Sunday School

I am going to include an article written by Elder McConkiehere as an introduction. I recommend that you read it along with these materials. It is wonderful. Some of the concepts will be repeated in the lesson I have written, but the “second witness” will be worth the double exposure. It is called, “The Story of a Prophet’s Madness.” It was published in April 1972 in the New Era. The beginning of the article is shared here, but the complete article can be found on lds.org.

If you have the time and the inclination, review the following scriptures: Exodus 14:1–4; 16:2–3; 17:1–4; Numbers 11:4–6, 18–20; 14:1–4; 20:3–5;21:5. In each of these verses, Israel longs for the good things of Egypt, for an opportunity to return her slime pits. You with young children might have experienced something like this. I know I made life miserable for my parents on a couple of occasions when they took me to visit distant relatives and I did not want to go. My constant complaining and incessant review of the things I was missing at home must have filled them with indignation. The Lord seems to have had some of those same feelings about the children of Israel during their backward-looking journey to the Promised Land.

Author’s Note: This lesson will not follow precisely the format of the lesson in the manual for Gospel Doctrine. I want to provide some insights and background to the excellent material contained in the Church’s publication. Please do not teach this lesson at the expense of that one. The manual provided by the Church is your main and most important non-scriptural resource. This lesson is clearly of lesser value and inspiration, but I hope it will help you in understanding what happened to Israel in the wilderness and at Mount Sinai.

Elder Holland quoted George Q. Cannon as he taught a great lesson on the character of God:

The story of Joseph makes me think about what it really means to be free. During the early years of Joseph’s life, while he was experiencing the viciousness of murderous brothers and the solitude of slavery and the pain of imprisonment, his brothers were (1) committing murder (Genesis 34), (2) committing immoral acts (Genesis 35, 38), (3) plotting murder (Genesis 37), and (4) lying to their father (Genesis 37). Which of all the sons of Jacob was most free? There are some lessons to be learned here. Part of the answer to this question comes as we consider who bows to whom and who sits on a throne and who lives with decades of guilt and remorse.

If I were teaching this lesson, I might begin by pouring water into several different shaped containers and asking class members to comment on what we can learn from that activity about the qualities of water. Someone will probably say that water takes the shape of its environment. If you then ask for words that describe water, you might get words like these: flimsy, unsound, mercurial, capricious, changeable, wobbly, fickle, erratic, unreliable, undependable, vacillating, untrustworthy, variable, mutable, impermanent, unsteady, uncertain, transitory, ephemeral, inconsistent, precarious, and unstable. I am amazed at how many words the English language has to describe this rather undesirable characteristic. But this lesson will require us to think about them because we are going to talk about three people who were much like water (one was even compared to water), and one young man who was as unlike water as it is possible to be.