Upon This Rock

“And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Jesus Christ compared the truth that is received through revelation from our Father in Heaven to a rock - solid, unchangeable, unbreakable and immoveable. Contrast this with knowledge gained in any other way. The Scientific method has allowed us to discover uncounted truths about the universe over the last half of a millennium in which truth seekers have been using it. But the greater the tools that we have developed and the more theories we’ve tested and proven, have only shown us how wispy and insubstantial our knowledge really is. When we could still comfortably hold a telescope in our arms, we assumed we knew the universe pretty well. But now that we’ve launched telescopes into space or constructed gigantic radio telescope arrays that take up the better part of whole islands, we’ve discovered that all of the countless billions of stars that we can see only make up about 4% of the universe - the rest being taken up by stuff that by definition we have no way of looking at or learning about. We used to think that atoms were the smallest things in the universe - solid, indivisible little billiard balls that make up everything. But now that we’ve built miles long superconducting supercolliders we’ve smashed atoms into smaller and smaller bits and discovered that the deeper you look into the things that make us up, the less solid they appear, until they start to resemble bits of computer code or mathematical equations more than anything we might recognize as actual, solid, physical stuff. Theories and laws get reevaluated and overturned in science all of the time. The popular wisdom and common knowledge is always shifting and changing with different tastes and fashions. But the truth that is gained through revelation is solid as a rock. The more we learn about our Heavenly Father and His plan for us, the more and more solid and real and true our knowledge becomes. Science may develop more and more sophisticated ways of explaining how truly ignorant we are, but the Holy Ghost can fill us with more and more knowledge and light all of the time.