The Melchizedek Teachings in the Levant

95:7.1The Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ings of the one God be­came es­tab­lished in the Ara­bian Desert at a com­par­a­tively re­cent date. As in Greece, so in Ara­bia the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies failed be­cause of their mis­un­der­stand­ing of Ma­chi­venta’s in­struc­tions re­gard­ing overor­ga­ni­za­tion. But they were not thus hin­dered by their in­ter­pre­ta­tion of his ad­mo­ni­tion against all ef­forts to ex­tend the gospel through mil­i­tary force or civil com­pul­sion.

95:7.2Not even in China or Rome did the Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ings fail more com­pletely than in this desert re­gion so very near Salem it­self. Long af­ter the ma­jor­ity of the peo­ples of the Ori­ent and Oc­ci­dent had be­come re­spec­tively Bud­dhist and Chris­tian, the desert of Ara­bia con­tin­ued as it had for thou­sands of years. Each tribe wor­shiped its olden fe­tish, and many in­di­vid­ual fam­i­lies had their own house­hold gods. Long the strug­gle con­tin­ued be­tween Baby­lo­nian Ishtar, He­brew Yah­weh, Ira­nian Ahura, and Chris­tian Fa­ther of the Lord Je­sus Christ. Never was one con­cept able fully to dis­place the oth­ers.

95:7.3Here and there through­out Ara­bia were fam­i­lies and clans that held on to the hazy idea of the one God. Such groups trea­sured the tra­di­tions of Mel­chiz­e­dek, Abra­ham, Moses, and Zoroaster. There were nu­mer­ous cen­ters that might have re­sponded to the Je­su­so­nian gospel, but the Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies of the desert lands were an aus­tere and un­yield­ing group in con­trast with the com­pro­mis­ers and in­no­va­tors who func­tioned as mis­sion­ar­ies in the Med­i­ter­ra­nean coun­tries. Had the fol­low­ers of Je­sus taken more se­ri­ously his in­junc­tion to “go into all the world and preach the gospel,” and had they been more gra­cious in that preach­ing, less strin­gent in col­lat­eral so­cial re­quire­ments of their own de­vis­ing, then many lands would gladly have re­ceived the sim­ple gospel of the car­pen­ter’s son, Ara­bia among them.

95:7.4De­spite the fact that the great Lev­an­tine mono­the­isms failed to take root in Ara­bia, this desert land was ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing a faith which, though less de­mand­ing in its so­cial re­quire­ments, was nonethe­less mono­the­is­tic.

95:7.5There was only one fac­tor of a tribal, racial, or na­tional na­ture about the prim­i­tive and un­or­ga­nized be­liefs of the desert, and that was the pe­cu­liar and gen­eral re­spect which al­most all Ara­bian tribes were will­ing to pay to a cer­tain black stone fe­tish in a cer­tain tem­ple at Mecca. This point of com­mon con­tact and rev­er­ence sub­se­quently led to the es­tab­lish­ment of the Is­lamic re­li­gion. What Yah­weh, the vol­cano spirit, was to the Jew­ish Semites, the Kaaba stone be­came to their Ara­bic cousins.

95:7.6The strength of Is­lam has been its clear-cut and well-de­fined pre­sen­ta­tion of Al­lah as the one and only De­ity; its weak­ness, the as­so­ci­a­tion of mil­i­tary force with its pro­mul­ga­tion, to­gether with its degra­da­tion of woman. But it has stead­fastly held to its pre­sen­ta­tion of the One Uni­ver­sal De­ity of all, “who knows the in­vis­i­ble and the vis­i­ble. He is the mer­ci­ful and the com­pas­sion­ate.” “Truly God is plen­teous in good­ness to all men.” “And when I am sick, it is he who heals me.” “For when­ever as many as three speak to­gether, God is pres­ent as a fourth,” for is he not “the first and the last, also the seen and the hid­den”?

95:7.7[Pre­sented by a Mel­chiz­e­dek of Neb­a­don.]