Zion

I greet you this beautiful Sabbath morning in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Master and Friend, and pray that you are covered with His blood and abiding safely under His feathers, the only safe places in the day in which we live.

Let's take a few moments this morning and talk about Zion.

This is a concept that I feel that is greatly misunderstood not only throughout the world, but especially among the Latter-day Saints.

We are fortunate at this time to live this earth's history where the culmination of this cycle's creation will be brought to pass in the establishment of a great latter-day, last-time Zion.

In the Lord's scriptural definition of Zion found in Moses chapter 7 verse 18, the Lord said this, And the Lord called his people Zion, for they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness, and there was no poor among them.

This external Zion that this scripture is referring to at the time of Enoch and his people can only be brought to pass through inward change.

Go back to the definition where the Lord said his people were one heart and one mind.

That, my friends, is inward heart and mind.

But these chapters, these sections are filled with information on the Lord's return.

And so the questions I'd like to deal with are how is Zion going to be established? Why did the Lord say he's coming so soon? And what did the prophet Joseph say about the second coming versus his contemporaries? This is another one of those instances where Joseph appears to be a product of his environment.

What are the signs of the second coming that are described here? What's the word eschatology? What's a premillenniast? What's a postmillenniast? Well, the short answer to all of these is given by Elder Maxwell.

The world is in commotion, but the church is in forward motion.

Also in June of that year, we receive the commandment that Joseph is to begin the translation of the Bible.

And this simulates a lot of questions on the second coming as well.

and on Zion.

By July of that year, Emma has questions and then receives this beautiful revelation also in section 26.

You think of, uh, Kirtland as being the seat of the First Presidency, because Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon and his other counselors, which their various, uh, counselors are in Kirtland.

But, um, but Independence is the real Zion, and Kirtland is really meant to be an outpost.

Uh, when Joseph Smith was coming to Independence to establish New Jerusalem, uh, they stopped and made a, made a, converted an entire congregation in Kirtland.

So suddenly, Kirtland is the largest branch of the church, and Joseph Smith needs to do administrative work there.

But his intention is that Independence, Missouri is the center place of the church, and so now he's got problem.

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Not only was Enoch taken up into heaven, but Enoch built a city, a city of holiness called Zion that was also taken up into heaven.

There's going to be an establishment of another holy city called Zion, and that's going to inaugurate a thousand years of peace on the earth, the millennium.

For God, it's like

this is the one continuous story that's been developing from the very beginning, and now we're at a really exciting part of the momentum of this story.

The Lord is drawing on those same biblical types of archetypes of covenanting, promised land and forever for you and your posterity.

We're going to build holy cities and we're going to build sanctuaries or in other words, temples.

Maybe we should stop thinking about Zion as one city with one temple and more as like a network of cities.