part of the book. We don't need to know what's in the sealed portion just yet. When we do need to know, God will tell us.

In the meantime, it would be best for us to learn what we can from the rest of the scriptures. As long as we don't have access to the sealed portion of the scriptures, we might as well try to learn what we can from the unsealed portion. Elder Bassett confessed that, in his eagerness to see what was in the sealed part of his model scriptures, he completely ignored what was written in the unsealed part, and he urged us not to make the same mistake. The scriptures were given to us for our spiritual development and learning. Let us make good use of the scriptures we've been given, and not fret too much about the scriptures that we have yet to be given.