Ether 4

At some point, if you get old enough, you’ll want the record as a reminder of past glories. These plates will be your Faith-in-God award.”

This caveat about telling people explains why Mosiah kept the record clandestine. I, however, Moroni, have the privilege of conveying them to my admittedly limited—non-existent?—audience. Faith in Jesus has gone down the tube. I’m the best witness money can’t buy. And now what will I do with the record? Bury it again. Hide it. What a country.

Here is what God told me to do (he said I could quote him):

The Jared’s brother story and pretty much every other story in these plates you should keep to yourself. When Gentiles get off their self-aggrandizing power trip, with all its accoutrements (sex, liquor, fraud, etc.), then we can talk. But now? No way. They’ve got to get as much faith as Jared’s brother had before I will trust them as a social class. I might even give them their own unique visions—if they change drastically.

I manipulate elements—earth, air, fire, water—and I feel free using any of them to kill people I don’t like. How can you tell who I don’t like? Start with people biased against my disciples. Next comes those who think I have nothing more to say. If you think that, you’ll hear me loud and clear in the end. As I often say, don’t push me.

On the other hand—and I always need to make this point (sometimes I go too negative)—believers in me get injections of my spirit. Right in the heart.

My spirit, by the way, isn’t so much about gooey feelings. It’s more about incitement to non-violence. It’s about kindness. It’s all about affirmation of good work people do. My spirit is a speechless motivational speaker. If you have an impulse to do something good, that’s a sign. There’s no good done that I don’t spark.

If you don’t believe that, you probably reject everything else about me too, including the Incarnation part and the Great Reconciliation and my general photon presence in the world—yes, it’s literal. I’m the light. Which makes me the life, since everything needs light, except for a few weird creatures I messed up on and banished to the ocean floor. I’m also the truth, which you can see, perhaps, by my bluntness even today.

One more invitation to the Gentiles, who you, Moroni, should feel lucky you don’t have to contend with, given how crappy your relationships with fellow Israelites have gone. Here it is: Come my way and I’ll show you more than you’ve known, all the truth you couldn’t reach because you lacked faith.

Meanwhile, come my way too, you Israelites, and you’ll find out what secret lines I’ve initialed in God’s will and testament, which has you as the chief beneficiaries. (Not that he’s going to die. But he currently holds dual citizenship and might move outright to his other country.) When you tear down that wall of hyperlogicality that constricts your ideologies, soap up your heart and prop your eyes open, you’ll see phantasms that one only finds by hunting for them. I can’t say more than that, but whatever you imagine, this is bigger. (Hint: this massive blessing-load includes what I showed my friend John in a vision that unfortunately you don’t have access to, but a lot of which he didn’t even write down, it was so luminously precocious.)

Gentiles, Jews, whatever: when you get your hands on what I’m writing right now, you’ll know God is on the move. He’s grinding out more news.

So this proviso, this mantra, if you will: repent and believe and get baptized. If you believe and are baptized, you’re in; don’t believe and you may as well skip baptism, because it won’t do a thing for you a Roman bath wouldn’t do. (And probably a lot less.)

I have to honor any of you who do these three things and don’t renounce them because of troubling shadows on the margins of my words. And by “honor,” I mean make you a king—hopefully a magnanimous one like King Benjamin—over a domain I’ve had on the backlot since before I made the world.

You know who I am. Amen.