Perhaps because of that, this blogpost feels very appropriate right now.
I have mentioned in other posts that I spent a number of consecutive years teaching a Gospel Doctrine Sunday School class. Through that calling, and not unlike every other thing He has made a part of my life, God taught me many things.
One of the things He taught me came as a consequence of the order of the yearly curriculum. I started teaching in 2012 when the Book of Mormon was the subject matter, then went through the Doctrine and Covenants, Old Testament/Pearl of Great Price, and New Testament, and rounded out my years as teacher by revisiting the Book of Mormon, in its entirety, and the Doctrine and Covenants, in part, before I was released.
It was while I was teaching Old Testament that I could not help but notice similarities between the ministries and experiences of Joseph Smith and Moses. Having recently taught the Doctrine and Covenants, I didn’t even really have to look for them. They were both conspicuous and striking, and in detail, they went beyond those foretold by Joseph of Egypt through Lehi in 2 Nephi, chapter 3. The following list of similarities is not exhaustive.
Both began their ministries with significant theophanies. Moses had his “burning bush” experience, Joseph his first vision.
Both were called at a time when the minds of the people had been darkened and brought into captivity by ideas not in line with the everlasting gospel. Though they remembered, in a very superficial way, the promises of deliverance made to them through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Israel had 400 years to adopt the false beliefs, practices, and culture of the Egyptians. Likewise, Christian sects held to an idea of salvation through Jesus Christ, while falling prey to concepts, creeds, and philosophies that corrupted the idea of the nature of God and his gospel.
Both attempted to bring a people into God’s presence. Both failed to do that. Instead, Moses was increasingly called to “speak unto the children of Israel,” just as there were increasing “revelation[s] given through Joseph Smith the Prophet to…” individuals and groups of people.
Both were relegated to encoding gospel principles and ordinances into routines and rituals deemed important by the people they were trying to teach. In Moses’ day, those included animal sacrifice, and in Joseph’s day those included Masonry—neither one having any power to save, apart from the understanding both men were trying so desperately to teach in the first place.
Both men knew the people weren’t getting it, and both interceded for them.
Both groups of people they taught slowly drifted away from seeing the need to obtain a knowledge of God and, instead, institutionalized religious practices and ceremony, in whose participation the people could presuppose a knowledge of God that they didn’t actually have.
Teaching the Old Testament immediately after teaching the Doctrine and Covenants opened my eyes to the ways in which Joseph Smith was “a prophet like unto Moses,” and it helped me see just how much the people who claim to descend from Joseph’s restoration of the gospel are really just Israel 2.0.
Both men have been instrumental in helping me better understand God, His purposes, and my place in God’s plan. When I consider the set of things that I could not have understood, experienced, or endured without first comprehending other sets of things that were revealed to me because of their efforts, I am left to marvel in the best of ways and to praise God for his goodness and mercy in making their influence and teachings accessible to me, in spite of the distance in time and space that would have otherwise so easily separated us.