Hill Cumorah

If you remember my last post you will recall how I showed you one of my favorite places. That is the upstairs of the Smith Log Home. We are now at the Hill Cumorah in the Fall of 1823. Come with Joseph and me as we walk to the Hill Cumorah from the Joseph Smith Farm. This is how Joseph descibes the Hill Cumorah, ““Convenient to the village of Manchester, Ontario county, New York, stands a hill of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighborhood. ” (Introduction to the Book of Mormon)  If you look at the picture above you can tell what he was talking about.  Although it looks just like any other hill in the area it is very special and different.

Here is why this hill is so different than any in the area. Joseph Smith says, ” On the west side of this hill, not far from the top, under a stone of considerable size, lay the plates, deposited in a stone box. This stone was thick and rounding in the middle on the upper side, and thinner towards the edges, so that the middle part of it was visible above the ground, but the edge all around was covered with earth.Having removed the earth, I obtained a lever, which I got fixed under the edge of the stone, and with a little exertion raised it up. I looked in, and there indeed did I behold the plates…The box in which they lay was formed by laying stones together in some kind of cement. In the bottom of the box … lay the plates.” (Introduction to the Book of Mormon)  So that is what happened near the top of the Hill Cumorah on September 22, 1823.

Joseph Smith continues, “I made an attempt to take them out, but was forbidden by the messenger, and was again informed that the time for bringing them forth had not yet arrived, neither would it, until four years from that time; but he told me that I should come to that place precisely in one year from that time, and that he would there meet with me, and that I should continue to do so until the time should come for obtaining the plates.Accordingly, as I had been commanded, I went at the end of each year, and at each time I found the same messenger there, and received instruction and intelligence from him at each of our interviews, respecting what the Lord was going to do, and how and in what manner His kingdom was to be conducted in the last days.” After all of this training the time finally came to retrieve the plates. Joseph Smith describes this event, “At length the time arrived for obtaining the plates…On the twenty-second day of September, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, having gone as usual at the end of another year to the place where they were deposited,  the same heavenly messenger delivered them up to me with this charge: That I should be responsible for them… by the wisdom of God, they remained safe in my hands, until I had accomplished by them what was required at my hand. When, according to arrangements, the messenger called for them, I delivered them up to him; and he has them in his charge until this day.” (Introduction to the Book of Mormon)

This ancient record would be translated by the Prophet Joseph Smith and published in the English Language in 1830 and has since been published in over 100 languages. I promise that if you read the Book of Mormon that you will have greater peace, joy, and happiness than you ever experienced before. The Book of Mormon is true and I know it because I have read it.