Ep.38: World Religions Unraveled: Mormonism

Andrew Marcus:

Hey, this is Andrew Marcus from THE INDOUBT SHOW. Thank you for tuning in. We have a great show for us today. We have Matthew Emadi, who is a pastor. He is going to be joining us and talking about all things Mormonism, and so it’s going to be fascinating. Lots of insight, lots of information. We hope you enjoy today’s show. All right. We got Matthew Emadi all the way from Utah. Sandy, Utah. How are you doing today, Matthew?

Matthew Emadi:

Great. Thank you for having me on, Andrew.

Andrew Marcus:

Oh, this is so awesome, man. I’m so excited. We’re going to be talking about something very interesting today. Just the Mormon church, Mormonism, its history. But before we even dive into that, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family life, ministry life. What are you up to in Sandy, Utah?

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah. I am out here in Sandy, Utah. I pastor Crossroads Church. I’ve been pastoring there now for nine years as of August. I am married 15 years this December to my wonderful wife, Brittany. We have six kids, ages 13 to three, five boys and one girl.

Andrew Marcus:

Five boys and one, they got a girl.

Matthew Emadi:

Yes, one girl. She’s special. She’s definitely the princess-

Andrew Marcus:

That’s amazing.

Matthew Emadi:

… and I am tired all the time from these children, but I love this season of life. It’s awesome. The enthusiasm of the kids, playing sports, all this stuff. It’s great. But my wife and I actually met in Kentucky when I was a student at seminary. I went to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and then we moved here in 2014. Like I said, I’m pastoring Crossroads Church, and God has done a great work at the church. It’s a small church. It was kind of really unhealthy and dying when I showed up. But in nine years, God has brought life. We’ve seen health, we’ve seen growth, we’ve seen people saved. We even actually sent people out to plant a church three years ago.

Andrew Marcus:

Amazing.

Matthew Emadi:

So good work happening at the church, and then also within the last couple of years, I worked with a couple other pastors out here and we started the Salt Lake School of Theology, and so we are a teaching side of Gateway Seminary and we offer an accredited master’s degree through that school, so I teach hermeneutics, New Testament. It’s a lot of fun, a lot of work.

Andrew Marcus:

That’s amazing. I was going to say, six kids and you can do multiple things. That’s like you’re a superhero.

Matthew Emadi:

Well, I just curl up in the fetal position once a week and cry and then good to go.

Andrew Marcus:

That’s so funny. Amazing. Now, is your daughter the youngest?

Matthew Emadi:

No, we have boy, boy, then daughter, and then boy, boy, boy, so she’s right in the middle.

Andrew Marcus:

Smack in the middle. That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

Matthew Emadi:

I love it.

Andrew Marcus:

Praise God. So when I was reading one of your articles, you mentioned that you used to be a police chaplain in Sandy, Utah.

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah. I actually started at Crossroads and there was an opportunity to serve as a police chaplain for the city, so I went through the process. I agreed to do it, but I didn’t last long and I actually didn’t do much as a chaplain because the lead chaplain was formerly a bishop in the Mormon church, and I knew that going in, for the record. I just thought, yeah, well, it’s a state police department. They are going to have chaplains of different religions, but I’m just going in to do my thing. I’m going to share the gospel with people. I’m going to encourage people. So I agreed to do it, but I quickly found out at the first meeting that the head chaplain wanted to have a kind of ecumenical prayer time where we all get together, so it was myself, two Mormon chaplains, and then kind of a liberal Christian pastor, and he wanted us all to get together and regularly and consistently have these meetings for prayer and encouragement.

And so if I was at a big event with a bunch of chaplains and someone was praying, and I’m just at the event, okay, I get that. But this kind of intentional, hey, we’re all in this together. We all kind of believe in the same God, pray to the same God, worship the same God mentality. I had to say something, and so I told him, I was like, “Hey, we don’t worship the same God. The Mormon God and the God of the Bible is not the same God,” and he was just shocked that he had never heard any of that before. Nobody had ever told him that, and so it really kind of created some stress, and eventually I just said, “Look, I’m just going to back out,” and I think he was relieved. I’ll step away. You can continue to do what you want to do. It’s your program. But I can’t act like for your benefit or for the sake of the truth that we are all in this together worshiping the same God.

Andrew Marcus:

That’s so huge, and I’m sure a lot of people who are watching or listening right now, maybe they haven’t heard this either, like this could be a first time kind of realizing. I remember my wife, she bumped into a couple of elders at a bus stop. This was years ago, and we invited them over. They wanted to have a conversation, so we’re all sitting together talking, and the first thing they said is the same thing you mentioned, like we believe in the same God, we worship the same God. We believe that Jesus died, he rose, et cetera, et cetera. And so they made it seem like we are one and the same. We’re all Christians. I kind of just looked at one of them and I said, “Okay, well, if that’s true, if you’re saying that’s true, then why are you trying to convert me?”

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah, that’s a great question.

Andrew Marcus:

And he was like, “Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh.” I’m like, “Tell me about Joseph Smith.” So there are a lot of differences. And I mean, you being in Sandy, Utah, the percentage of evangelical Christians compared to the percentage of those who are in the Mormon church, there’s a big… You’re on mission, man. You’re on the mission field. And so I’m excited to ask you even for maybe some of the tools that you can help us when we’re engaging with people in this faith community, how we can evangelize if they think we’re exactly the same.

Matthew Emadi:

The Mormon church in the modern era has made an intentional effort to sound and to portray themselves as more in mainstream Christianity. They want to be viewed as Christian, and they will use the same language and the same terms, and we’ll get into this more as we talk about evangelism, but really they think because they talk about Jesus Christ, because they talk about God the Father, they even talk about grace, all of these things, that they’re Christian, and somebody who doesn’t know Mormonism very well will hear those terms and at the surface level think, “Oh, we believe the same thing,” but actually nothing is the same, nothing at all.

Andrew Marcus:

Okay. So before we even dive into some of the theologies and different things, maybe let’s backtrack and just take us through just the history of the Mormon church, when it started, maybe some of the key leaders.

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah. So the Mormon Church was founded by Joseph Smith who claimed to be a prophet. Joseph Smith lived in the 19th century, so early 1800s in New York. Joseph Smith claimed to have had a vision where God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in the woods and they appeared to him in response to his prayer. He was wanting to know basically what is the true church? What is the truth? And in response to that prayer, he claimed God the father, and Jesus Christ appeared to him and revealed to him that none of the churches are true, and so Mormonism has this whole theology of the great apostasy that after the time of the apostles, the true gospel was lost, and it has now been restored through Joseph Smith and the Mormon church.

So Joseph Smith was a self-proclaimed prophet who claimed to have a vision and who translated the Book of Mormon, which is this ancient history compiled by this person, Mormon, this ancient history of the Americas, and so he supposedly translates the Book of Mormon and is the leader of this restoration movement of the truth, and he eventually leads his crew from New York through Ohio to Missouri, but has some run-ins with the authorities and the law and is killed while in Missouri. There’s different splits at this point. A lot of people don’t know this about Mormon history, but there’s different sects that splinter off now as people try to figure out who’s going to lead the Mormon church. But Brigham Young basically comes into power, and he’s the one who leads the Mormons from Missouri to Utah to settle in Utah.

And so even in growing up in Utah as a kid, we would learn Mormon history and we would sing songs about Brigham Young and the pioneers who came here, and so Brigham Young is really instrumental because he leads them during this whole period in their history and gets the temple built in Salt Lake City, and the whole society is established, and really it just kind of grows from there. In some ways they’re inoculated out here in Utah from the outside world, and they’re able to practice polygamy and their religious practices. But that’s why Utah is the mecca of Mormonism, as I say, because of that history. There’s a lot of theological issues that are being developed during this time. Plural marriage or polygamy, their doctrine of God, their doctrine of salvation, their doctrine of exaltation. All of these things are getting founded but developed.

But it really comes back to Joseph Smith who claimed that he was able to do what no man has been able to do, not even Jesus or the apostles were able to do, and that was to unify the church, and so he made some pretty grandiose claims. He gave a lot of prophecies, many of which did not come true, and when you look into his history, he has a lot of questionable actions and character flaws, and he was involved in the occult, all this stuff. A Mason. In fact, there are still Masonic symbols, there’s Masonic symbols on the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City. So it’s quite a history. But that is kind of the history in a nutshell, and why the Mormon Church is centralized in Utah and how it’s grown really from there to the modern day.

Andrew Marcus:

What would you say the percentage of people in Utah are Mormons compared to evangelical Christians?

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah. It’s hard to know the exact percentages, but most people say probably between 3 and 5% of people in Utah are evangelical Christians. 60% of the people are Mormons, and then you have atheists, you have Roman Catholic, you have other religions. But Mormonism is still predominant. It affects the entire culture, the whole way of life. Everyone assumes you’re Mormon. The neighborhoods are built around Mormon churches. I just took a walk with my wife last week and we were on this hill looking out over our neighborhood, and you could see three Mormon churches in our neighborhood all within walking distance from each other.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow.

Matthew Emadi:

So Mormonism is everywhere. It is a way of life. It is ingrained into the culture. Some people have described it as being a Mormon in Utah is like being a Muslim in the Middle East. It’s who you are. It’s your family, it’s your history, it’s your networks, it’s your relationships, and so it’s ingrained and woven into every fabric of life out here.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow. That’s crazy. I mean, it’s so different from where I am in Canada, so that’s just so eyeopening. And so did you ever sing, like you’re talking about singing songs growing up in school about Mr. Young there, but what about, did you sing any Joseph Smith songs, or was Burnham Young kind of the person who took over?

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah, I think because in the public schools they were wanting to keep the lessons oriented towards just the historical facts, and Brigham Young was the one who really led the pioneers, and Utah was founded under his leadership. It was left at that just to retell the story. But in the Mormon church, they will definitely sing songs about Joseph Smith. He is highly esteemed, and yet honestly, because of the information available on the internet, because of podcasts like this, because people have access to information, people are discovering the truth about Joseph Smith, and that’s one of the reasons many people, especially the younger generation, are leaving the Mormon church.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow. It’s just mind-blowing to me to even just think, because a songwriter, I wonder what a Joseph Smith song sounds like, so I might have to Google that later, because that’s just mind-blowing to me.

Matthew Emadi:

You might be surprised.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah. I think I’m going to have to Google it later. Okay. So it’s true that he got this vision and the Book of Mormon, was it like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or something? Was that fact?

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah, he claimed to have translated some ancient Egyptian writings.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, that’s where he got the Book of Mormon.

Matthew Emadi:

Well, yeah, part of it. I think it’s related to the Book of Abraham. I can’t remember exactly. The Book of Abraham is in the book of Mormon. The Mormon church has four scriptures, so the King James Bible in so far as it’s translated correctly, that’s what they would say. We could talk about that at some point. The doctrine in covenants, the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. And so Smith claimed to have translated ancient Egyptian. He claims to have translated these golden plates that he discovered, and he would do this through a stone in a hat. He would look into the hat on the stone and be able to receive visions and translations of these things. But those things, especially the ancient Egyptian, has been proven false. And honestly, even the first vision that he claimed to have has something like nine different versions from Joseph Smith himself, and so it was changed over the years. In fact, I think the first time he recorded the vision was supposedly 12 years after he had the vision, and so there’s all kinds of problems with the history.

Andrew Marcus:

Man. I mean, that’s just so fascinating. So one of the books they use is the King James Bible?

Matthew Emadi:

Yes. Yep.

Andrew Marcus:

Interesting.

Matthew Emadi:

It’s interesting, and this is a helpful point just to be aware of for evangelism, the Mormons do claim to believe the Bible. So when I talk to them, I appeal to the Bible because they say it’s one of their authoritative books. Now, the problem is, of all their books, the Bible is the most undermined by Mormons because they will say we believe the Bible insofar as it is translated correctly. Now, even in saying that, they are misguided because that’s not what they intend to say. Here’s what I mean. What they mean to say is we believe the Bible insofar as it has been transmitted correctly. Okay? So what they’re getting at is they have come to believe, and it’s been really just taught to them from day one, that the Bible has been corrupted through the process of transmission. So from the original manuscripts, through the copies of the copies of the copies that have been made, the Bible in their mind has certainly been corrupted. The text cannot be trusted, and so we will affirm it in so far as it has been, again, they’ll say, translated correctly, but transmitted.

And so in their mind, it’s like, yeah, we believe the Bible, but we don’t believe in its infallibility or it’s inerrancy, and therefore we can’t ultimately trust the Bible because how do we know if what we have is really what the apostles said? And so that is an important issue when talking with Mormons to establish the credibility of the biblical text. And I know that’s a whole nother conversation, but the Bible’s the most well attested book in the history of the world. But what I usually do is, because you usually don’t have a lot of time to get into that conversation with them, I usually just appeal to the fact that, look, you are appealing to the Bible, and Jesus and the apostles believed in absolute truth and that truth could be known and that what they wrote is true, and so I start there to try to build a framework of thinking to say, “Look, you’re appealing to the Bible. The worldview of the apostles and Jesus is that absolute truth can be known and that the Bible is true, so let’s go to the Bible and let’s look at what it actually says.”

Andrew Marcus:

Fascinating. And what is the response that you get? Are they open to that or do they want to incorporate the other writings that are more-

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the average Mormon today is more relativistic than historically Mormon. Joseph Smith said when he had that first vision that it was revealed to him that all the creeds and confessions of the Christian Church are an abomination.

Andrew Marcus:

Oh, wow.

Matthew Emadi:

So years ago, Mormons would say, “Look, we have our doctrine. We believe this doctrine. Yes, it is different than yours.” The average Mormon today is more of a kind of relativist, borderline postmodern, so that it’s all kind of same. We may have a little differences, but we’re all saying the same thing in the end, and that’s why I go and say, “Well, yeah, but you say you believe the Bible, right?” “Well, yes I do.” “Well, Jesus and the apostles believe there was truth and there was error, so do you believe their worldview, their position is correct?” And then I just try to go from there and look at texts. But really, it’s case by case with who you’re talking to.

Andrew Marcus:

Totally.

Matthew Emadi:

I think it’s good to ask questions and to try to get into the specifics of what they believe and what they think, because you won’t get the same answer from every Mormon.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah. That makes total sense, especially in today’s culture, and again, like you mentioned with social media and podcasts and just so much information available. So that’s what the Mormon church believes about scriptures. What’s their view on Jesus?

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah. And just to add one other thing to their view of revelation in scripture, they have a modern day prophet, so that modern day prophet also gets modern day revelation, and so it’s important to recognize that as well. If a Mormon is being consistent, they would have to say what they believe, they can only believe right now. Because at any point, the prophet could change anything, right, because he speaks for God. So there’s that aspect as well, which I didn’t even bring up. But Mormons will talk to you about Jesus. They’ll talk to you about atonement. They’ll talk about their savior and how much they love Jesus. The problem is, Jesus is not the Jesus of the Bible. The God of Mormonism is not the God of the Bible, and so the whole narrative of Mormon theology is different than the narrative of scripture.

In Mormon theology, Jesus is the offspring, the first created son of heavenly Father and heavenly mother. Okay? So already we have diverged greatly. In Mormon theology, Jesus is literally our older brother because we are all the spirit children of heavenly Father and heavenly mother of whom Jesus was the firstborn, and so Jesus is a created being of a created God himself who then comes to earth to kind of follow the ordinances and keep the commandments and to make atonement for sins. But he makes atonement not at the cross, but in the garden of Gethsemane. So the drops of blood that he sweat in the garden of Gethsemane is where Mormons would say he made atonement for sins. But again, what is that atonement? Is it atonement that satisfies the wrath of a infinite, righteous, holy, eternal, almighty God?

Well, no. It’s more of him, yes, kind of paying for our sins, but doing so for good people who are doing the best to save themselves. So in Mormon theology, you work as hard as you can and you climb the ladder as high as you can, and then Jesus will get you the rest of the way. So there’s a verse in the Book of Mormon. I don’t want to get the reference wrong, but it essentially says, you are saved by grace after all that you can do. So if you have done all that you can do, then you’ll be saved by grace. But even in this kind of short description that I’ve given you, it’s beginning to show how when you encounter a Mormon and they start talking about Jesus, they’re not talking about the same Jesus. When Peter asked the apostles, look, who do people say that I am? And they said, well, some say Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets. In Jesus’s day, there were people who were getting it wrong, the answer wrong. And he says, who do you say that I am? You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. So essential to the true gospel is a right understanding of who Jesus is because there’s only one Jesus that can save, and the Mormon Jesus is not God, and he cannot save because he is a false Jesus.

Andrew Marcus:

What is their belief and understanding on salvation, then?

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah. So again, Mormons will talk about grace. They’ll talk about their savior, Jesus. But really what it comes down to is doing all that you can do, following the commandments and the ordinances to be able to achieve the highest level of exaltation. So again, this is why we have to be clear on what we mean by the terms we are using. When we talk about salvation as Christians, we are talking about being delivered from God’s judgment for our sins. We are talking about being saved from God’s wrath into the presence of God to dwell with him in fellowship forever in the fullness of joy. Right? We’re talking about life out of death, resurrection from the grave in a new heavens and new earth to worship and glorify God forever. When Mormons are talking about salvation, they’re not talking about that. They’re talking about exaltation.

In Mormon theology, everyone is going to go to one of three levels of heaven. The highest level of heaven is the celestial kingdom, and so Mormons want to do all these good works and to do their temple ordinances and to keep these commandments in order that they might attain the highest level of heaven, which is the celestial kingdom. Now, what they receive in the celestial kingdom is divinity, so they believe that they are progressing through their good works towards this state of godhood, really, where they will, a worthy Mormon man be married to his wife forever, and they will populate their own world with spirit children who inhabit that world, and they will be with their families forever as deified people, because that’s what heavenly Father and heavenly mother of this world are. So again, it’s not about the glory of God and the infinite delight of communion with him and his presence. It’s about achieving a status of divine exaltation.

Andrew Marcus:

Wow. So going through all the details, we’re very different.

Matthew Emadi:

Yeah. Yeah. Andrew, this is why I tell people, just because Mormons say they believe the Bible and use the same terms doesn’t mean there are some similarities. Actually, everything is different because the whole narrative is different. The whole doctrine of God is different, and if the doctrine of God is different, if the storyline of redemption is different, then nothing means the same thing.

Andrew Marcus:

So really understanding our beliefs when it comes to salvation, God the Father, Christ, the scriptures, the inerrancy of scripture. That’ll help us with our conversations. that also just helps us with our lives.

Matthew Emadi:

Yep, absolutely. The gospel really is good news.

Andrew Marcus:

Well, we really appreciate you. We appreciate your time, and I really appreciate your ministry. You’re doing great things. We pray for you, your family, your church community. Would you just continue to be on mission? We’re just grateful for all you’re doing, and thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

Matthew Emadi:

Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate you.

Andrew Marcus:

Hey, thanks so much for joining us today. For more great content, check out THE INDOUBT SHOW on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your podcasts. We hope you enjoyed it today. Feel free to check out indoubt.ca. We have some great resources available to you. Have an awesome day.