Imagine giving someone a spyglass in the year 600. A spyglass is the refracting telescope you picture pirates using on the open sea before finding their target. The sinister pirate stands on deck, extends the spyglass to its full length, looks through one small hole and sees what his own two eyes could barely make out on their own. A ship. Ripe for plunder. The spyglass wouldn’t be officially invented for 1000 years, in 1608 by most accounts.
Imagine giving that to someone in the year 600. They would be amazed; it would be such a phenomenon to them. Another example is the microscope, also invented around 1600, but perfected over the next 400 years to what we have now. That would blow someone’s socks off in the year 600.
The James Webb Space Telescope is replacing the Hubble Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope known to man. Imagine showing that to someone in 1830. There’s a good chance they wouldn’t believe their eyes. There’s a good chance the people from these times would consider what they’re being shown witchcraft or sorcery. If you showed someone a modern-day microscope found in every high school science class and told them you could see the cells of a plant they might put you to the stake for burning i.e. Salem Witch Trials.
The James Webb Space Telescope is described:
“will provide improved infrared resolution and sensitivity over Hubble, and will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology, including observing some of the most distant events and objects in the universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies.”
I don’t know what all that even means, and I’m here, in the year 2020. The word “events” seems to imply that this telescope will be powerful enough to literally look so far away that we’re seeing the past. I won’t get anymore into the science of telescopes and microscopes because I didn’t pay enough attention in my science class to give accurate information about that.
My point is this: if in history you showed someone a device that wouldn’t exist for 1000 years, they might not believe it, or they’d think it was some sort of magic. That is exactly how people reacted in 1830 when Joseph Smith talked about seer stones. Miraculously, it’s how people react today to the idea of Joseph Smith using seer stones.
The natural eyes of Joseph Smith were seeing revelation and things of the spiritual realm just like we look through a telescope and see things that we previously could not. God-fearing people everywhere believe in heaven and hell, God and angels, and yet can’t accept a prophet of God seeing things we don’t. The concept of a stone being the medium should not be a stumbling block. Who in the year 600 would have thought glass would be the medium with which we look into the cosmos?
Our nature today is to be so skeptical of anything of a spiritual nature. If you stop and look at it in a logical sense, the principle is sound, the logic is there. The same people today who hold a cell phone, press an icon on a screen, type in a statement, and suddenly have billions of results, scoff at the idea of a stone that helps translate ancient scripture. How crazy is that? 99% of people today don’t understand internet, email, or electricity yet use it every single day. To be clear, I don’t understand how most of those things work, I don’t understand the intricacies involved. I don’t have to understand, I see it in front of me, whether I understand it or not, the proof is there. It exists.
Seer stones are not cooky, bizarre, unprecedented technology. They are a different kind of telescope. When Joseph Smith looked into them, he saw, through revelation and the power of God, things he couldn’t see with his natural eyes. A person in 1830 couldn’t comprehend a mobile phone. Many today refuse to comprehend the thought of a seer stone. It doesn’t mean seer stones didn’t exist. There’s so much we don’t understand, and we are marveled by technology daily. Is it that difficult to think God had a device that would allow man to do extraordinary things long before the mobile phone?
I know that seer stones exist, just like cell phones. I know that Joseph Smith used them to translate an ancient record. The Book of Mormon wasn’t written by a natural man. It was translated through the medium of a seer stone, provided by God. All of us here in the year 2020 who don’t understand how the very phones we hold provide all the miracles they do, how can we be so skeptical?
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For anyone who would like to learn more about seer stones the link below is a great resource and watch this short video:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/seer-stones?lang=eng
No Coincidences 