Jesus Christ

Written by Julia Baker, a BYU student, studying a volume of scripture known as the Pearl of Great Price, which is written by prophets; members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “Mormons” revere it as sacred text. This post comes from a book within the Pearl of Great Price known, as The Book of Moses; it is an extraction from the translation of the Bible as revealed to Joseph Smith the Prophet, June 1830—February 1831.

Our Relationship with God the Father

I grew up in Fort Worth Texas, a city slapped right in the middle of tornado alley. I remember one night when the winds were roaring outside my window, a flash of lightening hit nearby. The sheer force of such natural power coursing through the air in even such relative proximity shook the glass in my window panes and made my ears ring. I had never felt a fear of storms, but at that moment I was struck with the same realization Moses felt: “Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed” (Moses 1:10).

When I first read Moses’s encounter with Natural Power in Moses chapter one, found in the Pearl of Great Price—a book of scripture held as sacred by Latter-day saints “Mormons”—I felt like there was some disconnect in what Moses learned about his relationship with God the Father. After being in the presence of the glory of the Lord, he knew that man was nothing. And yet, when Satan came to confront him, Moses resisted him with a profound understanding of his own divine potential, knowing he was “a son of God, in the similitude of his Only Begotten (Moses 1:13). It seemed so strange that Moses could feel he was nothing and yet had infinite potential as well.

What I learned about my relationship with God the Father alongside Moses from this comes from the often quoted summary of the marvelous vision in Moses one, stated in verse 39: “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” The operative phrase here is “to bring to pass.” Particularly when we read accounts of singularly fantastic spiritual experiences, like Moses’s vision of the works of God, we forget that our journey to realize our potential is a process. It does not happen in a moment of glory, but in a lifetime of trying to become like God. He is willing to help us as we continue to increase our knowledge and faith and power. We must not be rendered hopeless by our state of comparative “nothingness,” but we must also realize that fulfilling our potential to become like God the Father is a long process that takes patience. As we progress and improve, God will see fit to share more and more of His mysteries with us, until we can become equal to him in knowledge and in limitless power.

Additional Resources:

We can become like our Heavenly Father. Learn more at the official site of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (inadvertently called by friends of other faiths as the “Mormon Church”).

Learn more about God.

Request a free copy of the Book of Mormon or Bible.

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