In a very interesting and provocative article. Bradlee Dean asked the question, “What would it be like, if…?” I have never thought too much about a question like that because it is pure speculation. There is really no way of knowing now how things would be different if history could be changed. We can’t change the outcome of a game played a week ago; the score has already been recorded. We can’t make that critical substitution, even if we thought another player could have made the winning point.
There can be no more betting on games, horses or greyhounds after the game is over or the race has been run. It is like trying to bring back the arrow after it has fled the bow. They who are involved in such speculation are placing a bet today on the team that lost yesterday or even like a hamster trying to escape a spinning exercise wheel by running faster. Even saying all that, Mr. Dean posed an interesting question about what would our lives be like now if it hadn’t been for some great leader at a crucial time in our history. He wrote:“Imagine with me for a moment if George Washington, John Adams (and etc.) never existed. Imagine history without Abraham, Moses…Jesus Christ. Where would we be if these men did not exhibit leadership with courage and sacrifice on the behalf of the people? Where would we be if they had not loved both the seen and unseen (the people then and we today), resulting in our now having both actual and spiritual freedoms throughout the world? I can tell you, we would all be slaves to tyranny in every form (Hebrews 11)! etc.” I am using his thought to remind us of a somewhat similar circumstance, only in a different era, a different place and different heroes—people who had similar courage and determination to succeed with their mission and calling in life, people who also accomplished a great work. I am referring to a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, an event that could not have been nor come about without the freedoms that the Constitution of Independence and the Bill of Rights made possible in 1776. I am referring to the time when God, the Father of us all, and His Son, Jesus Christ, opened up the last dispensation of time, an event prophesied in both the Old and the New Testaments, a time when both the Father and the Son appeared to a young Joseph Smith. The one identified as the Son gave him an answer to his question. After that initial visitation, many great and marvelous things were revealed to this young prophet. The rest is history. In a small log cabin in a remote wilderness, (approximately 50 years after the revolution) in the year 1830, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized. The same organization and priesthood that was established by Jesus Christ, himself, in the meridian of time was restored to the earth. The heavens were opened once again, and revelation from God directed the infant organization as it grew. Now, today, the church that had a humble beginning, in a small rural cabin, is beginning to cover the whole earth as it was then prophesied that it would do.
There was a direct relationship to what the first group of men accomplished and the fulfilling of the second group’s mission. The church could not have prospered without the declaration of freedoms provided by the founding fathers, primarily the freedom of religion. Even with religious freedom, the young church struggled and its members were persecuted by whole communities, communities who were supported by the local law enforcement. In order to survive, the Saints had to flee to the wilderness until they, too, were protected by those freedoms. It took a few decades before the constitution meant more than just words to many communities in this young country.
Our continent, on this choice earth, has been declared many times, by the God of the universe, to be the “promised land,” a promised land for all those who are and have been directed to come here.
Speculation as to what it would be like now, if those great individuals had not been born and brought together at the same time in history, may be fun, and it may keep some occupied. But those speculations will never change history nor bring the “arrow back that has already fled the bow.”