Understanding God: Easy or Hard?
No one understood God better than Jesus, and that fact is indisputable. Jesus told us who the Father is and that he is his son. He also explained that we are the children of God and that his Father is our Father, too. Jesus did the will of the Father in all things, and he told us to follow him and keep his commandments. I am not sure it gets any simpler than that.
The restoration of all things from the beginning, which began with the Prophet Joseph Smith, is the return to simplicity in understanding God. Joseph stated that confusion about religion and a desire to know his standing before God caused him to seek answers. I suppose we can be thankful for people who made God and religion overly complicated because it led to the restoration of the gospel.
So, how did it become so hard to understand God in the first place? If I were to jump to a simple conclusion, it would be that defining God in a way that made him impossible to comprehend, solidified, and unified a power structure that centralized power in church and state—in other words, controlling the innate nature of people to believe in a higher power. This game of control shifted the direct relationship between God and man to a middleman. The churches and state religions took the place of Jesus as the mediator and our advocate with the Father.
The role of a church is not to act as a component in a personal relationship to God, but to administer the ordinances and covenants in a way that deepens that relationship. The church is not a link in a chain that connects us to Father in Heaven. That is Christ’s role. No one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ.
My reason for sharing these thoughts is that reading Doctrine and Covenants and trying to understand theology by watching debates and conversations with those who consider themselves mainstream Christians reveals a stark contrast in thinking between the two. One debate, in particular, presented an argument on the Trinity that was so convoluted that it was impossible to follow. It had charts and bullet points along with an over 30-minute presentation that left the faces of the others blank. Even the debate moderator, a Protestant, sat with a look on his face that could only be described as, what???
God be praised for Jesus, who taught in plainness and for the restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith and his successors.