Is the Holy Spirit Inefficient?
Unreliable Method
CES Letter Core Question
Is God's method for revealing truth unreliable?
Same method: read, ponder, and pray. Different testimonies. All four testimonies cannot simultaneously be true. Is this the best God can come up with in revealing His truth to His children? Only .2% of the world’s population are members of God’s one true Church. This is God’s model and standard of efficiency?
Next Relevant Quote
Unreliable Method
If God’s method to revealing truth is through feelings, it is a very ineffective and unreliable method. We have thousands of religions and billions of members of those religions saying that their truth is God’s only truth and everyone else is wrong because they felt God or God’s spirit reveal the truth to them. Each religion has believers who believe that their spiritual experiences are more authentic and powerful than those of the adherents of other religions. They cannot all be right together, if at all.
CES Letter, Page 75
God’s method of “revealing truth through feelings” is actually extremely efficient to those who are not “past feeling” (Eph. 4:19, 1 Ne. 17:45). The Lord calls “upon all men by the Holy Ghost everywhere” (Moses 5:14). The righteous will respond. Christ explained: “Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice” (John 18:37).
The alleged inefficiency is a result of a majority of people refusing to hear the Holy Spirit. The Lord told Joseph Smith in the 1830s: “All flesh is corrupted before me; and the powers of darkness prevail upon the earth, among the children of men, in the presence of all the hosts of heaven.” (D&C 38:11.) “And the whole world lieth in sin, and groaneth under darkness and under the bondage of sin.” (D&C 84:49.) It would appear that the world is even more wicked today.
Before mortal birth we could learn to feel the Holy Spirit. Elder Boyd K. Packer remarked: “Revelation is the process of communication to the spiritual eyes and to the spiritual ears that were ours before our mortal birth.” Apostle John Taylor explained it this way: “When truth shall touch the cords of your heart they will vibrate; then intelligence shall illuminate your mind, and shed [its] lustre in your soul, and you shall begin to understand the things you once knew, but which had gone from you.”
Joseph Smith declared that “All things whatsoever God in his infinite wisdom has seen fit and proper to reveal to us, while we are dwelling in mortality. . . are revealed to our spirits precisely as though we had no bodies at all.” The Holy Spirit is “the still small voice, which whispereth through and pierceth all things” (D&C 85:6).
The author of The CES Letter alleges inefficiency in God’s methods, but we cannot predict how many of His children will be saved. The process of gaining light and truth continues after death in the spirit world. President Joseph F. Smith saw that in that realm:
Chosen messengers went forth to declare the acceptable day of the Lord and proclaim liberty to the captives who were bound, even unto all who would repent of their sins and receive the gospel.
Thus was the gospel preached to those who had died in their sins, without a knowledge of the truth, or in transgression, having rejected the prophets. . .
I beheld that the faithful elders of this dispensation, when they depart from mortal life, continue their labors in the preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption, through the sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son of God, among those who are in darkness and under the bondage of sin in the great world of the spirits of the dead. (D&C 138:31-32, 57.)
Multiple scriptures state that “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matt. 7:14; see also 2 Ne. 31:18, 3 Ne. 14:14, 27:33, D&C 132:22). Joseph Smith taught: “The disappointment of hopes and expectations at the resurrection would be indescribably dreadful.”