Elder Mark E. Petersen was one of the most out spoken and strongest speaking Apostles. His authoritative manner and confidence of conviction always was reflected in his messages. He knew whereof he spoke and he spoke the truth of God as none other could speak. All who ever heard him speak could little doubt the words which he spoke with such conviction and strength.

Elder Petersen spoke of the Nephites, their last great battles, their records and of the Hill Cumorah. Here is a quotation from one of his messages entitled, 'The Last Words of Moroni' as recorded in the Ensign, November, 1978, p.57.

"Moroni's father was commander of the armies of this ancient people, known as Nephites. His name was Mormon. The war of which we speak took place here in America some four hundred years after Christ.

"As the fighting neared its end, Mormon gathered the remnant of his forces about a hill which they called Cumorah, located in what is now the western part of the state of New York."

It would seem while certain 'Mormon Intellectuals' where quibbling over there being two Cumorahs and the location of one of them in Mesoamerica, those of the General Authorities where clearly proclaiming that Cumorah was Cumorah in the state of New York where it had always been. Later in that same message, Elder Petersen clearly states the following:

"When finished with his record, Moroni was to hide it up in that same Hill Cumorah which was their battlefield. It would come forth in modern times as the Book of Mormon, named after Moroni's father, the historian who compiled it."

There is no mistaken of what was said and meant. There was no vagueness in Elder Petersen's statement set before the membership of the Church and the world. There was no room to misunderstand his strong conviction that Cumorah was Cumorah, the same Cumorah in the state of New York where the Nephites had fought as recorded in the Book of Mormon and that the plates where buried there by Moroni. This was and is the position of the Church, why certain others continue to attempt to erode this solid basis upon which a sense of the lands of the Book of Mormon may begin to be based upon is of some matter of personal dissection apart from what has been taught by the authorities of the Church.

In another address of Elder Petersen, entitled 'Mormon and the Book of Mormon', recorded in Tambulilit, Aug-Sept. 1986, 6, he further states that the hill Cumorah of the days of Mormon and Moroni is that same hill where Moroni placed the plates and from where Joseph Smith would recover them from. It was not a postional statement, markedly stating Cumorah is in the state of New York, that was the obvious conclusion. It was one of those in text statement of understanding that, that was just the way it was.

"It was Moroni who wrote the final history of his people. He knew that the record must be kept safe, for his father had commanded him to take good care of it. When Moroni finished his own writings on the gold plates, he made a box out of stone and put the plates inside. Moroni placed the stone box containing the sacred records in a hole in the ground on the side of the Hill Cumorah, as it was known in those days. Eventually Moroni died.

"About 1400 years went by, and the records lay safely in the Hill Cumorah. Then the time came for them to be brought forth. Moroni was sent back to earth as an angel from heaven to visit a young man named Joseph Smith, Jr., who lived on a farm with his family in western New York, not far from the Hill Cumorah. The Lord had chosen Joseph Smith to be His first latter-day prophet, and He instructed Moroni to deliver the sacred records to him. Four years later Joseph would translate the records by the power of God and have them published for all the world to read. The records came to be called the Book of Mormon because Moroni's father, Mormon, had compiled most of them."

Moroni did not carefully prepare that box to preserve those plates and items, and carefully place it in the Hill Cumorah, 'as it was known in those days', the day of Mormon and Moroni, just to have them carted around to suit a young farm boy's location in the early eighteen hundreds. It was that young farm boy's family who was moved from place to place until they came to be where it was that Moroni had hid and placed the golden plates in tha same hill of Cumorah some 1400 years later. God's had brought Joseph's ancestors across the ocean from the Old World to the land of promise. The Lord had kept the ancestral line of a descendant of Joseph of Egypt and Ephraim his son from those ancient times down until Joseph Smith Jr. was born unto his father Joseph Smith Sr. just as the Lord had promised Joseph of Egypt hundreds and thousands of years earlier. The hand of the Lord preserved one of the pure blood of Ephraim to come forth to restore all things and to fulfill the latter day promises of the Covenant of Abraham that through Abarham's seed, through Isaac's seed, Jacob's seed, Joseph's seed and Ephraim's seed, the fathers of the covenant, be brought forth to bring about the blessing of all the nations of the earth according to the promises and blessings of the fathers that were presented in the pre-councils of heaven, and to Adam, Enoch, Noah and all the holy fathers and prophets throughout the history of this second estate of this earth's duration from father Adam until the time that Joseph was called forth, having been foreordained to such in the preexistent heavens. This was no passing happening. It had been set out as the plan of God as part of his plan for bring about the immortality and eternal life of man. Too often do we take those things which God's hand has well set out ]and established before the foundation of the world and make it so common that it must fit how it is that our human minds of the wisdom of man would have them be rather than accepting them as God had set them out from before the foundation of the world.

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(rev. 2/10/04)