“There Are Many Mysteries But I Show Unto You One Thing Which I Have Inquired Diligently of God That I Might Know”

Bryan Richards

The mysteries of godliness are available to everyone who is willing to make the sacrifice to know them. Alma was the prophet but still had to make diligent inquiry to open the mysteries of heaven. In order to know hidden things, we must study it out in [our] mind (DC 9:8), have great desires (1 Nephi 2:16), exercise faith (Ether 4:7), remember to ask (DC 42:61), fear God and serve him in righteousness and truth (DC 76:5-7). Nephi declared, For he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost, as well in these times as in times of old, and as well in times of old as in times to come (1 Nephi 10:19).

Many of the mysteries of godliness have already been made available to us. The details of the resurrection, the millennium, and the three degrees of glory are good examples of the mysteries already revealed in the dispensation of the fullness of times. Yet, these doctrines were not clearly taught in all previous dispensations.

Jeffrey R. Holland

“Clearly not all of the Nephite prophets knew the details of the Resurrection as we know them in our dispensation, though they knew a great deal for their time. For as much as was revealed about this first resurrection and whatever implications it had for later iterations of that event, at least Alma—for one—was not given to know many of the specifics of the Resurrection even though he had ‘inquired diligently of God’ that he might know them. It was a question about the doctrine of the resurrection that the increasingly humble Zeezrom put to Alma which the prophet could refer to only as one of ’the mysteries of God.’ Years later in teaching his son Corianton, Alma still called it a ’mystery,’ the details of which only God himself knows.” (Christ and the New Covenant, p. 239-40)

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