Brother Baxter asked me to speak on my experiences as a patriarch, or on anything else that I wanted.  Speaking just on my experiences might take me three minutes, so I'd like to expand the topic to include the gathering of Israel.

One of the main purposes of a patriarchal blessing is to declare the lineage—the tribe of Israel—through which a person's blessings will come.  I often asked myself, “Would I even know if a person wasn't from the tribe of Ephraim?”

Everyone here is probably from the tribe of Ephraim.  This is the tribe designated by the Lord through which the restoration of the gospel and the gathering of Israel would take place in the latter days.  All of the other tribes will have to come to Ephraim to receive their blessings.

One day a girl came to me for her blessing.  She was born in Romania.  The thought went through my head that she might not be from the regular tribe.  I laid my hands on her head and heard myself say that she was from the tribe of Reuben!  I couldn't have found the word “Ephraim” if I had tried.  My mind searched for the names of the other tribes, as well, and they were nowhere to be found, either.

This was hugely reinforcing for me.  The system works, and I was able to identify the tribe!

I have since found three people from the tribe of Manasseh.  One of them was a young man who came with his brother to receive their blessings together.  The first brother was from the tribe of Ephraim, but the second was from Manasseh.  This is possible because their father was American and their mother was Hispanic.

Patriarchal blessings are given through the power and authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood, and under the influence of the Holy Ghost.  I pray all the time that the blessings will not be mine, but from the Lord.  And I have learned that any priesthood blessings given by one holding that authority are honored by the Lord.

I was once asked by a woman whom I didn't know to go to the hospital to administer a priesthood blessing to her comatose mother.  I knew the mother.  I asked the full-time missionaries to accompany me.  One of them anointed the woman, and I sealed the anointing.  I've never had such a struggle with a priesthood blessing as I had with that one.  I stuttered and I stammered as I searched in my mind for anything coherent to say.  Nothing made sense.  All that came out was a jumble of meaningless words.  I felt terrible.  When I finished, the daughter looked at me and said, “So what did that mean?

I shrugged and fled.  I got in my car and berated myself for my failure and unworthiness.  What had I done wrong?  I was about a mile from the hospital when I heard a voice in my mind.  I can still show you exactly where I was at that moment.  The voice said, “I have no blessing for that woman.”

A flood of relief swept over me.  I wasn't at fault at all.  That woman was negative and apostate.  She had taken her fine sons out of the Church.  The Lord let me know through this experience that it is not the holder of the Priesthood who is giving the blessings.  It is the Lord Himself giving the blessings, through the Spirit, and that He honors the blessings thus given by His authorized representatives.

I was His authorized representative on that occasion, and He said, “I have no blessing for that woman.”  It's an awful thing to be in an apostate condition and unworthy of the Lord's blessings.  Unfortunately that seems to be the position in which much of the House of Israel has found itself through history.

The Lord loves this special lineage of the House of Israel; and because of promises given to their progenitors, He refuses to let them stay in their apostate and rebellious states.  He can't bless them while they're rebellious; so He withdraws His protections, troubles come upon them, they humble themselves, the blessings start to flow, and that generation learns all over again to remember the Lord.  The pattern is that things become good again, and the House of Israel prospers until a succeeding generation forgets what was done for their fathers.

Israel split into two separate kingdoms in Palestine.  The northern kingdom consisted of 10 tribes, and was ruled by one bad king after another who collectively turned the people away from God and made them as wicked, or worse, as the idolatrous nations that they replaced.  The only way for the Lord to redeem His wayfaring people was to give them a good shaking.

Assyria was the tool that He used.  Assyria was the brutal world power of the day.  Assyria ruled by terror, and made sure that conquered nations remained weak by depopulating their country and sending the people elsewhere.  The Lord said through the prophet, Isaiah, that He would send the king of Assyria against Israel, and that after the work was done, He would then punish the king of Assyria for his pride and haughtiness.

“I will send him against a hypocritical nation. And against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.

“Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so, but in his heart it is to destroy and cut off nations not a few.”  (2 Nephi 20:6-7).

In other words, the king of Assyria won't know that he's doing my will, and that he's working for me.  He will think that he's doing everything by his own strength and wisdom, but “Shall the ax boast itself against him that heweth therewith?  Shall the saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it?”  (2 Nephi 20:15).  After I use him to punish Israel, then I'll punish him.

The king of Assyria's punishment came when Sennacherib invaded Judah to destroy it as had been done to the northern kingdom.  Judah was then ruled by the good king Hezekiah, and Isaiah was the prophet.  Jerusalem shut its gates against the monstrous invading army, and then trembled in fear as they awaited the assault.  Everyone knew they were about to die—everyone but Isaiah.  He told Hezekiah to not be afraid, because “Thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria.  He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it.

“By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city, saith the Lord.

“For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David's sake.”

And I love the phraseology of this next sentence:  “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand:  and when they arose early in the morning, behold they were all dead corpses.

“So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned and dwelt at Nineveh.

“And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword and they escaped into the land of Armenia.”  (2 Kings 19:32-37).

That left quite a mess for the Jews to clean up.  Imagine having to dispose of 185,000 bodies.

The northern kingdom of Israel split from Judah about 925 B.C.  Nineteen wicked kings ruled in the northern kingdom over the next 200 years, and then Sargon destroyed the kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C. and carried the survivors off to Assyria.  From there they went north, and became lost to history.  They became the 10 lost tribes of Israel.

Nineveh was the capital of Assyria.  It was located on the east bank of the Tigris River.  For the 10 tribes to go north, they would have had to go up between the Black and Caspian Seas.  I've always assumed that meant they ended up in what is now Russia.  After passing between the Black and Caspian Seas, if they went straight or turned right, that's where they'd end up.

I worked in the Boise Temple with Steve Buss, a man who served as a mission president in Siberia.  I asked him, “What do the patriarchal blessings of those people say?”

“Well, that's very interesting,” he said.  “There are no stakes in Siberia, so there are no patriarchs.  For the people to receive their patriarchal blessings, Salt Lake has to send patriarchs.  They sent one who gave 70 blessings.  He found people from every tribe.  That raised red flags for the people back in Salt Lake, so the next time they sent a different patriarch.  He gave 120 blessings, and found the same thing.”

Then there was the account given by Wendy Watson Nelson of her meeting with a group of 100 women in Russia:  “I’d like to get to know you by lineage,” she told them. “Please stand as the name of the tribe of Israel, which (was) declared in your patriarchal blessing, is spoken.”

“In the small gathering of fewer than 100 women in Moscow, 11 of the Twelve Tribes of Israel were represented —all but the Tribe of Levi. After the meeting, the Nelsons went to the airport and flew to Armenia, where Elder Nelson was set to create the first stake of Zion in the country the next day.

“The first people to greet them as they got off the plane were the Armenia Mission president and his wife, who heard of the Moscow sisters’ experience. 'The first thing she said to me was, ‘I’ve got Levi!'”

Nephi stated that because Israel would harden their hearts against the Holy One of Israel, “wherefore they shall be scattered among all nations and shall be hated of all men.”  (1 Nephi 21:5).

That has been the lot of Israel:  to be scattered, hated of all men, and afflicted because they harden their hearts against the Holy One of Israel.  It has happened to them over and over and over again in every place that the children of Israel have ended up.  I'll recount the instances, of which I'm aware, when the House of Israel has been afflicted:

1. Assyria carried the northern kingdom off in 721 B.C.
2. Assyria was conquered by Babylon in 607 B.C.  Babylon became the new bully on the block.  After conquering Assyria, the Babylonians set their sights on Jerusalem, besieged it in 605 B.C., put Judah under tribute, and carried its most promising young men off to Babylon.  Those young men included Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, Daniel, and Ezekiel.  I have always wondered how Lehi's boys escaped.  They were there, and they were the same age as the other captives.
3. Lehi left Jerusalem five years later, in 600 B.C.  The Mulekites left 13 years after Lehi. Those two groups ended up in America, and are among the ancestors of the American Indians.
4. Mulek's father, king Zedekiah, rebelled from under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and hoped to be able to throw off the Babylonians' yoke.  The result was that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, and carried the survivors off to Babylon.  The destruction of Jerusalem had long been prophesied.  The Jews' being carried off to Babylon was also prophesied. Coupled with that prophecy was their promised return, after 70 years, to rebuild the city.

Isaiah prophesied that the Jews' return would be accomplished through a man named Cyrus.  The prophecy was made 150 years before Cyrus was even born.  Isaiah's words were:  “That saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers:  That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.” (Isaiah 44:27-28).

As I was telling this story to Marjorie, she commented, “The Lord plans ahead, doesn't he!”  And boy, does He ever!  I liked that comment, so I entitled this talk, “He Plans Ahead, Doesn't He!”

The Lord planned to send Cyrus against Babylon.  Cyrus was not yet born.  Babylon was not yet the world power.  Jerusalem was not yet destroyed.  Babylon would be impregnable.  It was surrounded by stone walls 85 feet thick and 335 feet high.  That's as high as three pine trees.  The walls were 56 miles in circumference.  (Bible Dictionary, pg 601).  That's like enclosing all of Baker Valley inside a gigantic wall.  The Euphrates River ran right through the middle of the city.  Where the river entered the city, and where it exited, there were huge metal grates that extended deep into the river so that no one would be able to swim under them.

Did you note Isaiah's comment about saying to the deep, “Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers?”  Babylon was impregnable to everyone but Cyrus.  Cyrus was able to think outside the box.  He employed his army upriver from Babylon in digging a new channel for the Euphrates to empty into a big swamp.  Leaving a few men to complete the process of digging through the bank of the river, he took the rest of his army to Babylon, and stationed half of the men where the river entered the city, and half of them where the river exited.  They were given orders to watch the level of the river.  When they saw the water level drop, they were to enter the city through the river bed.  This was all timed to take place during a big festival being held in the city.  The inhabitants of Babylon knew Cyrus and his army were outside the walls, but they didn't worry much.  They were all celebrating  in the center of the city when Cyrus entered and took the city with hardly a struggle.

Many of Babylon's citizens were happy to have Cyrus take over.  This took place in 538 B.C.  He decreed that any captives who wanted to do so, could return to their homelands.  He even commissioned Ezra and Nehemiah to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the city and the temple.

This was the first example of Israel being gathered.  The Jews needed to return then to enable Jesus to be born in the Jews' nation 500 years later.  The Lord plans ahead.

5. We know what happened to the Nephites when the Lamanites annihilated them in 384 A.D.  It's important to remember that the Lamanite survivors of that great battle were a compounded mixture of the descendants of Laman, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, Ishmael, Mulek, and those who came with him.
6.   Hernando de Soto became the first European to enter the Mississippi Valley in 1541.  As he went through what is now Arkansas he found a land that was heavily populated with towns and villages, and filled with extensive farm fields.  From any one village he could see others.  But when the first French expeditions went through the same area in the 1670s, 130 years later, they found the area sparsely populated with only isolated villages and tribes.  What happened?

When my ancestor, William Brewster, arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts on the Mayflower in November of 1620 winter had already set in.  The Pilgrims went to work building shelters on shore, but weren't able to move off the ship until Christmas.  The weather was bad, food was short, and there was much illness.  By spring only half of the 102 Pilgrims were still alive.  They survived because of the Indians' caches of corn that they found.  There were very few Indians around, so the Pilgrims took the corn, and it saved their lives.

What they didn't know was that in the three years before they arrived in America, a great pandemic had swept across the land which killed over 90% of the Native Americans—the Israelite remnant of Lehi and the Mulekites.

What happened was that the visits of the European explorers introduced diseases into the Native American population against which their immune systems had no defenses.  Those diseases included smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, influenza, diphtheria, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, sexually transmitted diseases, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, leptospirosis, yellow fever, and pertussis.

The years 1616 to 1619 are known as “the Great Dying.”  Estimates are that the Native American population in 1616 was perhaps 18 million.  When the Pilgrims arrived they found a land wide open for colonization.  Perhaps only one and a half million Indians remained.

Can you see God's hand in these House of Israel afflictions?

7. Another that must be mentioned is the annihilation of 6 million European Jews by Hitler in World War II.  They were a “hiss and a byword,” to Hitler, and continue to be so to like-minded people.  We can't begin to imagine Hitler's inhumane atrocities.

 

8. What is less well known is the parallel atrocity that Stalin was inflicting at the same time upon the Ukrainian people.  In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet Union did the exact same thing that Russia is trying to do today in Ukraine.  They annexed the country.  Millions of Ukrainians were shipped off to Siberia to work as slaves in the mines and concentration camps.  The deaths and the suffering that took place are incomprehensible and uncountable.

Several weeks ago I asked myself, “Who are the Ukrainians?”  Then I asked myself, “What if, when the 10 tribes got past the Black Sea, they turned left instead of right?”

They'd have ended up in Ukraine.  Ukraine is a vast, fertile plain, and would have been a wonderful place to settle—except that the Ukraine area is a crossroads where one invading army after another has historically swept through.  The Poles, Turks, Russians, and Mongolians have all at various times caused havoc in the country.  The Ukrainians, to my way of thinking, perfectly fit into this pattern of affliction that was to be the lot of the House of Israel wherever they've gone.  If they are actually of the House of Israel, Stalin's deportation of them to Siberia would help to account for our patriarchs' identification of their descendants in that area.

I don't know what's currently going on in Ukraine, but this I do know—God is in control.  Whatever else happens there, the ultimate result is going to be the working of God's will.  I suspect that Putin is being used, just like the Lord used Sargon, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, and Cyrus.  I suspect the circumstances that evolve will bring about the long-prophesied return of the 10 tribes.  We all feel, and hope, that the Lord's Second Coming is much, much closer than it ever has been.  One of the tenets of our belief is Article of Faith number 10 which states, “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes.”  The Ten Tribes will need to be restored before the Lord's Second Coming.  Doctrine and Covenants 133:26-35 says that those in the north countries will be coming to Ephraim.

We live in historic times.  We live in tumultuous times.  We're going to see great things.  We're poised to see fulfillment of some of the most important prophecies ever made.

Jeremiah prophesied:  “Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The Lord liveth that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them.”  (Jeremiah 16:14-15).  He also said that “In those days the house of Judah shall walk with the house of Israel, and they shall come together out of the land of the north ...”  (Jeremiah 3:18).

In other words, the scenes that we're poised to witness will be greater miracles than when the Lord brought the Children of Israel out of Egypt by parting the Red Sea.

The fifth chapter of Jacob is Zenos' allegory of the tame and wild olive trees.  It's a prophetic history of the House of Israel.  It is 77 verses long, and we are in verse 74.  Verse 75 is the Millennium.

Nephi saw all of this in vision.  He was forbidden to write it, but assured us 7 times in 7 verses in 1 Nephi chapter 22 that the righteous would be spared.  (1 Nephi 22:16-22).  We don't have to be nervous about the things that are about to transpire.  All we have to be is righteous.  All we have to do is to keep our covenants as we serve as witnesses to God's pre-planned fulfillment of prophecy.