John Bytheway:               00:00:01             Welcome back to part two with Dr. David Thomson, Numbers 11 to 27.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:00:07             That brings us to Numbers 13 and 14. And Hank, you talked about giants and grasshoppers earlier. The Israelites, they’re near Canaan, they’re near the promised land. God tells Moses to send scouts, spies in to scout out the land. They get one from every tribe, 12 of them in total. I’m imagining these are trusted people. Their judgment is going to be well valued. This wasn’t the rabble. These were the leaders. Go in and scout out the land. Verses 13 through 24, maybe we’ll just paraphrase right now. They go in, they spy out the land and they bring back their report. They bring along some pomegranates and figs because the land is awesome. There is all kinds of good stuff in there. It is flowing with milk and honey. It’s wonderful. 10 of those 12 who went in there are afraid. They said, “The people be strong, that dwell in the land. The cities are walled.” Worst of all, and like you said earlier, Hank, there’s giants there. The children of Anak, they’re huge. And they’re warriors. In the NLT, next to them we felt like grasshoppers. And they convinced most of the people that taking the land would be impossible. It’s great, but we’re grasshoppers. Those are giants. We can’t do it. No way.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:34             I don’t think there’s any way a grasshopper could beat a giant. I just …

John Bytheway:               00:01:40             Could be annoying, but-

Hank Smith:                      00:01:41             Yeah. I think there’s a message there. Moses says, This is an odd metaphor, but I think I get it.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:01:47             The Lord, he knows what’s in that land. Why did he send them in there when he knew they were going to come back with a report that this is going to be near impossible, that there’s no way this is going to happen? Why did the Lord do that? As a scientist, one of the things I’d like to chat about is, does Heavenly Father want us to have blind faith? Let’s come back to that in just a second as we see what happens as this plays out amongst the children of Israel. Two of the scouts, Caleb and Joshua, they saw how tough it looked, but they didn’t agree with the 10. They tried to quiet the people saying, Let’s go at once to take the land. We can certainly conquer it. They had faith that they could do this hard thing, a very different mindset than the 10. I sympathize with the 10, by the way.

                                           00:02:34             I feel like a grasshopper right now sitting here with two giants, Hank and John. I totally get that. We sometimes are asked to do things that are hard that are way out of our comfort zone. In the face of the challenge, they ended up convincing most of the people. They made, I think, at least a couple of fundamental mistakes. Number one, they put their focus on themselves and their own inadequacies instead of putting their focus on God, instead of trusting God. It’s an attention problem. They’d already seen miracles. They knew what God could do. They lost focus. Hank, could you read verses seven through nine?

Hank Smith:                      00:03:19             Numbers 14:7-9. This is Joshua and Caleb. And they spake unto the company of the children of Israel saying, The land which we pass through to search it is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into this land and give it to us. A land which flows with milk and honey. Rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land, for they are bread for us. These people have funny metaphors. They are bread for us. Their defense is departed from them. The Lord is with us, fear them not.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:03:56             Don’t be afraid. Who did they say was going to do this for them? They didn’t say, Hey, we can do it. Who’d they say was going to do this? Jehovah, He will bring us into the land. Not us. The other 10 were relying on their own strength, their own ability. They’re not persuaded. In fact, they’re so unpersuaded that they want to stone Caleb and Joshua for suggesting that they go in for their faith.

Hank Smith:                      00:04:24             That’s what we do to faithful, optimistic people.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:04:29             Yes. Stop. Let’s just kill them. They’re going to convince people to go in there and then we’re all going to die. That brings us to the Lord’s response here. In verses 11 and 12 of chapter 14, John, could you read that for us?

John Bytheway:               00:04:45             Numbers 14:11, And the Lord said unto Moses… This is such a reversal. There’s lots of people who say how long, but this time the Lord says it to Moses. “And the Lord said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke me? and how long will it be ere they believe me for all the signs which I have showed among them?” It’s like they forgot what happened in Egypt already.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:05:10             They’ve forgotten. I love the verse just because I can feel that the Lord is a real person here. I can just feel his frustration. I get frustrated too. Can the Lord be frustrated? Is there godly frustration? It seems like there is. Maybe some of my frustration isn’t godly, but that’s a real emotion. That’s something we have. The NLT phrasing makes it a little more real even. He says, “How long will these people treat me with contempt? Will they never believe me?” I love Stephen Robinson’s book back in the 90s, Believing Christ. This is a quote from Brother Robinson. “Faith is the first principle of the gospel. We often think that having faith in Christ means believing in his identity as the son of God and the Savior of the world. But believing in Jesus’ identity as the Christ is only the first half of it. The other half is believing in his ability, in his power to cleanse and to save, to make unworthy sons and daughters worthy. Not only must we believe that he is who he says he is, we must also believe that he can do what he says he can do.”

                                           00:06:25             Christ has said that he can fix me, and man, I’ve done some dumb things. That is not the end of the story if we don’t want it to be, because Christ can fix that. We’re not perfect and we are going to make mistakes, and Christ, part of our faith has to be that he can fix all of those mistakes, no matter how severe they are, how they impacted the people around us. That’s why he died for us. We need to believe that, that he can do that. No matter … You think you’re a loser? If that’s what you really feel inside, be assured that Christ doesn’t see you that way and that with him, that isn’t your destiny. For me, it was transformative. I’ve got to believe Christ that he can do what he said he can do.

John Bytheway:               00:07:18             I know exactly what you saw in verse 11 when you made that jump to Stephen Robinson’s book. Believe me. It wasn’t believe in me or believe in my existence, but it was believe what I said and believe what they have already seen me do with the Egyptians. I liked Brother Robinson’s idea of it’s one thing to believe in him, but it’s another thing to believe what he said he could do and that he really can do it as far as being mighty to save and to forgive.

Hank Smith:                      00:07:49             Sometimes I will ask a group of young adults to close their eyes and say, How many of you believe you are going to live in the celestial kingdom? About half the hands will go right up because those students know the gospel. A quarter of the hands will just stay flat down and then another quarter will go back and forth. And then I’ll say, Okay, put your hands down and let’s talk for a minute. You are going to go to the celestial kingdom, and it doesn’t have anything to do with you. It has everything to do with him. Then I’ll take them to a couple of places. 2 Nephi chapter two, you know this one, John. Jacob, I know that thou art redeemed.

John Bytheway:               00:08:35             ‘Cause you’ve been such a good boy.

Hank Smith:                      00:08:37             Because of the righteousness of your Redeemer. We are to rely wholy upon the mercy and merits and grace of him that is mighty to save. John, you can back me up here. This is my work and my glory. To bring to past the immortality and eternal life of man, and then what does he say, John, in 2 Nephi 27?

John Bytheway:               00:09:01             And I am able to do my work. I like the willing and able. We covenant to be willing, which our hearts are in the right place, but we mess up. But he is able. What’s the song we sing? We are weak, but thou art able. It’s the same thing.

Hank Smith:                      00:09:22             I know we quote this talk a lot, John, and it’s because we love him so much and he did such a good job. The most downloaded talk at BYU speeches is a talk called My Grace is Sufficient by Dr. Brad Wilcox. Can I just give you guys a couple of thoughts from it? If someone out there hasn’t read it, they need to go and listen to it and read it. Here is one analogy Brad gives. “Christ’s arrangement with us is similar to a mom providing music lessons for her child. Mom pays the piano teacher. Because mom pays the debt in full, she can turn to her child and ask for something. What is it? Practice. Does the child’s practice pay the piano teacher? No. Does the child’s practice repay mom for paying the piano teacher? No. Practicing is how the child shows appreciation for mom’s incredible gift. It is how he takes advantage of the amazing opportunity mom is giving him to live his life at a higher level. Mom’s joy is not found in getting repaid, but in seeing her gift used, seeing her child improve, and so she continues to call for practice, practice, practice. In the same way, because Jesus has paid justice, he can now turn to us and say, Follow me. Keep my commandments. If we see his requirements as a way of being too much to ask, maybe it’s because we do not see it through Christ’s eyes. We have not yet comprehended what he is trying to make of us.”

                                           00:10:59             A little bit further down, he says, “The older I get and the more I understand this wonderful plan of redemption, the more I realize that in the final judgment, it will not be the unrepentant sinner begging Jesus, just let me stay. No, he will probably be saying, Get me out of here. Knowing Christ’s character, I believe that if anyone is going to be begging on this occasion, it will probably be Jesus begging the unrepentant sinner. Please choose to stay. Please use my atonement, not just to be cleansed, but to be changed so that you want to stay.” John, you’ve heard me say this before. I don’t live the gospel because I think I’m going to earn a place in the celestial kingdom. I live the gospel so that I will choose the celestial kingdom when it is offered to me.

John Bytheway:               00:11:51             Brad has a couple of other phrases that he uses, so we’re not earning heaven. We’re learning heaven. Have you been saved by grace? Have you been changed by grace? He asked that question because the Savior is changing us. I love David that you brought up Stephen Robinson. The book he wrote after Believing Christ was called Following Christ. There’s one line in there that backs up what Hank just said. The question is not, am I going to make it? The question is, do I want to stay? He goes through Section 25. “You are sons and daughters in my kingdom.” If you’re in the kingdom of God on earth, you’re in the kingdom of God. Now, do you want to stay? Which is a totally different question.

Hank Smith:                      00:12:32             John, I say pretty boldly, “I’m going to the celestial kingdom.” Why? Because Jesus is that good. I completely trust him. Now, does that mean, oh, I don’t have to repent? No. No, not at all. It’s, I want to repent. I want to be what he wants me to be. I want to do better. Sometimes us older folks, we hear this taught and we think somehow that we’re telling young people, You don’t have to repent. Jesus is going to save you. Maybe I just don’t, I’m not articulating this carefully. In my experience, when you use fear against a young person, you say, If you don’t do this, you’re not going to heaven. That is not as motivating as the Lord loves you and he’s going to take you to heaven, so go get to know him, and then the Lord will help them change. The Lord will help them repent. I get a little concerned, I do, that our adults are saying, Stop teaching this grace thing. It’s too easy. Maybe it goes against the traditions of our fathers. I don’t know.

John Bytheway:               00:13:42             I’m thinking of Elder Renlund’s statement, he doesn’t want us to keep the commandments, he wants us to choose to keep the commandments, and we’ll fail. We won’t do it perfectly. That’s why repentance is there. When our hearts and our minds are turned to how much he loves us, we want to choose to follow him.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:14:00             Yeah, we’ll fail sometimes, you know, as we’re trying to get stronger or to get better at something, whether it’s lifting a weight or learning how to throw a ball in baseball fast, right? Throw a fastball. A little kid’s going to try to do that, and they want to throw that ball hard and fast. They can’t do it. Then as they get better, once in a while, they’re going to do it. They’re going to make it and it’s going to be, they throw that strike and it was fast and it was great, and then they may have a few throws where it doesn’t work. But they learned in that process a little bit more. If we take that to making our choices to live like Jesus, sometimes we’re going to fail. The choice isn’t going to turn out right, that we’re going to make a mistake, but we’re going to grow if we’re doing it right, because if we really want to be like Jesus, then those choices gradually, we’re going to become more and more like him.

Hank Smith:                      00:14:51             And you’ll get there.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:14:53             Yeah. Don’t expect that you’re there yet. You’re not like Jesus all the way yet. I’m a lot more like Jesus now than I was when I was 15 and making the right choices now. Because I’m a lot more like Jesus, because I’ve become more like him, it’s easier. I still got a bunch I’ve got to work on.

Hank Smith:                      00:15:13             I want to be clear on this. If I’m having a conversation with someone and I say, Do you believe in Christ that he is who he claims to be? Yes. Do you believe that you can be saved in the celestial kingdom of God? I don’t know. I think the Lord might ask you that question. Numbers 14:11. How long until you believe me? You believe in me, but you don’t believe me. When I say I will save you. I will make you like Dave just said. I can make you that celestial person.

John Bytheway:               00:15:54             In our first trip through the Old Testament, Hank, we talked about one of my favorite verses in the Book of Mormon. “Thou art angry, oh Lord, with this people because they will not understand thy mercies, which thou hast bestowed upon them because of Thy Son. ” It’s Alma 33:16. They’re just not getting it. How long until they get it?

Hank Smith:                      00:16:15             Yeah, how long until you understand how merciful I am.

John Bytheway:               00:16:19             He is our advocate, my favorite title for Christ, and who is the accuser? In the Book of Revelation, Satan is the accuser of the brethren. Jesus is our advocate. I think we start accusing ourselves of not being good enough, but we have an advocate.

Hank Smith:                      00:16:37             Someone told us once, instead of being so obsessed with obedience, we ought to be more obsessed with repentance.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:16:46             A little while ago, I was reading 2 Nephi chapter 25, verse 23, which has to do with this. Hank, can you read that verse for me?

Hank Smith:                      00:16:58             For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children and also our brethren to believe in Christ and to be reconciled to God, for we know that it is by grace that we are saved after all we can do.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:17:13             I think that I’m like a lot of people in the way I’ve read that verse throughout my whole life, which is, you could interpret this verse two ways, probably. First, I have to do everything I can do, and then I’ll be saved by grace, because that won’t be enough, but I got to do all that stuff, everything I can do, and then I’ll be saved. And that’s the way I’ve read that for a long time. Last time I was reading that, it came with a different meaning than I had always read it in. Even after everything I do, I’m still not saved. That’s not going to do it. Even after everything I do that doesn’t matter, I’m going to be saved by grace. And it makes sense when you look at it that way. You look at that literally. Do any of us do everything we can? We’re all shot if I had to do everything I could do before grace kicks in. I don’t do everything I could have done.

                                           00:18:17             Let me give you an example. I’ll be super frank. I was bishop and everything, and still, I sometimes have a hard time kneeling down and saying my prayers at the end of the day. I’m tired, I climb into bed, and maybe I’m going to say you give a little prayer in my heart, prayer to God, laying there in bed all lazy. I know I should do it because when I do it, I sleep better when I do it, and yet I don’t do it. Am I doing everything I can do? No, I could’ve kneeled down. I could have realized this laying in bed. I could’ve got out of bed, knelt down, and said my prayer. I didn’t do it. It was just a few nights ago. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do everything I could do. I’m a lost cause now if I’m reading the scripture the way I used to read that scripture in 2 Nephi.

Hank Smith:                      00:19:08             Yeah, that’s it. It’s over. You did not do all you can do. This is a point we’ve been through a few times on our show, but it’s an important one. For we know that it is by grace that we are saved. Right there. It’s in the verse. We know that it is by grace that we are saved, and you’re reading of it, Dave, I think is right on. Even though we can do a lot, there’s a lot we can do, we can serve. We can be obedient. We can pray. We can attend the temple, even with all that we can do. It is by grace that we are saved.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:19:50             Going back to the prayers, and again, to that obedience and repentance thing, when I forget to pray, it’s pretty often that I get up in the morning, you know, stretch and get ready to do my morning prayer. Morning prayers are easy for me. It’s just part of my routine. It’s what I do. A lot of times I’ll think, Oh, man, I forgot. This is a goal. I have a goal this week, in fact, guys. Pray every night. I’ve already failed. I didn’t pray, like I said, once this week. I get up in the morning, Oh, man, I feel bad about that. And I sheepishly kneel down before Heavenly Father, and I explain, Hey, Heavenly Father, I’m sorry. I forgot to pray last night. Invariably, I feel that grace. And again, I repent. I say, All right, I’m going to give this another crack. I’m going to try to become better at the way I prioritize my conversations with you, Heavenly Father. Invariably, I feel the grace.

                                           00:20:45             It’s all right. Keep on working on it. Keep going. So I’m a scientist, and I think there’s a stumbling block that, again, going back to our giants and grasshoppers and the terrible prospects of having to go in and kill giants when you’re a grasshopper. When you feel like a grasshopper, remember whose team you’re on. Remember who’s fighting your battles. It brings another question that I thought about as a scientist. God sends them in to go look around, to use their eyeballs, to use their minds to assess the situation, to see what’s going on. President Uchtdorf said this is very important when we try to get revelation. He said recently, and this is something that many brethren have said over the years, “information brings inspiration.” Revelation doesn’t come by a strike of lightning, it comes by counseling together and learning. So gathering information puts you in a better position to receive inspiration.

                                           00:21:41             True principle, right? Well, God sent, back in Numbers, he sent those scouts into the land to gather information. They made observations, and again, I feel for them, I get it. They went, they looked, they made an assessment of what was going on in that land. They made an assessment of whether they, the children of Israel, would be able to go in there and be victorious. And they come back and having thought about this, having assessed it with their eyeballs, having seen it, and the Lord then turns around and tells them, forget about what you saw. Forget about what you observed. It’s not important. Why did he tell them to go look around when he was just going to tell them to go do it anyway, even though their minds did not tell them that that was a good option? Does he want us to follow blindly?

                                           00:22:35             On the contrary, I think God wants us to know exactly what’s going on. When we are asked to go do something really hard, he wants us to understand that he can do it, and it was him that did it as driving home that lesson of faith. We knew what the situation was. Then if you believe the Lord, he’ll go in and make it happen. Then what happens to your faith? Then what happens to your willingness to believe the Lord in the future? I don’t see it as blind faith at all. Heavenly Father wants us to exercise faith that encompasses not just what our eyes and ears tell us, but he wants us to also include what we’ve learned through our spiritual senses and spiritual experiences and our spiritual observations. This brings me to this idea of faith and science. To me, there is an imaginary conflict between faith and science.

                                           00:23:44             In fact, I see a perfect meshing of faith and science. Yet, this perceived conflict is a big stumbling block for a lot of people, and I personally know people for whom that stumbling block has unfortunately destroyed their faith. I think we get in trouble when we ascribe too much weight to the evidence from our eyes and ears and not enough to our equally valid intuition, our equally valid ability to feel the Spirit. The promptings of the Holy Ghost. On the other hand, I think it’s sometimes a mistake to give no weight to scientific observation. Again, the two are completely compatible to me. President Nelson dedicated our building, I say new, it’s not really new anymore, back in 2014 or 2015. This is what President Nelson taught at that dedication. He said, “All truth is part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whether truth comes from a scientific laboratory or by revelation from the Lord, it’s all compatible.

                                           00:24:48             All truth is part of the everlasting gospel. There is no conflict between science and religion. Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion or both.” This is a trap some people fall into. I know there are spiritual casualties when this conflict is ongoing. I know it was when I was in seminary. I’m concerned when a well-meaning Sunday school teacher or seminary teacher teaches as gospel truth something that the church does not take a position on. For instance, evolution. In other words, how the Lord created the earth. What is the key doctrine? The Lord created the earth. That is the core doctrine that we need to have a testimony of. How he did it, we don’t know. The church doesn’t have a position on it. That’s super important to remember. It doesn’t matter who’s right on this. It’s that we don’t know.

                                           00:25:50             That’s a problem that certainly I think scientists like myself fall into the trap of we study something so deeply and all of a sudden we think we actually know that that’s the case. Problem is we don’t know. And science itself, we got to remember that. If you’re not a scientist, sometimes it gets confusing. Science doesn’t pretend to prove almost anything. Science doesn’t prove things very well. It accumulates evidence for or against. It can disprove some things in very specific narrow areas. I can do an experiment and under a given set of conditions, I can say whether drug A protects muscle from degradation. I can see that. I can hypothesize, yeah, I think this is going to protect it. I can do my experiment and I can either reject that hypothesis or I can say, Oh yeah, it looks like it, maybe it does protect it. But science doesn’t pretend to actually arrive at the truth very often.

                                           00:26:53             Even when it does, when we have a scientific law, sometimes it needs to be revised. For example, there’s a scientific law, it’s called conservation of mass, as it was formerly known. It kind of fits with gospel principles as well here. You cannot create or destroy mass. Can’t do it. It’s just converted from one form to another. That was considered an absolute law for a long time until, I’m not a physicist, so I could butcher some details here, but in general, the idea is correct. Einstein came along and he realized that in nuclear reactions, you can convert mass. You can get rid of mass. It becomes energy. That law that was assumed to be solid had to be tweaked just a little bit. Now we talk about the conservation of mass energy instead of the conservation of mass. Scientists need to remember that we don’t really get to absolute truth in science, and that’s important.

                                           00:27:48             Sometimes if you’re not a scientist, you hear people say things like, Science has proved this or that. The point is, is we have this conflict that sometimes gets invented between science and between faith. I’m not against going into the weeds. I believe evolution was, you know, God created the earth through evolutionary principles. And you guys may or may not agree with that, but I think the important thing is, is that we don’t take stuff like that and present it with a fervency of testimony equal to that fervency of testimony we bear, with which we bear testimony of Christ, or that prophets are Christ’s spokesman on the earth, or that the Book of Mormon is true, the core parts of the gospel. Let’s make sure it’s clear. I know of a couple of people grew up in the church solid. Problem is, if you’ve been taught that something like evolution, it could be a lot of things, is wrong with the same verbency that the gospel is true.

                                           00:28:58             What happens to that student when they get into university and are confronted with an enormous evidence that that point that seminary teacher made isn’t true? If that’s been all lumped together into the same testimony, Jesus Christ lives, the Book of Mormon’s true and evolution is of the devil. Now that student’s going to have a big problem. They’re going to have a crisis of faith. Let’s make sure we get a strong testimony at the core of the gospel. Let’s play around in the weeds a little bit if we want to. It’s fun sometimes. Let’s just make sure that some things we don’t know for sure yet, both on the scientific side and on the spiritual side. Yeah. Again, science and faith are 100% compatible, and I love Alma 32. That’s where we learn about Alma’s seed, where he asks us to do an experiment on the faith. I love that chapter because that’s exactly what we should be doing.

                                           00:29:59             I believe we should be doing it temporally, as we try to learn about the world around us, it’s the same process when we do it spiritually. Our faith grows in the same way that our scientific knowledge grows. Just a few things Alma said. He said concerning faith, “faith isn’t to have a perfect knowledge of things. Therefore, if you have faith, you hope for things which are not seen, which are true.” And mere faith is awesome. That’s a great thing. Then he said, “As I said concerning faith, it’s not a perfect knowledge. Even so with my words, you cannot know of their surety at first unto perfection any more than faith is a perfect knowledge. But behold, if you will awake and arouse your faculties,” that might include your eyeballs, it might include your ears, certainly includes your brain, and it probably includes some other senses that we don’t classically associate with our body, our spiritual senses.

                                           00:30:55             “If you arouse those faculties and exercise a particle of faith, even if you can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until you believe in a manner that you can give place for a portion of my words.” Grow the faith a little bit. Then he talks about planting the seed. Plant that seed of faith in your heart and then observe. Watch what happens. Pay attention. See what happens to that seed. Make sure you follow the experimental protocol. You got to do it the right way. Then watch and see. Does the seed grow? If it grows, then you know it’s a good seed. If it doesn’t, throw it out. Do the experiment the right way, follow the experimental protocol. Then you’ll know if the seed is good or not. That’s how our faith grows. He tells us, at some point, your knowledge will then be perfect.

                                           00:31:45             Now you know. Now you know that that seed was good. Your faith is dormant. You don’t need the faith anymore because you have knowledge. That’s what we want to do. It’s the same process. I love science. I love even more my faith. Learn all that you can with your eyes, ears and mind. Go scout out the land. Get an assessment of what the situation is and your best evaluation of it is. So important is that we never should give mortally constrained perception greater weight in our decision making than eternally learned and spiritually obtained truth. That, I think, is the key. We should go after science as hard as we can. We just have to make sure we don’t let that overshadow equally valid, equally thought out conclusions in that process.

Hank Smith:                      00:32:45             That’s well said. I think you and Elder Talmage, Elder Widtsoe.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:32:50             Eyring, President Eyring’s father, a lot of good people who, you know, I’ve learned from.

Hank Smith:                      00:32:57             Dave, that is fantastic and very well said. And I love that it comes from a scientist. You have been trained. You teach at what I think is a very prestigious university who really expects a lot out of its students. I remember a student came to me once and said, I’m really struggling. I’m reading the book of Genesis in my religion class and I’m learning about evolution in my biology class and I’m struggling. We talked for a second. I remember we came up with a little conclusion. Let science teach you how. Let the scriptures teach you why. She felt good about that. Dave, before we let you go, is there anything else from this lesson that we need to see?

Dr. David Thomson:        00:33:43             Yes, one more. The story from Numbers that stands out more than any other is Balaam and his donkey. It really brought some important and deep thoughts to me that go back and connect to what we’ve been talking about in terms of gratitude and our association with other people. Israel arrives in the plains of Moab and the king of Moab, whose name is Balak, was scared because Israel now, again, they’re not feeling like grasshoppers anymore. They’ve gone and slaughtered the Amorites who had attacked them. And Balak is scared because he’s now worried that he has Israel sitting right there. There’s a lot of them and he is convinced that they have the Lord with them. He sends messengers with money to Balaam to try to convince him to pronounce a curse upon Israel. This Balaam guy, he’s not an Israelite, but he is presented in the scriptures as a prophet.

                                           00:34:43             He is someone who talks to the Lord, and the scriptural record supports that. Balak thinks if Balaam will come and if he will curse the Israelites, then I can go defeat them. So these messengers go to Balaam to convince him. They’ve got money. And the message that Balak sent to Balaam was, “Come now therefore I pray thee curse me this people for they are too mighty for me,” this people, the Israelites. “Per adventure, I shall prevail that we may smite them and that I may drive them out of the land. For I wot that he whom thou blessest is blessed and he whom thou curses is cursed.” In other words, Balak’s convinced that Balaam, because of his relationship with the Lord, has the power to bless and curse. He has a reputation. The messengers wanted Balaam to go with them back to Moab to curse Israel.

                                           00:35:34             Balaam, to his credit, he told them to stay the night and he would tell them in the morning whether he’d do that or not. And he goes and consults with the Lord. During the night, God visits Balaam and the King James version, it says, “God said to Balaam, thou shalt not go with them. Thou shalt not curse the people for they are blessed.” Balaam goes to the messengers and says, Sorry, can’t do it. Not going with you. They leave. They go back to Balak. Balak tells them to go back to Balaam. I think it said maybe with more money, you know, offer him more money. Let’s get him over here to curse Israel. So they go back. And again, Balaam says the right thing. In King James version, I like it. He said to the messengers, “If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord, my God, to do less or more.”

                                           00:36:25             He’s saying, I don’t care how much money you give me. I can’t do something the Lord doesn’t want me to do. We’re going to see later on in the scriptures, Balaam, he sounds like he’s doing a great job here as a prophet. He goes a little bit astray later on, but right now he’s looking pretty good. Then this is where he starts to go astray a little bit. The messengers, they beg him. He’s told me he won’t go, but they say, Come on, go talk to the Lord about it again. He tells the men to stay another night and he’s going to go talk with the Lord. He says, Let me go check with the Lord again. Maybe he’ll tell me something different. This reminds me of Joseph Smith and Martin Harris with the manuscript. The Lord already said, Don’t give him the manuscript, and they keep on coming back. Come on. Let’s give him the manuscript.

                                           00:37:11             Same kind of idea here. This time, Balaam goes back to the Lord and says, Come on, are you sure I shouldn’t go with these guys? God tells him to go with the men. And this is contrary to what the Lord told him first. Balaam’s begging and God says, Okay, fine, go. But he says, Only do what God tells you to do. This is where it gets fun. Balaam gets up in the morning, tells the guys he’s going to go with them. He gets on his donkey and they head out for Moab. God’s not happy with him. It’s unclear to me. God told him he could go and now God’s not happy with him. There’s probably a little bit of story that’s in between the lines that we maybe don’t know about, but in any case, God’s not happy with him, so he sends an angel to stand in the road to block Balaam’s way.

                                           00:37:57             And now I’m going to shift to the NLT version in chapter 22, verse 23. Says, “Balaam’s donkey saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand. The donkey sees the angel. Balaam doesn’t see the angel. The donkey runs off with Balaam still on it. Balaam beats the donkey and gets it back onto the road. Again, kind of a little comical vision in my mind of what’s going on here. The donkey still sees the angel and tries to maneuver around it on the trail. In doing so, they’re in between two walls, in trying to get around the angel, the donkey crushes Balaam’s foot against the wall. Now Balaam’s really mad and he beats the donkey again. Then again in the NLT in verse 26 and 27, the angel of the Lord moved farther down the road and stood in a place too narrow for the donkey to get by at all.

                                           00:38:51             This time, when the donkey saw the angel, it laid down under Balaam. In a fit of rage, Balaam beat the animal again with his staff. Balaam’s really getting mad and hitting his donkey. Then the Lord gave the donkey the ability to speak. Did the donkey really speak to Balaam? Again, that’s not important. Maybe Balaam’s talking to him and they’re having a conversation the way I have a conversation with Chappy, my dog. Who knows? That’s not the important part. What we get out of this, their conversation, whatever the manner of the conversation was, the donkey says, “What have I done to you that deserves your beating me three times?” Balaam then says, “You have made me look like a fool. If I had a sword with me, I would kill you.” Clearly, Balaam has lost the Spirit now. We already knew he might have lost it because he couldn’t see that angel.

                                           00:39:43             He was on a path that he shouldn’t have been on and he couldn’t see. And then from the NLT, it says, “Then the Lord opened Balaam’s eyes and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the roadway with a drawn sword in his hand. Balaam bowed his head and fell face down on the ground before him. Why did you beat your donkey those three times the angel of the Lord demanded? Look, I have come to block your way because you are stubbornly resisting me. Three times the donkey saw me and shied away. Otherwise, I would certainly have killed you by now and spared the donkey.” If roadshows ever come back in the church, this is a great scriptural story to do a roadshow with. It’d be fantastic. And that’s how I looked at the story, just a fun story. But as I stopped and pondered for more depth here, I thought, in what ways am I stubbornly resisting the Lord?

                                           00:40:41             As I think about that personally, I could make a list. Number two, who are the donkeys in my life who have seen what I could not see when I’ve been heading down the wrong path in my life? Number three, are there people in my life who perhaps cannot see something I can see? How can I be a donkey to them? Those are three really good questions to ask. I was mostly joking when I said I was going to go with the King James version of this story. It uses different verbiage for a donkey. My wife convinced me that it would be too crass for this podcast. So again, I’ll stick with the NLT word donkey. There are many donkeys for whom I’m grateful in my life. I could list off many, many donkeys. I want to just talk about three of them. My mom, of course, she would be great.

                                           00:41:30             She raised me. My dad died when I was 12 years old. She was burdened with raising a teenager who didn’t have his head on straight. How many times was she a donkey for me? I love her. I won’t go into much more from that. Let me talk about the three who I thought really were donkeys at critical times in my life. The first one is a guy named Expedito down in my mission in Brazil. Expedito was a member of the church down in Divinópolis, Brazil. And on your mission, was there like a member who was kind of like a Yoda to you. Old little guy. You know those members who just love the missionaries and are so full of wisdom. And as a missionary, you’re looking at this old guy and you’re like, Man, I hope I’m like him when I get that old. This was Expedito.

                                           00:42:24             He was like Yoda in so many ways. To understand his impact, you need to understand how I ended up on a mission. This is an important one. When I was a teen, I had zero intention of going on a mission. In fact, I was very opposed to it. I was dating a good girl. My high school girlfriend once suggested that I serve a mission. I can’t remember how she put it. She might have said she’d always dreamed of marrying a return missionary or something like that. Well, this presented a problem for me as a, my current mindset. Nonetheless, she had me wrapped around her little finger, so I decided to serve a mission. Why did I serve a mission? Well, at that point, it was for the girl. And, as I’ve said, it was amazing. It was really hard at first. It took some transition.

                                           00:43:11             I had a lot of learning to do, but I loved my mission. I learned so much testimony-wise, learning who I was, learning to love other people, but it was still a mission that was being served on this foundation of my girlfriend. Serving my mission, everything’s going great. November, I’m set to come home in March. November, I get the letter. This letter came and man, it crushed me because in my mind, she wants me to serve a mission. Okay, I’ll go serve a mission because if I do that? The reward. The reward. That was my mindset. And now all of a sudden, that foundation I was, that went away. Boom. It’s gone. That didn’t go the way I was anticipating at all. And I just fell into this darkest pit for about 10 straight days. It felt like it was longer, but I went and fact checked myself in my mission journal.

                                           00:44:11             It was 10 days where I was in a really dark place and it was horrible. Okay, so where does Expedito come in here? Well, we had a lunch appointment with him. For most of us, I think a missionary shows up to lunch, kind of grumpy and a black cloud over our head. Maybe we ask him, “What’s wrong? You doing okay, Elder?” And he says, “Yeah, I’m fine.” And we’re like, “Oh, okay, he’s fine.” And we move on. Feed him. That’s the end of the story. Not Expedito. He left companion with his son, who I think was branch president at the time, and took me out into the courtyard, and he sat me down, and we had a talk for, like, 30 minutes to an hour. I don’t know. It was a long talk. He sits me down. He saw I was turned the wrong way.

                                           00:44:56             He could see that I wasn’t on the right path. He put his arm around me while I cried. It was so good. I don’t remember what he said. What I do remember is I got up. Wow. The difference between when I walked in that house and after that talk with Expedito, he was able to help me look to the Savior. He got those blinders off me. He let me see the angel. When we were done, I left his house with a new commitment to the Lord. It was miraculous to me. If I had to pick a moment in which I was born again, that was it right there. Wow. I’m grateful to Expedito. He must have died a long time ago. It’s been a long time since I served there. I can’t remember his last name. His son is, I think, Elson, if I remember right. Elson, if you happen to be listening to this in Portuguese or something, give me a call. I’d love it. But Expedito, man, what an impact. He was-

Hank Smith:                      00:45:59             Yeah. Wow.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:46:01             Mega donkey. Oh, he got me on the right track. President Oaks said in his new book, he says, “We are challenged to move through a process of conversion toward that status and condition called eternal life. This is achieved not just by doing what is right, but by doing it for the right reason for the pure love of Christ.” That is exactly how I felt like I was on my mission. I was doing a lot of really good stuff, but I wasn’t doing it for exactly the right reason. Maybe it was a good reason. I think if we go to Elder Oaks and good, better best, but it wasn’t the best reason, and it wasn’t the one I should have been focused on. I didn’t have my eyes on Christ. Expedito, man. That is going to be one meeting in heaven that I so look forward to. Boy, that guy. You know what the bad thing is? I don’t know if I ever really expressed that to him very well. I cried in front of him. For me at that time, that was like, Oh, I got to go hide. I don’t want to talk to him again. That was embarrassing.

                                           00:47:03             Boy, I love Expedito. That was donkey number one for me. Bishop Walker in North Carolina. We got out there. You know, we’re married. I get done with my master’s degree and we go to North Carolina for a PhD. We were kinda like 85 percenters, meaning it’s Sunday morning, we wake up, there’s 85% chance we’ll go to church. But if we’re kinda tired, maybe we won’t quite get there. We’re good. We’ll serve. We’ll do all the things, but maybe we’re not all in yet. Man, Bishop Walker in Greenville, North Carolina, I am so grateful for him. He saw something in me that I didn’t see at the time. I saw myself as a 85 percenter, which is good. That’s not bad. That’s okay. He saw something more. He called me to be young men’s president, called me into the bishopric. I was a young guy.

                                           00:47:50             He was just somebody who I looked at and I was like, He sees life the way it ought to be seen, and I wanted to be like him. That was amazing. Bishop Walker was incredible. My third donkey, and this is the superstar of all donkeys in my life, and that is Kendra, my wife. I so love her, even though we are so different and we butt heads sometimes and we have different ideas. She has an infinite supply of forgiveness and patience and just keeps on loving me. She has seen so many things in my path that I couldn’t see. Again, that comes down to we’re really different. I’m a real letter of the law kind of guy. She’s a real spirit of the law kind of girl. It’s a really good pairing because she has helped me grow so much. She’s taught me so much about charity. My patriarchal blessing said I had to focus on charity, and looking back, that patriarch didn’t know me at all. He couldn’t have hit the nail on the head better than he did. Kendra has helped me learn charity, and hopefully I’ve been a donkey to her, too, in helping her along the way.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:00             This is the funniest conversation.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:49:03             So take home message from Balaam here. There’s going to be donkeys in your life. There’s going to be people who are walking the trail with you who can see things you can’t see. We’ve all got to decide, are we going to ignore them or are we going to listen to them? The experiences I just told you. It may seem bleak, but I am fully confident and have a strong testimony that in the end, if we keep our eyes on the Savior, keep our focus there, make sure we’re building on the right foundation, it is going to be amazing.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:39             Dave, this has been a fantastic day, and I knew it would be getting to know you over the last little while and the way you and I ended up meeting and chatting. I’m going to ask you to do something here, and I haven’t prepped you for it. I want to give you a quote from one of my donkeys. This is such an odd way to talk, but one of my donkeys. John, you’re one of my donkeys, just so you know. President Hinckley. He said, “Faith is like the muscle of my arm. If I use it, if I nurture it, it grows strong. It will do many things. But if I put it in a sling and do nothing with it, it will grow weak and useless.” He said, “This is my prayer for all of us. Lord, increase our faith.” Dave, you and I talked beforehand. We have a lot of people listening who are in trying circumstances, trying to work their way out of darkness and trial and maybe their consequences of their own choices. Can you tell me what that quote means to you and speak to those people?

Dr. David Thomson:        00:50:49             Oh, Hank, I love that quote. I remember it because when anyone says muscle, I perk right up. It’s something I’ve studied for a very long time. A major part of what I study is how muscle grows and why it atrophies or why it gets smaller and weaker. From a biological perspective, when you go into the gym, you want to get bigger, stronger muscles when you’re lifting weights. I spent a lot of time studying how that happens going from the obvious that, yeah, you lift weights and you get stronger down to what’s not obvious, which is what’s happening inside muscle cells that tells that cell to adapt and to grow and to strengthen. So you go in and you pick up a heavy thing and you lift it. It does a number of things. It strains that muscle. It puts stress on that muscle. It may even damage the muscle a little bit.

                                           00:51:48             That strain sets off a bunch of… Our bodies are so incredible. Just looking at a muscle, you have many, many sensors that are able to detect stress and strain and many other signals. But when you stress that muscle, it turns on some of these sensors. They set off a cascade of reactions, which ultimately tell the muscle to build more protein. It builds more protein, and as those proteins are added to the structure of the muscle, the muscle gets bigger. I think as you take that and you try to apply that physiological principle to our daily lives and our own spiritual strength and the strength of our faith, the lesson’s pretty clear. If your faith isn’t tested, if it’s not stressed, if you aren’t faced with questions that you don’t know the answer to, if you sometimes think that you understand what you ought to be doing and you do it, and then you don’t get the blessing you thought you should have got for it, these are all things that can really stress your faith.

                                           00:53:02             Keep in mind that that stress, that difficulty, that resistance is part of the growth process. It is the stimulus that’s going to help you grow. Without it, like President Hinckley said, you can’t grow if you’re not stressing. When you go in and lift weights, if you want to get stronger… and this is the hard thing. I guess if you look at it in the wrong light, it might be discouraging. I think it’s absolutely true of faith just as much as it is for muscles. If I am new to weightlifting, let’s say brand new, I haven’t touched a weight and I go into the gym, I can get at the bench, get in… Let’s say I want to bench press, and I might just have the bar. That’s 45 pounds, and I might lift that, and I do it like eight times, my muscles are done.

                                           00:53:53             Not only that, that stress made them hurt, and the next day, I might be in a lot of pain. Well, if I keep on going into the gym and I grab that bar and I lift, I keep on doing eight reps with that bar, pretty soon it’s going to be a lot better and it’s not going to hurt as much. But I’m going to plateau. I’ve gotten stronger, but I’m not going to get stronger still. I’m using a weight that now my muscles have adapted to. They’ve strengthened and they can handle that weight just fine. I’m still not going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’ve got more work to do. What do I got to do? I can’t keep on using that bar. I’ve got to do something. Either I’ve got to do more than eight reps, or maybe I’ve got to do more sets of reps than I was doing, or maybe I’ve got to put some more weight on there.

                                           00:54:43             I’ve got to do something to create more stress, otherwise the muscle’s not going to grow. I think that’s consistent with what we’ve been taught about our faith as well. We can’t be complacent in our faith. Doesn’t matter what experiences I’ve had up until now. If I stop trying to exercise my faith to continue to grow and to obtain new experiences and new knowledge, we’ve been told, “If you’re not going upward, you’re going to be regressing. You’re going to go backwards.” I can give an example of that. When I got done with my mission, we got married. Again, I’d had, my mission was amazing. Those five and a half months, after I’d gotten my mindset right and gotten my eyes on the Savior the way that they should have been, it was amazing. My mission. It was so good. It was easily the best months of my mission.

                                           00:55:34             Then I got home, found Kendra, we got married and started our life together and had our first child. Kylie, I remember one of the first crises of faith I faced after I’d been born again and gained my faith. It was the dumbest thing. Kylie, she had colic. She just cried all the time. She was fine. But I was in a state as busy student. I had a lot going on. I was actually doing, like, personal training for about 20 hours a week in addition to my studies to make money. And I was busy and I kinda let my gaze shift off of the Savior and I was paying attention to other important things, but I’d moved away. I’ve got a kid who just cries all the time. It came down to this, again, it’s kind of that transactional thing with God. Hey, heavenly Father, this is really hard, so I’m going to pray to you and ask you to get Kylie to quit crying so much because I’m really tired tonight. We took turns at night. Sometimes it’s Kendra’s turn to be awake, sometimes it’s my turn to be awake. It’s my turn to be awake and I’m super tired and Kylie’s crying and, Hey, Heavenly Father, let’s do something about this.

Hank Smith:                      00:56:44             It’s like asking someone in the weight room, Can you take this weight?

Dr. David Thomson:        00:56:48             Yeah, will you lift this weight for me? Well, he didn’t do it. For me, it was a crisis of faith and it made me weak. Got mad at God. Again, it was kind of like a week long funk where I just was down. I didn’t feel good because I decided, man, I don’t know that there’s anything I wanted more than right now having Kylie go to sleep so I could go to sleep. It was like, I want this more than anything and God’s just not listening to me. He must not care. He must not love me. At this point, there was, in my scientific mind that it makes no sense that God doesn’t exist. It was that way at that time, but I just don’t think he loves me because he wouldn’t do this thing for me. It was my wife who pulled me out of the funk, because again, she’s my favorite donkey of all time ever.

                                           00:57:37             I got out of that funk, got my head oriented back on Christ. She reminded me of some things that I just had lost vision of. I forgot about. She had to remind me. I don’t know how I forgot about some spiritual experiences I had. She’s like, David, this doesn’t make sense. Why are you saying this? Remember this? Remember that? I was like, Oh, yeah, I do remember that. Yeah, I know that happened. She got me back on track. I love my wife. Funny thing is, I got back on track and it was, I remember I’d done my repenting. I apologized and I told God, Look, this is hard for me. You know it’s hard, but I just want you to know I’m back in and my conversation was, I’d love it if you took care of this for me, but if you don’t, I trust you and I’m in.

                                           00:58:27             Guess what? Kylie slept great that night for me. The next night it was like, boom, there it was. As we gain faith and strength, scarily, there’s a chance that God may push us a little bit further. He may put a little more strain on us, not because he doesn’t love us, but because he loves us and he wants to make us into something that we’re not yet. I’m so grateful for those strains. There have been strains in my life. Universally, there’s a few stupid things I’ve done that I think have hurt me and haven’t been for my own growth. I can see the Lord’s hand in so many things that have made me stronger. I do hope and have faith that the Lord continues to give me challenges that will help me to grow and progress.

Hank Smith:                      00:59:17             Dave, this has been a fantastic day. We started out, focus on the Lord. We walk through the Book of Numbers and we finish, focus on the Lord. My book of Numbers has been filled up with notes, things I want to remember, things I want to implement. Don’t know if I’m going to go tell my wife she’s my favorite donkey. That might be something I hold off on.

Dr. David Thomson:        00:59:42             I don’t know. Kendra seemed a little bit… She was enchanted by it a little bit. I think she liked it a lot, so my favorite donkey.

Hank Smith:                      00:59:49             I might have to go on faith and give this a try. With that, we want to thank Dr. Dave. Dave Thomson for being with us today. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen. In every episode, we remember our founder, Steve Sorensen. We hope you’ll join us next week on followHIM.