Hot-Button Questions About the Bible and Christian Life Grace to You: Q & A with John MacArthur

PHIL: John, here’s another totally unrelated question. How would you advise people to witness to their Mormon friends?

JOHN: Here’s the thing you need to understand to start with. Mormons are on their way to hell. It is a damning religious system. It is so far from Christianity as to be more like paganism than Christianity. There are so many gods in Mormonism that they don’t even know how many gods there are. In fact, there are more gods all the time because they make gods. When Mormons die, according to Mormon theology, the Mormon couples that have been baptized in the temple in Salt Lake and have been faithful Mormons, done what they’re supposed to do, they get their own planet and they just make gods with some kind of strange celestial sex forever and ever and ever. That part of it, folks, is very much like the seventy virgins that the Jihadists terrorist think they’re going to meet when they blow themselves up along with the infidels. There are elements of Muslim religion in Mormonism. Worst of all, they believe that the God who created the universe is Himself a created being. And they believe that Jesus, the eternal God, is a created being. They believe that God had sex with a mother and they had baby Jesus born to them as a god in heaven.

This thing is so polluted and convoluted, it is idolatry of the rankest kind. It is polytheism of the worst kind. There’s millions of gods all over everywhere. It is deviant...it is deviant in the sense that it has all these sexual overtones. And that ought to be clear to anybody who has got his eyes wide open because Joseph Smith’s big deal was polygamy. You know, have sex with as many women as you can possibly have. Brigham Young, you know, turned that into epic proportions. And, of course, recently the Mormons have tried to back away from that.

Now you have to understand this about Mormonism. Mormonism believes the Bible is corrupt by their own statements. The Bible is corrupt. The Bible is filled with error. The Bible is not trustworthy. And the Bible has to be corrected and the correct interpretation of the Bible comes through all the writings of Joseph Smith, and The Pearl of Great Price, The Doctrines and Covenants, all of that kind of stuff is designed to correct the Bible and give added revelation. So what you have is a denial then of the Trinity, they don’t believe in the Trinity, a denial of the nature of God as the eternal One, a denial of the person of Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God. There’s even a denial of the Holy Spirit, the biblical teaching of the Holy Spirit, a denial of the veracity and the truthfulness of the Bible. And then you add to this, this sexual deviancy where you want to have multiple wives and end up on a planet somewhere making spiritual children forever. And you can see that there’s some really...some really perverse things at the core of this.

I think, and the reason I’m saying that because I know the question was about evangelizing, I think you have to understand that you’re snatching a branch out of the burning. This is a very, very, very pagan religious system. They have managed to do enough public relations to convince people that we ought to accept them as Christians. They even talk about salvation by grace. Now you’ve got to understand what they’re saying. They believe in three heavens, for example, okay? And the first heaven is going to be the deprived. And you know what the deprivation of the first heaven is? You’re single. Okay. That’s where you go if you’re a non-Mormon, you’ve got to be single forever and like that’s the worst imaginable thing to be single forever. That will tell you what their perceptions are.

Then they have a second heaven which is a little bit better for people, but they’re also single forever. And then they have the highest heaven where you get to be married and make your children forever. The low heaven is sort of where everybody goes, the non-Mormons. They’re stuck, single forever, and it’s not a happy place and it’s really sort of a version of hell.

So all of their theology is skewed, all of it is warped. So when they talk about a salvation by grace, they’re talking about getting you into that first heaven where you’re single and you suffer and it’s not a happy place, that’s where the grace will take you. God’s just nice and let’s you go there, but if you want to get to the big heaven, you earn your way there..."  http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/GTY116/HotButton-Questions-About-the-Bible-and-Christian-Life