Today's Favorite Verse: Genesis 35:2-3, 19
"Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments:
And let us arise, and go up to Beth-el; and I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went.
And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem."
Rachel stole the images that were her father's when Jacob fled with his family. Her father Laban came after them and searched for his idols, but Rachel stayed seated on the camel where she had hid them. Jacob must have found out for now he is calling his household to put away the strange gods and cleanse themselves. After this event this chapter tells of Rachel's death in childbirth. I pondered on how timely it was that she followed a prophet and became clean. We never know when death will take us. The cleansing process needs to be continual.
I pondered on how you really cannot become clean until we first put away the strange gods, idol worship, and walking after the philosophies of the world. All of these tools of the adversary will prevent us from having the Holy Spirit as our guide. I will be forever grateful that when I began to read the scriptures that the spirit told me not to read books about the scriptures, but to read the scriptures. I can see now that if I had done differently, I could have been so tempted to go down very strange roads, on paths I would not want to be following. There are many false prophets out there, that will turn you into a copy of them for a price. There will come a day of reckoning and sifting among the saints. We must be made clean in preparation for the Lord's second coming.
"They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish in Babylon, even Babylon the great, which shall fall."
(Doctrine and Covenants 1:16)
