Gospel Cogitations

Moroni Appears to Joseph Smith In His Room Picture Credit: Tom Lovell The other day as I sat waiting in the temple, I had the idea come into my mind to read the words that the angel Moroni said to Joseph Smith the first time he visited him.  I had read this passage before, but had not gone to the effort to visit all of the verses that Moroni referenced.  As I read through the verses, it was very inspiring to see what prophecies are being fulfilled in these last days.  I hope my thoughts can lead others to also feel the spirit of the Restoration. This will contain a lot of text quoted from the scriptures (bold-face), so sit down, get comfortable, and maybe pull out your own scriptures/study journal and take notes of thoughts and impressions that come into your heart.  If you are adverse to lots of reading all at once, this post is broken up into sections, so you can study it over time. Context The visit of Moroni to Joseph is recorded in Joseph Smith History ...

Isaiah - Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier Photo credit: The Wallace Collection The other day, I was studying the Book of Mormon, and I read this in the footnotes for 2 Nephi 12: "Comparison with the King James Bible in English shows that there are differences in more than half of the 433 verses of Isaiah quoted in the Book of Mormon, while about 200 verses have the same wording as KJV." And being the engineer that I am, I thought - "I bet I can figure out exactly  what the differences are between the King James version and what Nephi wrote down from the Brass Plates." For those of my audience who don't have experience reading diff files, the text highlighted in blue are the characters/words that are different between the two columns, and the text in black is the same.  Because of the nature of the algorithm, sometimes there will be a few characters in black while the rest is blue.  Usually, unless the whole word is black, there isn't a noticeable simi...