Revelation 22:18-19
From a young age, I anticipated the time when I would serve as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With many close family members and friends having previously served as full-time missionaries, I had many opportunities to prepare for my own experience. Among the many aspects of this preparation was a desire to know what the hard questions might be, and how to answer them. Listening to many stories from returned missionaries, combined with pretty simple reasoning, I concluded that religious questions (both sincere and intentionally-confounding) were unavoidable as a missionary.
One of the most common intentionally-confounding questions involved in the stories shared by my fellow returned missionaries was how any of The Church's modern-day scripture (and particularly The Book of Mormon) could remain valid within the presence of the warning at the very end of the Bible, Revelation 22:18-19.
Almost every story involved a religious opponent attempting to utilize this scripture in disproving the validity of The Book of Mormon, and therefore the reality of Joseph Smith being a true prophet and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being the true church of God. Because I had learned for myself that The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's prophetic call, and The Church were indeed absolutely true, I determined to somehow find an explanation for how the scripture in Revelation did not disprove these things. Fortunately, the returned-missionary stories always included an explanation that that missionary had used.
Among the first explanations I heard was that nearly the same thing is said in Deuteronomy 4:2 which reads, "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it...". Since this scripture came to Moses over a thousand years prior to John's writing of Revelation, the explanation reasoned that if everything in the Bible following Deuteronomy is considered valid scripture, then Deut. 4:2 (and, therefore, Rev. 22:18-19) must not be valid scripture. In short, either these two sets of verses are true and everything following Deuteronomy is false (which everyone could agree is wrong), or the two sets of verses are false. This explanation, while scripturally shrewd, however, did not seem satisfying enough for me. Since I regarded nearly everything in the Bible as God's word, trying to prove a portion of it to be true by disproving another portion was never accompanied by spiritual confirmation.
Another explanation held that, since the New Testament was historically put together in a non-chronological order, John's multiple references to "this book" cannot refer to the entire Bible as a whole, but must instead only refer to the book of Revelation. Supporting this claim was the fact that nearly all modern biblical scholars agree that Revelation was written probably before 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, and probably the whole Gospel of John itself. Upon reading Rev. 22:18-19 within this context, this explanation seemed much more convincing than the first. However, I came to realize soon that even this did not provide enough spiritual satisfaction. As part of his prophetic responsibilities, the prophet Joseph Smith was commanded to edit the Bible into what is now referred to as the Joseph Smith Translation which included additions to the very book of Revelation. Hence, even if Rev. 22:18-19 only referred to the book of Revelation, this second explanation didn't seem complete enough.
With no further way to conjoin the warning in Revelation with my personal testimony, I needed to set this scripture on the mental "I currently don't know" shelf and move on in my preparation for a mission. After at least three years of waiting, I found myself as a full-time missionary in the Bronx of New York City sitting in a chapel of The Church during a missionary training meeting. The mission president from the mission that helped to film the training video series referred as The District was there providing training to us directly. At a very unexpected moment he asked all of us to turn to the scripture that I then dreaded ever being brought up: Rev. 22:18-19. Figuring that he would eventually utilize the same explanations that did not work for me, I soon found out that I was wrong. He provided a new explanation that immediately brought spiritual confirmation of truth to me.
He drew our attention to how the verses prohibit "any man" from "[adding] unto" or "[taking] away from the words of the book...". Further explaining that this means the plagues come upon anyone who uses mortal reasoning or worldly sources to change, add to, or take away from, the scriptures. But, as latter-day saints, we do not claim that any of our scripture came from the knowledge of a man; rather, we claim it to be divine revelation given directly from God. Modern revelation is one of our hallmark beliefs, and certainly one that I had a strong testimony of by this point.
After years of exercising patience, acknowledging that my understanding of the Lord's word is incomplete, I finally was able to take Rev. 22:18-19 off the "I currently don't know" shelf. I learned that these verses teach a critical lesson about the importance of us as mortal, imperfect people fully relying on the Lord's divine revelation and not our own individual reasoning. Indeed, the very definition of scripture is truths revealed from the Lord and not by man.
One of the most common intentionally-confounding questions involved in the stories shared by my fellow returned missionaries was how any of The Church's modern-day scripture (and particularly The Book of Mormon) could remain valid within the presence of the warning at the very end of the Bible, Revelation 22:18-19.
"For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." ~ Rev. 22:18-19
Almost every story involved a religious opponent attempting to utilize this scripture in disproving the validity of The Book of Mormon, and therefore the reality of Joseph Smith being a true prophet and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being the true church of God. Because I had learned for myself that The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's prophetic call, and The Church were indeed absolutely true, I determined to somehow find an explanation for how the scripture in Revelation did not disprove these things. Fortunately, the returned-missionary stories always included an explanation that that missionary had used.Among the first explanations I heard was that nearly the same thing is said in Deuteronomy 4:2 which reads, "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it...". Since this scripture came to Moses over a thousand years prior to John's writing of Revelation, the explanation reasoned that if everything in the Bible following Deuteronomy is considered valid scripture, then Deut. 4:2 (and, therefore, Rev. 22:18-19) must not be valid scripture. In short, either these two sets of verses are true and everything following Deuteronomy is false (which everyone could agree is wrong), or the two sets of verses are false. This explanation, while scripturally shrewd, however, did not seem satisfying enough for me. Since I regarded nearly everything in the Bible as God's word, trying to prove a portion of it to be true by disproving another portion was never accompanied by spiritual confirmation.
Another explanation held that, since the New Testament was historically put together in a non-chronological order, John's multiple references to "this book" cannot refer to the entire Bible as a whole, but must instead only refer to the book of Revelation. Supporting this claim was the fact that nearly all modern biblical scholars agree that Revelation was written probably before 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, and probably the whole Gospel of John itself. Upon reading Rev. 22:18-19 within this context, this explanation seemed much more convincing than the first. However, I came to realize soon that even this did not provide enough spiritual satisfaction. As part of his prophetic responsibilities, the prophet Joseph Smith was commanded to edit the Bible into what is now referred to as the Joseph Smith Translation which included additions to the very book of Revelation. Hence, even if Rev. 22:18-19 only referred to the book of Revelation, this second explanation didn't seem complete enough.
With no further way to conjoin the warning in Revelation with my personal testimony, I needed to set this scripture on the mental "I currently don't know" shelf and move on in my preparation for a mission. After at least three years of waiting, I found myself as a full-time missionary in the Bronx of New York City sitting in a chapel of The Church during a missionary training meeting. The mission president from the mission that helped to film the training video series referred as The District was there providing training to us directly. At a very unexpected moment he asked all of us to turn to the scripture that I then dreaded ever being brought up: Rev. 22:18-19. Figuring that he would eventually utilize the same explanations that did not work for me, I soon found out that I was wrong. He provided a new explanation that immediately brought spiritual confirmation of truth to me.
He drew our attention to how the verses prohibit "any man" from "[adding] unto" or "[taking] away from the words of the book...". Further explaining that this means the plagues come upon anyone who uses mortal reasoning or worldly sources to change, add to, or take away from, the scriptures. But, as latter-day saints, we do not claim that any of our scripture came from the knowledge of a man; rather, we claim it to be divine revelation given directly from God. Modern revelation is one of our hallmark beliefs, and certainly one that I had a strong testimony of by this point.
After years of exercising patience, acknowledging that my understanding of the Lord's word is incomplete, I finally was able to take Rev. 22:18-19 off the "I currently don't know" shelf. I learned that these verses teach a critical lesson about the importance of us as mortal, imperfect people fully relying on the Lord's divine revelation and not our own individual reasoning. Indeed, the very definition of scripture is truths revealed from the Lord and not by man.
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