Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me, since I appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen.

Fear not, nor be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any.” (Isaiah 44:6-8)

Mormonism Is A Non-Christian Cult Hostile To The Gospel

I mentioned before that, being an online apologetics and discernment work, Apprising Ministries does not involve itself in politics per se; however, there are times when those issues will cross, as is the case with popular conservative talk show host Glenn Beck and his recently concluded Divine Destiny event. AM correspondent Chrystal Whitt of Slaughter of the Sheep outlines the issue concerning Beck, who is a baptized member in good standing with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), in her insightful post Evangelicals And Glenn Beck:

the Beck phenomenon is hitting a fevered pitch among some church leaders despite the fact that Beck is a proud and vocal Mormon. Megachurch Pastor Jim Garlow, of Skyline Church, now pronounces Glenn Beck saved. (Online source)

Whitt then points us to Evangelical Megachurch Pastor Defends Support for Glenn Beck, which ran in The Christian Post, where we read:

Before deciding to stand by Beck, evangelical megachurch pastor Jim Garlow said he had to do a lot sorting and watched Beck as closely as he could. “I have listened and watched very carefully regarding clues to Glenn’s spiritual condition,” said the lead pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa, Calif. “I have interviewed several people who have been with him and have talked very specifically with him regarding his own personal salvation,” he added.

And according to Garlow, Beck has said “unequivocally” that that he relies on the atonement of Jesus on the cross for forgiveness for his sins. “[A]nd those are almost the exact words,” Garlow recalled in a five-page memo released this past Tuesday. “Few people use the term atonement. Glenn did. Garlow also credited Beck for laying out “the clearest explanation of the crucifixion and the resurrection that I have ever heard on national TV” about a month ago.

Even prominent Southern Baptist leader Richard Land was reportedly surprised to hear the Gospel so clearly on secular television. “I have interviewed persons who have talked specifically with Glenn about his personal salvation – persons extremely well known in Christianity – and they have affirmed (using language evangelicals understand), “‘Glenn is saved,’” Garlow reported. “He understands receiving Christ as savior.” (Online source)

Unfortunately, what this actually shows us is an appalling ignorance of the teachings of the LDS Church, not to mention that of Holy Scripture, by these evangelicals because the “Jesus” taught by Mormonism is clearly not Jesus Christ of Nazareth (c.f. Acts 4:10-12). Apparently they don’t realize that the Bible tells us it is most certainly possible that someone to come along who — proclaims another Jesus than the one [the Apostles] proclaimed; sad that these men put up with it readily enough (2 Corinthians 11:4).

Dr. Walter Martin (1928-1989), who was the foremost expert in religious cults having their origin in the United States, labeled the LDS Church “a non-Christian cult”; and Martin had the following to say about the Mormon “Jesus,” who is clearly not the Christ of Biblical revelation, in his classic textbook The Kingdom of the Cults:

The Savior of Mormonism, however, is an entirely different person, as their official publications clearly reveal. The Mormon “Savior” is not the second person of the Christian Trinity,… Mormons reject the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and he is not even a careful replica of the New Testament Redeemer.

In Mormon theology, Christ as a preexistent spirit was not only the spirit brother of the devil (as alluded to in The Pearl of Great Price, Moses 4:1-4, and later reaffirmed by Brigham Young in the Journal of Discourses, 13:282), but celebrated his own marriage to “Mary and Martha, and the other Mary,” at Cana of Galilee, “whereby he could see his seed, before he was crucified” (Apostle Orson Hyde, Journal of Discourses, 4:259; 2:82)…[and] the Mormon concept of the Virgin Birth alone distinguishes their “Christ” from the Christ of the Bible.[1]

I have pointed out before that I’ve been in the ministry fields of apologetics, Comparative Religion, and counter-cult evangelicism for nearly 23 years; and having lived in a heavily Mormon area of southwestern Wyoming for 10 of those years, I recognize immediately that Glenn Beck—consistent with any Mormon—will portray himself as a Christian. However, only in neo-liberal cult of the Emerging Church, residing deeply within the postmodern Wonderland of Humpty Dumpty language, could one who doesn’t even believe in the actual Jesus be considered a Christian.

Today way too many people spend way too much time bending over backwards trying to give “the benefit of the doubt” to things that rather obvious; and we can see an example of this above, e.g. the spiritual denseness of Jim Garlow and Richard Land concerning the Mormon Gleen Beck. Against this background I’ll bring your attention to Beck’s August 29th appearance on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Let me show you what Beck himself says concerning the parameters of his own personal religious faith in the transcript within Glenn Beck on ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally, America’s future and His Critics | Fox News Sunday.

While discussing that particular rally, it becomes obvious that even Chris Wallace recognized it was, indeed, a religious event as he says to Beck “the central message [of your event] was that we need to return to God, we need to get straight with God individually, and that’s going to help us as a nation.” Wallace then reminds us Beck “said recently that the reason that a growing number of Americans don’t think President Obama is a Christian” would be “they don’t recognize the faith that he’s practicing,” because, in Beck’s personal view, it’s “a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Note very carefully what Glenn Beck now tells us below:

Wallace: And I — you know I respect you, and I say this affectionately, but who made you the God squad?

Beck: Oh, nobody made me the God squad… I’d love to have an open conversation about collective salvation. Chris, you know, I don’t know — I don’t know what you know or what you believe, but most Christians, when you say, “I’m a Christian” — and look, I’m a Mormon, and most Christians don’t recognize me as a Christian, so who am I to say? I’m not judging. 

I’m saying most Christians would look at collective salvation, which is my salvation — my redemption is incumbent on what the collective does, so I can’t be saved unless the collective is saved. Well, that is a direct opposite of what the gospel talks about. Jesus came for personal salvation. It’s like people say, you know, you just accept Jesus and you’re saved. That’s not what my church teaches.  You are, but then you also — you got to get in there and plug. You got to change your heart as well. OK. That’s what I happen to believe. (Online source)

Since soteriology i.e. salvation isn’t the subject of this particular piece, here I’ll simply point out that 1) the “collective salvation” issue apparently arises from comments made by Barack Obama in 2008 while “delivering the commencement speech at Wesleyan University”[2]; 2) Beck leaves no doubt whatsoever that he is “a Mormon,” and that 3) he is trusting “what my church teaches” concerning salvation. The fine online apologetics and discernment work Equipping Christians succinctly tells us about salvation for the Mormon:

Grace in Mormonism is given after all a person can do on their own. Salvation in Mormonism is divided into two categories; general, unconditional salvation, and conditional, individual salvation. The free gift of salvation, according to LDS doctrine, is nothing more than a resurrected body, regardless of where the person ends up. However, to live forever in the presence of God requires obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Mormon gospel. (Online source)

Lord willing, another time I’ll teach you in more depth about what the LDS Church teaches in its works-righteousness system, which Beck summarized well as: “You got to change your heart as well.” For now though, I want to focus your attention on what Glenn Beck said, as cited in At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth:

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck told the crowd, in what was part religious revival and part history lecture. “America today begins to turn back to God.” (Online source)

The LDS god Is An Exalted Man And Mormonism Teaches You Can Become A god

What I’m going to show you now, from official sources of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), is precisely what the Mormon Church, which Glenn Beck has just told us he’s believing in, teaches about God; much like I did concerning the Mormon view of Jesus previously in The “Jesus” Of Glenn Beck. We begin with the below from the Gospel Library Gospel Topics section of the LDS website itself; under God the Father we’re taught:

God the Father is the Supreme Being in whom we believe and whom we worship. He is the ultimate Creator, Ruler, and Preserver of all things. He is perfect, has all power, and knows all things. He “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (D&C 130:22).
(Online source)

The “D&C 130:22” above refers to Doctrine And Covenants, which is one of four books considered Scripture by the LDS Church; the others being the King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Pearl of Great Price. D&C contains alleged, “Revelations Given To Joseph Smith, The Prophet, With Some Additions By His Siccessors In The Presidency Of The Church”; and we’re told that section 130 features, “Items of instruction given by Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Ramus, Illinois, April 2, 1843.”

So the following, D&C 130:22, is from the founder of the LDS Church himself. Telling us that he was the “prophet” chosen to “restore the church” Joseph Smith says God revealed to him that:

The ^aFather has a ^bbody of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of ^cSpirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not ^ddwell in us. (Online source)

It’s important to keep in mind here that in Mormonism the Trinity has also been redefined; instead of, within the nature of the one God there are three co-eternal, co-equal Persons Who are the one God, the LDS Church teaches that Heavenly Father (Elohim), Jesus (Jehovah), and the Holy Ghost, are three separate gods working together with one purpose. Then from the LDS publication Gospel Principles, which Mormons use for Sunday School, under Our Father in Heaven we’re informed:

Because we are made in his image (see Moses 6:9), we know that God has a body that looks like ours. His eternal spirit is housed in a tangible body of flesh and bones (see D&C 130:22). God’s body, however, is perfected and glorified, with a glory beyond all description.
(Online source)

Now here’s Joseph Smith on the nature of God from “one of the classics of [the LDS] Church literature,” which is known as The King Follet Discourse:

God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make himself visible—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man;… 

I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see… It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God, and to know that we may converse with Him as one man converses with another, and that He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did;…

Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power…

In the beginning, the head of the Gods called a council of the Gods; and they came together and concocted [prepared] a plan to create the world and people it… (Online source)

We’ve now been told by the founder/prophet of Mormonism that God was once human as we are; in addition, there are other Gods, and we also must “learn how to be gods as well.” And then under Godhead from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism there’s the following concerning Smith’s theology:

On June 16, 1844, in his last Sunday sermon before his martyrdom, Joseph Smith declared that “in all congregations” he had taught “the plurality of Gods” for fifteen years: “I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods” (TPJS, p. 370)…

Although the three members of the Godhead are distinct personages, their Godhead is “one” in that all three are united in their thoughts, actions, and purpose, with each having a fulness of knowledge, truth, and power. Each is a God. (Online source)

In closing this, for now, it’s an incontrovertible fact that Mormonism is polytheistic (many gods c.f. Abraham 4:1), whereas Christianity is monotheistic (one God c.f. Isaiah 43:10). We’ve seen that the LDS Heavenly Father—whose name is Elohim—has a body; however, the eyewitness testimony of the Apostle John in his Gospel deposition quotes the real Jesus telling us that the one true and living God of the Bible — is spirit (John 4:24). So Bill McKeever of the leading Christian work Mormonism Research Ministry is proven correct in his God the Father According to Mormonism when he tells us:

The Mormon doctrine of God is not the same as the historic Christian view. It holds that God and man are essentially of the same species, and that God the Father has a body of flesh and bones. He is not uniquely self-existent, transcendent, or eternal… 

The traditional Mormon view of God is summed up by the famous Lorenzo Snow couplet, “As man is God once was, as God is man may be.” The historic understanding of this strongly implies that God the Father was once a sinner, and that we ourselves may model our mortal experience unto godhood after the mortal experience he once participated in.” (Online source)

But since the god taught by the LDS Church, which Glenn Beck is believing in, is clearly not the God of the Bible, then according to the opening text above the Mormon god doesn’t even exist. And so the question now becomes: Just what exactly is a non-existent god going to do for America even if she does turn to it?

________________________________________________________________________________

End notes:

[1] Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults, Ravi Zacharias, Gen. Ed. (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2005), 252, emphasis mine .

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/world/americas/26iht-26wesleyan.13202000.html?_r=2, accessed 9/4/10.

HT: Bud Press

See also:

PASTOR KEN SILVA ON VIEW FROM THE BUNKER PODCAST

WHY GLENN BECK WANTS TO SAVE AMERICA

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS VS. THE GOSPEL

MORMON CHURCH: DEITY OF CHRIST

JOHN MACARTHUR: NO SPIRITUAL COMMON GROUND BETWEEN BIBLICAL CHRISTIANITY AND MORMONISM

TWO STICKS: REFUTING THE MORMON VIEW OF EZEKIEL 37:15-17

SBC’S RICHARD LAND SAYS MORMONISM FOURTH ABRAHAMIC FAITH