A God Who Doesn't Change

I promised at the end of the last chapter to follow the seam into the history — how a teaching your keystone doesn’t contain came to be taught anyway, who taught it, and what your own Church has said about it since. This is that chapter, and it’s the one I’ve rewritten the most — because it would be so easy to turn what follows into a list of accusations. I don’t want that, and if it reads that way, I’ve failed you.

So let me say what I’m not doing. I’m not going to call your prophets liars or frauds, and I’m not going to mock anyone. Every quotation below comes from your own scriptures, your own General Conference, or your own Church’s official website — nothing else. And I’ll hand you the framing your Church itself uses for each one, in its own words, so you can weigh it fairly. All I’m asking is that we notice something together and sit with the question it raises.

The test the Bible sets for itself

Before we look at anything that changed, look at what the Bible says about change in God.

Malachi 3:6 — God says of Himself, “For I am the LORD, I change not.” Hebrews 13:8 says the same of the Son: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” This is the same note your own Book of Mormon struck — “unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity.” On this, all three books you trust agree without a seam. God does not change, and neither does the truth about Him.

That matters because the Bible also gives a plain test for anyone who claims to speak for God. Moses laid it down:

“When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously” (Deuteronomy 18:20-22).

The test is simple and a little frightening: a true word from God holds. It doesn’t get denounced a generation later by the same office that first taught it. So here is the only question this chapter asks. When a teaching is given by one prophet as doctrine, and reversed by a later prophet as error, which one was speaking for the God who does not change? Here are three times it comes up, in your own record.

First: Adam is God

In April 1852, in a sermon later printed in the Journal of Discourses, Brigham Young — the prophet who led your people to Utah — taught this about who God is:

When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is Michael, the Archangel, the Ancient of Days! about whom holy men have written and spoken—He is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.

— Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 1:50, April 9, 1852, journalofdiscourses.com

I want to be scrupulously fair about what this is. Brigham didn’t mumble it in private; he preached it from the stand as doctrine, and it was published with the sanction of the First Presidency.

Now here is what a later prophet — Spencer W. Kimball, in the priesthood session of your October 1976 General Conference — said about that exact teaching:

We warn you against the dissemination of doctrines which are not according to the scriptures and which are alleged to have been taught by some of the General Authorities of past generations. Such, for instance, is the Adam-God theory. We denounce that theory and hope that everyone will be cautioned against this and other kinds of false doctrine.

— President Spencer W. Kimball, October 1976 General Conference, Our Own Liahona, churchofjesuschrist.org

Read those two quotations back to back. One prophet teaches, from the pulpit, that Adam is our Father and our God. Another prophet, from the same pulpit, calls that teaching “false doctrine” by name and warns you against spreading it. I’m not adding a word of my own. Both men held the office you’re taught to follow, and they cannot both have been speaking for the God who does not change.

Second: a commandment, then a manifesto

You already know part of this one; plural marriage is no secret in your history. What’s worth doing carefully is looking at how it was framed — as a commandment — and then at how it ended.

The revelation now printed as section 132 doesn’t offer plural marriage as an option. It frames it as covenant, with the weightiest possible warning attached:

For behold, I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.

— Doctrine & Covenants 132:4, churchofjesuschrist.org

Then, in 1890, President Wilford Woodruff issued what your scriptures now print as Official Declaration 1 — the Manifesto — ending the practice:

And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.

— President Wilford Woodruff, Official Declaration 1, September 24, 1890, churchofjesuschrist.org

I have to be fair here. Your Church does not present the Manifesto as an admission that section 132 was wrong. It presents it as revelation too — God directing His prophet to end a practice for a season, much as He commands and later releases elsewhere in scripture. That’s a real answer, and you’re entitled to weigh it. I’d only lay Moses’ test gently beside it: a covenant whose rejection was said to bring damnation is set aside within one lifetime. Whether you call the change revelation or reversal, the teaching about what God requires of you did not hold still.

Third: the priesthood ban

The third I’ll handle most carefully of all, letting your Church do almost all the talking — it has spoken about this more honestly than people expect.

For over a century, Black members of your Church could not hold the priesthood or enter the temple. Your Church’s own Gospel Topics essay, “Race and the Priesthood,” dates the start of that policy plainly:

In two speeches delivered before the Utah territorial legislature in January and February 1852, Brigham Young announced a policy restricting men of black African descent from priesthood ordination.

— Gospel Topics essay, Race and the Priesthood, churchofjesuschrist.org

The restriction ended in 1978, in what your scriptures now print as Official Declaration 2: “all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color.” And here I want you to hear the Church’s own verdict on the reasons that had been taught for the ban all those years — not my verdict, the Church’s:

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.

— Gospel Topics essay, Race and the Priesthood, churchofjesuschrist.org

I take no pleasure in that quotation, and I’d ask you not to either. Those “theories advanced in the past” were taught by prophets and apostles as the reasons God Himself had withheld the priesthood. Today your Church says, in writing, that it disavows them. That’s an honest thing to do. But notice what it also means: for more than a hundred years, faithful members were taught as doctrine something the Church now formally rejects.

What I am — and am not — saying

Here’s the part I most need you to hear, because everything above can be misread.

I am not saying Brigham Young was a wicked man, or that Wilford Woodruff or Spencer W. Kimball were. Nothing I’ve written requires it. Men can be sincere, brave, devoted to God, and still be wrong — I am, about plenty of things, and so are the pastors I trust most. This was never about whether these men were good.

It’s about one quiet, unavoidable point: “follow the prophet” cannot be the final authority when prophets reverse each other. If one prophet teaches a thing as doctrine and a later prophet calls that same thing false doctrine, then “the living prophet is always right” has already broken — not by my argument, but by their own words. Something has to stand above the prophet to tell you which one was right, and your own tradition offers only one candidate for that job: the scriptures. That’s why God gave Moses a test — so the word could judge the man, and not only the man the word.

I asked you this back in the first chapter, and I’m asking it again on purpose. The Bereans, when an apostle himself preached to them, “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” — and Scripture calls them noble for weighing even an apostle against the written word (Acts 17:11). That’s not rebellion. It’s the most faithful thing a person can do.

Where this points

If the living prophet can be reversed — if he can be wrong even about who God is, as the Adam-God reversal shows he was — then the question “what is God actually like?” cannot be answered by asking who currently holds the office. It has to be answered from the word that stands above the office. From scripture.

That’s the question this whole letter has been circling, and it’s time to answer it directly. Not from my church. Not from a creed you don’t hold. From yours — your Bible and your Book of Mormon, the two books that already agree that God does not change.

Let’s do that next — using only yours.

Your friend, Brock