“Behold My Beloved Son”

D. Kelly Ogden, Andrew C. Skinner

The voice of the Father is heard on rare and sacred occasions in this telestial world. When the Father does come, he comes to say one specific thing: “This is my Son.” Why does he testify of this one, single fact? Because that is the most important thing he could say, the most needed testimony he could bear. Jews do not believe God, Elohim, would have a Son (the Shema proclaims, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord”; Deuteronomy 6:4). Muslims—between one and two billion of them on the earth now—do not believe God, Allah, would have a Son who would come to live with the rest of us groveling humans in this world (“Far is it removed from His transcendant majesty that he should have a son”; the Qur’an, Sura IV:171). Neither do many Christians these days believe that God the Father literally had a Son in this world. It is a unique and powerful witness of the divinity of that Son; his own Father bears solemn testimony of that fact at each momentous occasion in the Old World and in the New World, in ancient times as well as in modern times.

Verse by Verse: The Book of Mormon: Vol. 2

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