Book of Mormon: Keystone of Our Religion

For years I have heard the Book of Mormon referred to as the keystone of our religion and it just never made sense until recently. The reason it did not make sense was if you really wanted to know how the Church ran or what the most notable peculiarities of us Mormons you would look in the Doctrine and Covenants. I thought that perhaps they referred to it in that way to serve some missionary purpose, or perhaps it was something that Joseph Smith said before the Doctrine and Covenants was published.

But the other day I was looking at an arch with a keystone and for some strange reason it occurred to me if the Book of Mormon is the keystone, then what are the sides? At that point I realized that the sides were the New and Old Testament. I thought, "You know Christ being the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament, kind of made him look like a split personality or something. The Old Testament is about as harsh a document as you could want to stumble into when it comes to God. But if you put the Book of Mormon in between then you can get a little bit clearer understanding of the Old Testament and that perhaps a lot attributed to God in it was just not set down right or something."

I think if possibly more Mormons would just come out and say, "Geez, ya know I can't see Abraham as doing the right thing when he almost burned up Isaac. And what on Earth sense do you make of God gambling with Satan in Job." Perhaps we should just step back a ways and say – "You know let's quit trying to invest some of these stunts with profound religious meaning, and quit attributing God with some of this stuff."

When we do the Old Testament in Sunday School we kind of dance over the genocides that are attributed to God. The Book of Mormon approach is ever so much more reasonable – the ethnic wars explained in it are generated by men, God may predict they are coming – but He doesn't speed up the work. So I believe it is right to say that the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our religion.