The Gold and the Clay Principle

There's a great podcast by Bryce Dunford that I listened to recently that I want to summarize. First, here's the link:

The Gold and the Clay Principle

Here's the summary.

Everything God touches and does is gold. Everything humans touch and do is clay. God gives us gold and our imperfect fingerprints get all over it. The gold gets mixed with clay. And God is okay with that. He works through imperfect people. But people get disappointed with the clay that they find in the gold and sometimes they reject the gold. The challenge is to see the gold mixed with the clay, acknowledge the clay, but embrace the gold and use it in our lives.

A story in 1 Nephi 17 is a good example of this. When Nephi breaks his bow, the family gets very hungry and even Lehi starts murmuring. Lehi temporarily lacks faith that God can help them. But Nephi is still faithful. He makes a new bow and ONE arrow and then goes to his father. He recognizes his father's human weakness and but still honors and respects him as their leader and prophet. And you know the rest of that story.

The Lord uses ordinary human beings to do his work and this story is telling us, we need to be okay with that.

Everything in the gospel is a mixture of gold with some clay. Moroni acknowledges this in the Book of Mormon. Right after he takes over the record from his father, in Mormon 8:12 he says, "Whoso receiveth this record, and shall NOT CONDEMN IT BECAUSE OF THE IMPERFECTIONS WHICH ARE IN IT, the same shall know of greater things than these."

Moroni repeats this idea frequently in his writings. Near the end of Ether, he starts to feel concerned that his words are not as powerful as the brother of Jared's and his words will be mocked. So he prays about it and the Lord tells him in Ether 12:26, "Fools mock, but they shall mourn; and my grace is sufficient for the meek, that they shall take no advantage of your weakness."

There are places in the Book of Mormon where it seems like there are a few typos by Mormon who is abridging the record. He is engraving gold plates so when he makes a mistake he can't exactly delete his words so instead he clarifies what he really meant. There are a couple of places where he does this. For example, in Alma 50:32, he writes,

"Now behold, the people who were in the land Bountiful, or rather Moroni, feared that they..." Mormon realized he didn't mean the people feared so he corrected it.

He does it in a few other places too. He talks about the people of Ammon burying their weapons of war except he says weapons of peace and then corrects himself in Alma 24:19:

"...and thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace, or they buried the weapons of war, for peace."

We all make mistakes. The history of the church shows leaders making lots of mistakes and it doesn't take long to find them. The question is, are we going to accept the gold from God and acknowledge the clay as the imperfections of men or are we going to reject the gold? 

The restoration is filled with gold. But the Lord is okay with the clay mixed in it. And the great thing is, that means he is okay with my clay too.

I make mistakes all the time. I have made many mistakes raising my children and in everything I have done. So how can I be a hypocrite in expecting my church leaders to be perfect? If prophets can never make mistakes, then they don't have agency. But they do, because they have agency too. They can't know everything.

There was a man in church history who left the church because Joseph Smith misspelled his name in a revelation. Symonds Rider expected Joseph to be perfect; that because Joseph had received SOME knowledge from God, he had received ALL knowledge. But Joseph was human and misspelled his name. Symonds apostatized and joined the mob that tarred and feathered Joseph. It seems silly to do that over something so trivial, but it illustrates the point.

It also shows why we need to develop our relationship with Christ and not rely solely on others to be our connection with God. There is only perfect being who walked the earth and that is who we need to have faith in.

It's a great podcast. Listen to the whole thing.