Introduction
The book of Isaiah opens with a scathing rebuke of a people engrossed in blindness. They are spoken of as rebellious sons. He calls these people worse than dumb animals, totally incapable of an informed relationship with him. He calls them sinners, wrongdoers, perverts, and apostates. He says they are sick and diseased from their head to their heart to the soles of their feet, connoting that their gospel understanding, desires, and actions are wrong, from normal members to leaders. He says they are covered with bruises, wounds, and festering sores, intimating that despite the gravity of their condition, they aren’t aware of it. He says they are as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah.1
Most Mormons shed off this condemnatory language as applying to some historical group, or some contemporary Christian sect. But the chapter continues, making the target of the rebuke more clear.
For what purpose are your abundant sacrifices to me? says Jehovah. I have had my fill of offerings of rams and fat of fatted beasts; the blood of bulls and sheep and he-goats I do not want. When you come to see me, who requires you to trample my courts so? Bring no more worthless offerings; they are as a loathsome incense to me. As for convening meetings at the New Month and on the Sabbath, wickedness with the solemn gathering I cannot approve. Your monthly and regular meetings my soul detests. They have become a burden on me; I am weary of putting up with them. When you spread forth your hands, I will conceal my eyes from you; though you pray at length, I will not hear—your hands are filled with blood. Wash yourselves clean: remove your wicked deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil. (Isaiah 1:11-16, Gileadi Translation.)
What religious group today practices temple worship? What group emphasizes the frequency of temple worship while de-emphasizing the purpose of temple worship2 to the point that they can be compared to dumb cattle who trample the court of the temple, unaware of the reason they are there? What group has special meetings on the first Sabbath of the “New Month”? What group “spreads forth” their hands in prayer in temple worship, pleading for the Lord to hear them? Only the Latter-day Saints.
Is it possible that modern LDS temple worship is viewed by God much differently than it is viewed by modern Mormons?
Footnotes
- 1. “Hear, O heavens! Give heed, O earth! Jehovah has spoken: I have reared sons, brought them up, but they have revolted against me. The ox knows its owner, the ass its master’s stall, but Israel does not know; my people are insensible. Alas, a nation astray, a people weighed down by sin, the offspring of wrongdoers, perverse children: they have forsaken Jehovah, they have spurned the Holy One of Israel, they have lapsed into apostasy. Why be smitten further by adding to your waywardness? The whole head is sick, the whole heart diseased. From the soles of the feet even to the head there is nothing sound, only wounds and bruises and festering sores; they have not been pressed out or bound up, nor soothed with ointment.....Hear the word of Jehovah, O leaders of Sodom; give heed to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” (Isaiah 1:2-6,10 Gileadi Translation.) ↩
- 2. As described later in this chapter, the purpose of the temple is to re-enter the presence of God. ↩