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Sunday, August 27, 2023

Upon This Land II: The Language of Land Ownership

 Previously: A Promised Land Forever

A few years ago McKay Platt gave a talk at a Remnant conference about what it really means to have your language confounded. The name of the talk is "Confusion in the Storm," and he tells a completely different version of the story of the tower of Babel than most of us have heard. 


Here is a snippet of the talk:
One of the earliest stories about language comes from the Bible; the story of Babel. As the Bible tells the story and as I was taught in Mormon Sunday School, everyone on earth went from speaking the same language to many languages all of a sudden. The way I was taught this story doesn't jive at all with what is known about historical linguistics. Languages don't pop into existence fully formed overnight, they morph slowly. 

Chances are you believed this story. The Book of Mormon suggests a very different interpretation to this old story.  

The second sentence of Moroni's title page introduction to the Book of Mormon recalls a time that the Jaredites came from the great tower and refers to the "confounding the language." 

"Confounding the language" is generally thought to be a miraculous event where all people speaking in a different tongue suddenly found themselves speaking unknown languages: Japanese, Swahili, Navajo, and Finnish causing them to scatter into common language groups. The text, however, does not say "suddenly every man was speaking a new language." It was the people not their language who were confounded. The prayer of the brother of Jared was that the Lord "will not confound us that we may not understand our words." 

 Please don't miss the point. First people become confounded and then they cannot understand their own words. That is the basic mechanism that the Book of Mormon teaches that for the confounding of language at the great Tower. It is how the Pure language of the First Fathers became defiled. (Transcript, PP. 1-2) 

To be confounded is to lose the meanings of words in a people's own language. McKay explains that we have even lost the meaning of the word confound itself. He opines that it does not mean to "confuse" as many assume today, but rather that "it's common meaning in prior centuries referred to mixing or blending."

Mixing or blending what? Truth and error

When the meaning of language begins to be lost society can become a breeding ground for tyrants and dictators.

What do I mean?

If you can subtly manipulate language by changing the meaning of certain words and creating other words and phrases that deceive people into entering contractual servitude without their knowledge, then you've created the perfect system of voluntary slavery. Better yet, you've created a culture where people freely enter into contractual slavery while believing that they are free. 

Such a system would give the manipulators of the language access to unlimited amounts of political power. In fact, such a system would create the perfect environment for mass mind control. One psychiatrist described it this way:

... he who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. (Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, p. 45)

It's the perfect ruse. And it has been done right here in the American promised land. The confounding of our English language has resulted in a loss of our rights, our land, and even our religion (through 5013c)... everything that Moroni held sacred and wrote upon the Title of Liberty.

However, this loss of rights is merely an illusion, because, like the Title of Liberty, they have always existed. The State has attempted to enslave you through false contracts, but it is nothing but fraud.  The good news is that you never lost your unalienable rights, including the land that has already been granted to you. Land and rights are a gift from God, which He plans to fully restore in the coming Zion. 

Dear readers, our descent into slavery has been written into our very language. Because of our education in public schools and government accredited universities, we never had a chance at learning the constitutional history of 18th century words. Those words had real meaning, and our progenitors understood them. They knew that after the Revolution they had become freemen, no more subject to the king of England. And they held their land in freehold, beholden to none. 

Before you read the rest of this post, I recommend you read or listen to McKay Platt's talk. Read it here or listen here. It will serve as a great primer for the abyss that you're about to descend into. 

To understand land language we must first define some common terms, and you will find their true meaning, well, not so common.

Legal v. Lawful

In our modern culture, many of us use the words legal and lawful interchangeably, but the truth is that these terms are very different, almost complete opposites. According to the Book of Mormon, there are several types of law--spiritual law, governmental law, religious law (such as the law of Moses), and even "laws" established by Gaddianton robbers. 

Law can be defined as a set of rules prescribed by an authority. It is derived from the Old English word lah, meaning ordinance, regulation, or even a right. From the Old Norse the word was lag, which meant "layer, measure, stroke," or "something laid down, that which is fixed." 

Legal comes from the Latin word legalis, which means "pertaining to law"... and lex, which means "an enactment, precept, regulation, principle, rule, formal proposition for a law, motion, bill, contract, arrangement, contrivance."

During the righteous times of the Nephites governmental law was always based upon the land. And it only punished crime, i.e., aggression committed against another via assault, theft, murder, or breach of contract. 

The Nephites practiced a form of common law that is very similar to what America was founded upon. Its simple terms are laid out in the following verse:
Now, there was no law against a man's belief, for it was strictly contrary to the commandments of God that there should be a law that should bring men onto unequal grounds... But if he murdered, he was punished unto death; and if he robbed, he was also punished; and if he stole, he was also punished; and if he committed adultery, he was also punished; yea, for all this wickedness they were punished, for there was a law that men should be judged according to their crimes. (Alma 16:2, RE)

In another scripture we are told that the Nephites also punished liars and adulterers according to the law. 

Why?

Because committing adultery and lying are false representation and breach of contract. Adultery is a crime against your family, because you are falsely representing your place in the family and violating your marriage contract. In the context of Alma 1:4 (RE), lying has reference to preachers who practiced priestcraft, but in Nephite culture lying could have also meant breach of contract. For instance, if a businessman tries to sell something that is not what he says it is. Or, if a contractor got paid for a job and never finished it. These examples might qualify someone for being punished as liars according to the law. 

The point here is that only crimes involving victims were punished by the Nephites. 

It is also interesting to note that Mormon uses the phrase "unequal grounds" to describe unjust laws. The word ground signifies land. Unequal ground is similar to waves in the ocean, and this begs the question: was Mormon hinting at maritime law? 

Nephi most certainly did when he described the great Whore of all the earth sitting upon the "many waters." Waters in scripture is imagery for masses of people, and the Harlot (Mystery Babylon) sitting upon those waters represents control. That control is manifested in our modern version of maritime law, also known as procedural, administrative, political, corporate, or admiralty law. 

The term legal in our modern society has reference only to rules, codes, ordinances, statutes, or corporate policy, none of which is actual law. These things are the color of law. Color of law is defined as the mere semblance, or appearance of law or right. Often, this appearance of law allows policy makers to act in defiance and violation of actual law. 

In other words, anything defined as legal is merely an illusion. We, as sovereign American citizens, are not subject to anything but common law. Like the Nephites, we should only be punished according to our crimes that involve a victim. Anything else falls into the category of legal.

Have you ever wondered why cops are called police officers? It is because they do not enforce actual law, they enforce corporate policy. An officer is a position in a corporation, one that is superior to you and I, but only in the dead/legal/fictional world. In the real world, a policeman has no authority over anyone, because well, he was not elected by the people. 

In common law history, a constable or sheriff was elected by the people to represent them in apprehending criminals, he was not an officer or a policeman, and he was only supposed to punish actual crime. If he did not do his job correctly or attempted to abuse his power, the people could fire him and elect another in his stead. When was the last time a policeman was voted out of a job? Police chiefs are appointed by the Mayor, not elected. (Even captain Moroni, the chief captain of the Nephites, was elected by the people.)

Have you ever wondered why leaders who hold public office are called politicians? It is because, like the policeman, they do not deal in law but in corporate policy. They occupy an office in the for-profit governmental corporation. They work for that organization and not for you. It has been this way in America since the Organic Act of 1871 when the U.S. government was incorporated. Before that time politicians were known as statesmen. Statesmen deal in common law, not corporate policy. 

Because all cities, states, and municipalities have been incorporated, there is not a single policy they enforce that you as a sovereign are subject to, and this includes all taxes; especially income and property taxes. Furthermore, you are only subject to corporate policy if you consent to be. They have hidden into the language a variety of words that when said in response to certain question/statements make you a consenting partner in a contract.

I'll just use one example. When an officer pulls you over and and asks you if you understand why he did so, he is offering you a contract. When you say the words, "yes, I understand," what you are really saying is that you stand under the authority of the officer and you are consenting to whatever punitive action he is about to slap you with. 

When you show him your driver's license and he asks if the picture on it is you, if you say yes then what you are saying is that you are a dead corporation on a piece of plastic. Once you consent to being a dead corporation then you become subject to maritime law and corporate policy. Just the fact that you applied for and obtained a driver’s license means that you have already consented to be a slave to the State.

(As an aside I'm not suggesting that you get rid of your driver's license and try to become a state national or sovereign citizen. Some people have successfully done this but it takes years of research and a thorough understanding of the law. My purpose here is to merely inform and educate you about things you may have not known about. Someday soon God will make everyone sovereign citizens because He will destroy all the power structures that keep us slaves.)

The image on your driver's license is most definitely not you. You are a flesh and blood man or woman. The image on your license is only an image, and the name on the card is not your real name. It appears in all caps, which, according to Roman military law, means you have no status at all. Your real name is your Christian name, which is a combination of upper and lower case letters. Your Christian name describes the real flesh-and-blood you, the sovereign who only answers to the highest judge in the land, God Himself.

Your name appears in all caps on every legal document they have created for you, including: birth certificates, social security cards, loan documents, bank statements, tax returns, student loans, and even hospital tags. 

In the Roman empire this was known as capitus diminutio, or the loss of a man or woman's civil status in Roman society. If all the letters of the name were capitalized, then you had no status at all. Even the word capital is interesting in this context, in economic terms it simply refers to "those durable produced goods that in turn are used as productive units for further production of goods and services." 

Having a name with all caps literally means that you, my friends, are capital goods. You are the "productive units" that are used to produce other goods and services. In their fictional-corporate-world they own your labor; your labor is the capital good. It is also used as surety at the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for the national debt (the IMF has the original copy of your birth certificate), and it is bought and sold on the stock exchange. That is why you've heard the phrase that if you have good genes you come from "good stock." We are the livestock. We are human capital

Welcome to modern slavery. 

Now, I don't want to veer to far off on the word plays of maritime law, I've already written a fairly comprehensive piece on that subject that you can read here

But there are still a few more terms to define that have to do with the subject of this series. Before we get into these other familiar words there is a deeper aspect to legal and lawful that I need to share with you. I learned these definitions from Ron Gibson, a lawyer (not an attorney), who is an expert on land patents and who teaches seminars on the step-by-step process of how to claim them (more on Ron later). This is how he defines legal and lawful:

Legal: people on the water controlled by service corporations.

Lawful: men and women on the land

Now think about this: you can't move around on the water without assistance. You need some kind of boat or floating device to do so, otherwise you drown. But on the land you can freely move about and do as you please. On the water you are subject to others providing you the service of shipping. In exchange for this service you are granted certain privileges and benefits by the captain of the ship. When you accept those "rights" from the captain you consent to becoming his cargo, which means he can sell or trade you at his leisure. At that point your rights become alienable.  

Are you beginning to grasp the direness of your awful situation? 

You are only free as a flesh-and-blood man or woman on the land. That's it... there is no other way to be free. It is Jesus Christ, and no other being, that grants you that land and freedom. The Book of Mormon testifies of this truth. 

Now let's get one thing straight: rights do not come from government or men. Rights come from God, the Creator. He has endowed you with unalienable (unencumbered) rights and given you the land resting on the crust of the earth. The purpose of its very creation is to be tilled and worked by you, the husbandman. And it was designed to yield an abundance of food and goods. 

Like you, the land is alive, it is bursting with embryonic molecules that are just waiting to spring into commodities. All it needs is your hands to stir up its elements and enzymes.  

Do you realize that if every family were allowed to take ownership of the land freely granted to them by God then it would finally be possible to have "no poor among us"?

Zion requires land ownership. Any conversation about Zion is meaningless without a conversation about land. There has to be a gathering place. There has to be a land of Zion. 

One purpose of Zion is to restore the earth back to the condition that God intended for it when He created it. To do that requires hard work and labor on the land. And the earth will reward those who work it and share that abundance with others. 

Once we learn the basics of sharing and elevating the poor, then God will finally be free to reveal to us an inexhaustible amount of heavenly knowledge, or in other words, "all things." There is surely no limit to the concept of "all." 

It really is that simple. There is nothing mystical or abstract about Zion. It is just freedom, hard work, land, and sharing with and loving others, none of which requires a state, a government, an organized religion, or a corporation. 

We won't need to control each other by forming a state, and we won't need to centralize spiritual knowledge by forming an organized religion. Let people come and believe what they will. Let people come and work their land as they please, without licenses, permits, property taxes, or any other liens or encumbrances. 

Land and freedom are the preparatory requirements for Zion. And we already know all about them. We have three witnesses of the relationship between land and freedom right before us. We have the Old Testament, the Book of Mormon, and the foundational and constitutional history of America. 

Three witnesses that testify of the conditions necessary to establish Zion. 

Before we get further into Ron Gibson (a true servant of God) and his work on land patents, we've got to explore a little more of this language of land ownership as it applied to Americans before the Civil War and the incorporation of the federal government in 1871. 

There is quite a history to be told here, a history of how Americans once claimed their land and how it was subsequently lost.. 

Or was it? 

This Land is Our Land

As many of you know I live in Idaho, and I love it here. There are endless acres of wide open spaces teeming with mountains and wildlife. The Snake River Valley is a vast expanse of farmland and desert, loaded with sagebrush, lava rock, and man-made irrigation systems. Some cartographers have made the claim that if you flatten all the mountains in Idaho it would be bigger than Texas. 

I don't know if that is true.

But when you drive through the open desert plain you can't help but be mesmerized by its pure vastness. When you see wildflowers moving in unison in a gentle mountain breeze, or the tumble weed determinately moving toward the next cattle fence it will lodge itself in, or the majestic elk quietly grazing on an alpine slope... when you hear the comforting lullaby of a mountain stream, or gaze upon the soft red-orange glow of the next sunset over the Rocky Mountains, when you sense that the grove of Aspen trees seem to be one living organism, or behold the view of a seemingly endless range of mountains from the vantage point of a 10K foot-high peak, you can't help but wonder in awe at what God has created for us. 

When you see the tops of the wild grasses in late summer, whipping, bending, almost dancing in the wind, amidst a chorus of millions of others, the mind quiets down, and the realization sets in that God knows and numbers each of those grasses. He knows the flowers, the animals, the trees, even the rocks and the very sands that erode off of them. Not a leaf falls, a stream bubbles, a fish jumps, nor an insect scampers without His knowledge. And if He knows the indescribable detail of all these creations, then of course He knows you, intimately. 

He has given you the land and everything on it. This land is indeed ours. Any child can feel that as they gaze into a forest that is begging for them to explore it. Or a lake that is inviting a refreshing swim. Or a mountain that is beckoning to be climbed. Our connection to the land is written into our very hearts. 

Our American progenitors knew and understood their connection to the land, and fought a war to free themselves from the encumbrances of the king of England. Those encumbrances included taxes, duties, the forced quartering of British troops, and perpetual rents on colonial lands. The king was the only sovereign and owned all the land under the control of the British empire. 

He would allow barons to run the land and charge rents or fees to farmers, but ultimately he was the true landlord. For any reason and and at any time he could change his mind and take the land away from any baron or nobleman. But it was in his best interest to keep the land in productive use so he could collect taxes on those increases. 

The king gifted these lands to the barons and nobles, and those gifts were known as fiefs, which carries the same meaning as feud. According to Blackstone, a feud is described as "an estate in land held of a superior on the condition of rendering him services" (see p. 56 of Ron Gibson's book, What You Need to Know About Land Patents).

Ron explains this concept a little further:
It [a feud] is also described as an inheritable right to the use and occupation of lands, held on condition of rendering services to the lord or proprietor, who himself retains the ownership of the lands, {Blacks Law Dictionary, 4th Edition, p. 748 (1968.} Thus, the people had land they occupied, devised, inherited, alienated, or disposed of as they saw fit, so long as they remained in favor with the King. {F.L. Ganshof, Feudalism, p. 113 (1967)}. (What You Need to Know About Land Patents, p. 56)

This system was known as feudal tenure. It was essentially a pyramid scheme in land disbursement. The baron who received the initial land gift from the king was free to impart, or subdivide, his land to other vassals. A vassal is defined as “a person who held land from a feudal lord and received protection in exchange for homage and allegiance; a bondman or slave, a subordinate or dependent."

The feudal lords answered directly to the king and they were called "tenants." Fiefs who worked the land under them paid fees to the feudal lords in exchange for protection and the right to use the land. This privilege was inheritable as long as they remained under the favor of the lord. Similarly, the baron or nobleman enjoyed the same privilege under the king as long as they remained in his favor. The entire system was a hierarchical chain of command where a lord or vassal could lose everything on the whims of a superior. 

The size of the estates of the fiefs or vassals under the feudal lords widely varied just as they do today. Some lived on large estates and others on little acreage. The fiefs were reminiscent of today's middle class. They paid homage to the lords, who in return paid homage to the king. At the bottom of the pyramid were the serfs or villains. 

The word villain originally meant a person who had no rights. The Old English definition of villain was a "base or low-born rustic," in Old French it meant "peasant, farmer, commoner, churl, yokel."

Villains were employed by the fiefs as low wage workers. Ron explains that they "were recognized as nothing more than real property." Like many today that live in slums and are on the streets, they eked out a miserable existence in a constant struggle for survival. To put this in a modern perspective, those who work for wages from an employer labor three months out of the year just to pay their federal and state income taxes. The middle class who own more land and make "profits" instead of wages, still have to pay tribute to modern fiefs to retain the privilege of working their lands or businesses. This tribute is known today as property tax, corporate income tax and capital gains tax. 

Modern fiefs are incorporated governments such as cities, municipalities, counties, and states. These are fictional entities to which we all pay fees. The modern word fee is a variant of the word fief. Its original meaning can be traced to the Old English word feoh, which means, and be prepared to be shocked:

...livestock, cattle; movable property; possessions in livestock, goods or money; riches, wealth; money as a means of exchange or payment. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

You pay fees to incorporated entities because you are nothing more than human cattle, or chattel. We live in a modern system of chattel slavery... in which we, the slaves, believe that we are free. 

The entire system has been flipped upon its head. 

The power to govern is a right inherent in the people, not kings or magistrates. Read these words from the Declaration of Independence and let them sink in:

... That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...

We the People are the sovereigns, not a government that was created by us, which means that We the People, not the government, are the true owners of the land.

What Jefferson is describing is common law based upon the Bible. The origins of common law can be traced back to 11th century England, before William the Conqueror introduced the feudal system. When England was conquered by this tyrant in 1066 A.D., all land was commandeered by the king. Prior to that time, all lands in England were allodial, meaning, "owing to no one, nor to any lord or superior." 

After close to two centuries under the new feudal system, a group of 25 barons, who had studied the history of the land ownership of their ancestors, pressured King John to restore some of the rights they had lost. The result was the Magna Carta of 1215, a document that became the basis for common law. 

Under Magna Carta the barons would retain some of their rights and powers over their lands, but would still recognize the king as the "lord paramount." According to Ron Gibson, several sections of the charter gave: 

...the most powerful barons letters of patent... with the single goal of protecting the 'landowner' and helping him retain possession of the land, acquired in the service of the King, from unjust seizures or improper debts. The barons attempted these goals with the intention of securing property to pass to their heirs. (Land Patents, p. 72)

But it was short lived. King John died in 1216 A.D., just one year after signing the Magna Carta. The document was forgotten and the feudal system remained in force. Those humble Gentiles who came to America in the early 1600s were looking for two things: religious freedom and the right to own unencumbered land. However, the king still owned the territory in the colonies, where "American versions of barons sought to retain large tracts of land" (Ibid, p. 73).

According to Ron, the American feudal system operated as follows:

... the feudal barons in the colonies could dictate who farmed their land, how their land was to be divided, and to a certain extent to whom the land should pass. But, just as the original barons discovered, this power was premised in part of the performance of duties for the king. (Ibid, p. 73) 

The American Revolution was not fought just over taxes, it was fought for the right to own unencumbered land. This part of American history has been whitewashed and erased. The Establishment does NOT want you to know this, because if Americans wake up to this fact, the entire system of maritime law falls on its face.

After winning the war and securing those lands away from the king, "the un-appropriated lands... passed, not to the people of the colony or state within those limits they were situated, but to the whole people... (p. 74).

We the People, or the "whole people" as Ron opines, had the right to distribute those lands as they saw fit, "as joint tenants in the sovereignty." The way they chose to distribute the land was written into the U.S. Constitution. There was an office established in the newly formed government called the General Land Office, which issued Land Patents to those who applied for them. The land was not for sale. It was free.

The portion of the U.S. Constitution dealing with land disposal is Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2:

The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.  

The Congress was the direct representatives of the sovereign people, who gave the government the power in the first place. It was them who decided how to distribute the land, at least that is how it was supposed to go. It worked for a while, and between the time of the Revolution and the Civil War Americans enjoyed pure allodial title to their lands.  

Government was a contract between sovereigns to protect each other in their rights, nothing more. It soon became corrupted and taken over by Gaddiantons, some of which were early Founding Fathers like Alexander Hamilton, I wrote about that here

But the idea of government was, as Jefferson stated, "to secure these Rights" that were already granted by God. Land was a big part of that equation according to this 1863 court case:

The American people, before developing a properly functioning stable government, developed a stable system of land ownership, whereby the people owned their land absolutely and in a manner similar to the king in common-law England. (Wallace v. Harmstead, 44 Pa. 492 (1863), referenced in Land Patents, p. 76) 

These humble Gentiles had studied the Bible and had an understanding of the importance of the land that God had given to the Israelites. In fact, the republic set up by our Founder's was reminiscent of the republic set up by Moses. 

Much of the U.S. Constitution was based upon the book of Deuteronomy. That book of scripture was a constitution given to the Israelites just before they were finally allowed to possess and occupy the promised land. I don't have the space to get into the specifics but if you want to learn more about it I highly recommend this article written by Daniel J. Elazar

The Israelite constitution in Deuteronomy is reminiscent of the Book of Mormon decrees upon the promised land. There was a covenant offered that granted the Israelites the land with certain stipulations. These are repeated all throughout the book of Deuteronomy. Here is just one example:

Now therefore listen, O Israel, unto the statutes and judgments which I teach you, in order to do them, that you may live, and go in and possess the land which the Lord God of your fathers give you. You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish anything from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. (Deuteronomy 2:1, RE) 

The statutes and judgements referenced here are the ins and outs of the law of the land; the common law that God commanded the Israelites to base their nation on. It was a system of judges not unlike the reign of the judges set up by Mosiah. In an earlier post I pointed out that the names Moses and Mosiah share the same meaning. It bears repeating here: 

Do you think it is a coincidence that Moses and Mosiah have the same first three letters in their names? Well I looked up what the word mos means in Latin and this is what I found. The "Latin word mos comes from Proto-Indo-European *m-et-", and it means precept, law, quality, nature mode, fashion, conduct, behavior, character, humor, self-will, caprice, manner, custom, way, usage, practice, and habit. What do all these words have in common? Self-government. (The Constitution of No Authority)

Now, notice that the pronouncement in Deuteronomy above proscribes the Israelites from adding to or diminishing from the law given to them. You will notice the same language in this revelation given to Joseph Smith referencing the U.S. Constitution: 

And now verily I say unto you concerning the laws of the land, it is my will that my people should observe to do all things whatsoever I command them, and that law of the land which is constitutional, supporting the principles of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges belonging to all mankind, is justifiable before me; therefore, I, the Lord, justify you and your brethren of my church in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land. And as pertaining to the law of man, whatever is more or less than this comes of evil. I, the Lord your God, make you free; therefore you are free indeed, and the law also makes you free. (T&C 98:2, RE, emphasis added)

So here we have two witnesses of the law of the land given in scripture. The Book of Mormon is the third witness with its many references to the promised land of America and the decrees upon it. This began with the brother of Jared, who is the first post-diluvian to be led to America. Notice the language, it is similar to what God told the Israelites in Deuteronomy:

And the Lord would not suffer that they should stop beyond the sea in the wilderness, but he would that they should come forth even unto the land of promise, which was choice above all other lands, which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people. And he had sworn in his wrath unto the brother of Jared that whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and for ever should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fulness of his wrath should come upon them. (Ether 1:6, RE, emphasis added)

Did you catch the phrase "from that time henceforth and for ever"? That means that when Zion eventually comes, the same promises and decrees will remain upon this land. We will be under the same obligations as the Jaredites, the Nephites, and the Gentiles who possessed this land before us. 

When God says forever, He means it, and part of those promises entail gifting us the land. That means allodial title with no encumbrances by any governmental body or organization. And it means that every individual family will be granted a portion of land, for free, without any obligation to pay any property taxes on it. Our only sovereign landlord will be God Himself, who will require that you voluntarily share your abundance with the poor.  

In Part III, I'm going to go deeper into Ron Gibson's books and the history of land patents, but before I end this post there are still a few more terms to define, and I think that you'll be surprised to learn that these words you are very familiar with DO NOT mean what you thought they did.

Words that Destroy Rights

In our modern society, all words that have to do with property or real estate have nothing to do with rights and everything to do with equitable interest. In other words, everything is for sale, and everything is alienable. And the money we use to buy and sell the land that God has already given us has no value. It is play money, an illusion, and has only the appearance of value.

Let's start with the basics: real estate is NOT land. Real estate comprises everything that is built on or permanently affixed to the land. All forms of title (except allodial title) to land or real estate in our modern society only convey equitable interest and not sovereign ownership. According to Ron, the word equity is supposed to mean "justice as administered according to fairness," however, it is more often used today as a term to measure how much the price of homes and other commodities have risen since we purchased them.

Home equity is therefore an allusion. The increased "value" of your home has been artificially created by those who really own it. You, as a person (persona) with a diminished status, do not own anything. In fact, your body is also owned by those who own your home. To them you are a corporation, which Ron defines as "an artificial person or legal entity." As such an entity you cannot own anything independent of the incorporated State. You cannot convey ownership or transfer title without their permission. 

First of all, when you purchase a home with a loan from a bank you are incurring a mortgage. A mortgage is defined by Ron as "the lending of monies for the purchase of property by a creditor in exchange for the payment of a debt." A creditor doesn't actually lend you anything because fiat currency is not real, it has no value outside of the fictional world. The word mortgage comes from the Old French word morgage, or mort gaige, which literally means "dead pledge." 

According to Ron, "all land held not in allodial title has been hypothecated to the Federal Reserve Bank, as collateral against a federal debt that cannot be paid." The word hypothecate is a verb and means "to pledge (property) to another as security without transferring possession of title; mortgage." 

So what exactly is a mortgage, or dead pledge? For starters it is NOT a loan. A bank has no authority to loan you a single penny, and the fact that it claims to do so is a fraud. When you apply (beg) for a home loan and you get approved you are issued a promissory note, which we think is a promise to pay. But a promissory note is just a legal instrument that the government uses to draw money on your social security account, which is worth untold millions or in some cases billions of dollars. 

Yes, your value as a slave asset to the powers that be is based upon your projected future labor output throughout your life. Some are worth more than others. That money belongs to you, but because you're a slave, the government has stolen it. 

According to Ron, when the promissory note has been created, it sits for three days and then one of two things happen: one, it is cashed by the bank and given to the title company to pay off the seller of the home, or two it is digitized and monetized, rated by Dun and Bradstreet, and sold to multiple buyers, which can potentially number in the thousands.

The money for the mortgage does not come from a bank, it comes from the IMF, straight out of your social security account. It was yours to begin with. It is used to discharge a debt to a seller who didn't own the property to a buyer (you) who will never own the property. The IMF profits off of your money and then makes you pay it back to a bank with interest. A bank that never risked one penny to give you the loan. 

When someone defaults on their mortgage and goes into foreclosure the bank evicts them from the property. But this is actually an illegal act by the bank, because only the "owner" of the mortgage can file for foreclosure. In most cases, it is impossible to hunt down who owns your mortgage, especially if there are multiple partners. The bank is not the owner of the mortgage and is committing fraud when it attempts to evict a tenant. 

See the following video where Ron talks about these concepts, the mortgage stuff begins at the 30-minute mark:



And the IMF (International Monetary Fund) is an agency of the United Nations, the main organization that has shut off large percentages of all Western lands in the U.S.  

We live in the most sophisticated system of slavery that has even been concocted. And to make matters worse, the government (the king) also owns all the land. They stole the land from the people and are using it as collateral against our national debt. A debt owed to us, the people themselves. In Part III I will go further into the history of how that land was stolen from us. 

So, the government has taken two things that God has freely given you: the right to own the land and the right to own your own labor. Is this not the true definition of usury, an abomination proscribed by God in the Old Testament? We know the definition of usury as to charge excessive or exorbitant interest on money lent. But it comes from the Latin word usus which means to enjoy or use. It literally means to use another human being. 

Another word for that is slavery. 

Now let's take it a step further. Let's say you actually pay your mortgage off. You labor for thirty years to satisfy the lien against your home. A lien that was made up out of nothing (dead pledge). To reward you for this achievement the bank will issue you a warranty deed, which you think means that you own a free and clear title to your home. But little did you know that warranty deeds do not convey title, they only convey equitable interest. 

According to Ron, a deed is a trust instrument, which falls under the category of negotiable instruments. The Negotiable Instruments Act was passed in 1881, just ten years after the United States federal government was incorporated (by the way, Ron defines "federal" as corporate). The Negotiable Instruments Act lays out the rules of transferring payment via the use of promissory notes, cheques, and bills of exchange. 

The problem is these rules are based upon maritime or corporate law. Corporate law only deals with fictitious persons, not flesh and blood men and women. One of the corporate concepts laid out in the Negotiable Instruments Act and later in the Uniform Commercial Code is something called suretyship. When a fictitious person boards the surety ship they have left land and entered the sea. Surety is defined as follows:
A party who signs a negotiable instrument for the purpose of incurring liability on the instrument without being a direct beneficiary of the value given for the instrument. 

Through contract we have all agreed to being surety for the national debt, a debt owed to us, the very slaves that perform the productive labor that keeps the machine going. Most of us have no idea we have consented to this contract. The only real asset that we can pledge as surety is our future labor, which means we are at best indentured servants and at worst full-on slaves. 

A mortgage is nothing but a 30-year contract to pledge our labor as surety for the national debt, because the money "lent" to us by a bank has no real value. You cannot pay a bill with dollar bills. Your FRN (Federal Reserve Note) dollars will not satisfy any debt, this currency will only discharge the debt to another person (and it has been this way since 1933).  

At the other end of that tunnel is the warranty deed, the certificate we receive when we "pay off" the mortgage. But in the real world no gold or silver (gold and silver is still the only lawful money according to the Constitution) was exchanged, so you paid off literally nothing.

The warranty deed will only convey or transfer equitable interest, meaning that you merely have an interest in the fake value of the property. This means that the possession of a warranty deed will NEVER make you the owner of the property, but merely an interested party, tenant, or renter. 

According to Ron:

...if the deed is recorded at the County Recorders office, then the property or real estate is the trust property of the State... A "Warranty Deed" or other types of deeds does pass an interest on the land, (Not Title) admits consideration, bargain, and sells and conveys the appurtenances and warrants the performance of the a/the contract. (Land Patents, p. 34)

A warranty deed is NOT a title. 

Can you see why God included the account of the Title of Liberty in the Book of Mormon? He is trying to tell you something. He is granting you real (allodial) title to the promised land without encumbrances from other men. The only stipulations on the land are laid out in scripture and are decreed by Him, the only Landlord we answer to.

Another definition of deed is "act or transaction," and another definition of title is "a person's rank." Do you see the difference? A deed means you can be acted upon, a title means that you are the actor. A title makes you a king or a queen. Kings and queens are sovereign and answer to no one but God. 

The Book of Mormon describes sovereigns as those who desire to be accountable for their own "sins and iniquities." Unless you own your body, your land, and your property, you cannot be a steward and be accountable. Being accountable is the true definition of moral agency. Do you see how Satan has destroyed agency in our modern world? 

This post is getting long, and there is so much more to cover. But before I end I want to clarify a few more terms. 

Before the Civil War Americans were not known as voters, they were known as electors. A registered voter casts a vote in a private booth, an elector casts his vote in public. An election is only lawful if it is settled via public vote. We have not had a true election in this nation since 1860. Lincoln was the last president to be elected. All subsequent presidents have been appointed, just like police chiefs are appointed. This is why it is laughable that we argue over election fraud because it is all been fraud since 1860. And remember, fraud vitiates everything. 

The Book of Mormon teaches us about public voting, it refers to it as "the voice of the people." A voice is something that is heard. No one hears our voice when we vote in a private booth, just like no one hears a tree that falls down in uninhabited woods. Here is an example of how boisterous elections were in Nephite society:

And it came to pass that the people assembled themselves throughout all the land, every man according to his mind, whether it were for or against Amlici, in separate bodies, having much dispute and wonderful contentions one with another. And thus they did assemble themselves together to cast in their voices concerning the matter... (Alma 1:9, RE, emphasis added)

They did not cast in their votes, they cast in their voices. Do you see the difference? Our American progenitors did the same. They used their voices to elect government officials. 

But wait, weren't women discriminated against because they were not allowed to vote? No, a woman, the queen of her household, cast in her voice along with her husband. The two of them were one flesh, and as such they cast in one voice. Just like the Father and the Mother spoke in one voice when they declared that They created man in Their own image and likeness. Mankind has reference to both men and women.  

Do you see how we have flipped everything around on its head? 

Before we move on there is one more thing to clarify regarding modern voting. When we register to vote we are in fact declaring ourselves as commodities of the State. The word register comes from the old English word registrar, which literally meant an accounting of the king's fleet of naval ships. It was an accounting of the king's property. When we register to do anything in our society we are declaring ourselves as property of the State. It is a contract that we have to apply for. And the word apply means to beg or grovel at the feet of a superior (think about that next time you're filling out an application for some service from the State). 

The last word we need to define before closing is sovereignty. There is a lot of confusion surrounding that word. We know it as one who holds "supreme authority" in a geographical area, like a king or a prince. In a republic, the people are supposed to be joint sovereigns, holding all power in common. 

But what does it really mean? 

Sovereignty is a condition of the Elohim, the family of Gods who create the ever-expanding universe. Our God is Jesus Christ, and He enjoys absolute sovereignty over us and the earth He created. This is why He is called the King of kings. He will assume that sovereign condition of King when He returns at His second coming. 

Sovereignty therefore, has more to do with creative powers than authority over governments. In fact, the law of sovereignty is that one can only have jurisdiction over that which one creates. This definition comes from Ron Gibson's book, who further elucidates on the concept as follows:

Sovereignty, and thus the right of property, resides in the people. There is a natural order of things in the universe. Our Creator created man. Man formed or established the state (often incorrectly "the government") for the protection of himself and his property. Everything in the natural order of things is subservient to the being who created it. There can be no exceptions. In these United States, both the state and federal entities were created by the People. The People themselves retained "sovereignty" under the true Sovereign, our Creator, even though they delegated some of their power to their creatures for the purpose of protecting their rights. (Land Patents, p. 109)  

Sovereignty is a facet of the law of creation. If you create something you become the sovereign over it. The Luciferians who run this world have found a way around this law, it is called fiction. They simply "create" a fictional world with fictional persons who use fictional money who live in a fictional sea. They build fictional ships to carry the fictional persons around in the fictional sea, such as the citizen-ship, the friend-ship, the sportsman-ship, the statesman-ship, the bipartisan-ship, and on and on and on. 

They get the fictional persons to board the fictional ships by offering them a contract: "we will take you here if you board our ship, but you have to consent to our corporate rules." 

There is another unwritten law in the universe that says that you can give up your sovereignty if you consent to do so. Lucifer loves this law because this is how he can get you to give up your agency. He loves to make a deal with you, so he uses language to trick you into entering into contract with the fictional world. But the entire system is based upon fraud, and once you wake up and unplug yourself from the Matrix, you become free. Once you realize that you are a creative being that came from the bosom of the living God of Heaven, you can simply tell Lucifer that you reject his contracts and his fictional world. You can then regain your status as a sovereign being. 

It is all an illusion. But let's face it. Slavery is comfortable. Many people enjoy its carnal security. They don't want to think for themselves or take responsibility for their actions. They are not interested in being moral agents unto themselves. They want someone else to do it for them. And hence, they choose slavery. 

The Book of Mormon also testifies to this fact.

King Mosiah, another one of God's servants, who, like Moses, taught his people to be independent, used a word we are familiar with when he was describing to his people the conditions that bring God's judgments on society. 

That word was iniquity

Do we really know what it means? In scripture it is often used in conjunction with the word sin, but it does not mean the same thing. Sin is missing the mark, it simply means that we have shot at a target and missed the bullseye. To repent of sin we simply notch another arrow and ask God to help us hit the target. It is very personal, and the only way to overcome it is to turn and face God, acknowledging our foolishness and weaknesses before Him, and imploring Him to apply the atoning blood of Jesus Christ to our souls.  

So what is iniquity? According to the online etymology dictionary it means "hostility, malevolence..., an unfavorable situation..., unequalness, unevenness..., unfavorableness, unfairness, injustice..."

In other words, inequality

Iniquity therefore is a societal ill. It is present when there is any inequality or injustice that creeps into the law. King Mosiah also described it as people not taking responsibility for their own actions and letting the government (the king) take accountability for them. Here is what Mosiah said to his people:

And if the time cometh that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you. Yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction, even as he has hitherto visited this land...

And I commanded you to do these things [appoint judges], that ye have no king, that if these people commit sins and iniquities, they shall be answered upon their own heads. For behold, I say unto you, the sins of many people have been caused by the iniquities of their kings; therefore their iniquities are answered upon the heads of their kings. (Mosiah 13:7, RE, emphasis added)

Did you catch that? Kings, i.e., governments, cause people to commit iniquity because of unjust laws. People embrace and follow the laws without researching them or finding out if they are in fact just. They blindly follow and then jeer and sneer at law "breakers" who stand up to tyranny. In our modern society words like tax protester, tax evader, or sovereign citizen have become pejoratives, as if those who take part in these activities are criminals. Yet the real criminals are the Gaddiantons in government who enacted the unjust laws in the first place. 

Now, in case we missed Mosiah's point, in the next breath he explains to his people exactly what he is talking about so there can be no mistaking. He uses the word unequality, or, as we say it today, inequality, or inequity. He is trying to tell you what iniquity really means. He is a Moses type fulfilling his duty to teach his people, and us, what it really means to be free and independent. Read his words carefully:

And now I desire that this unequality should be no more in this land, especially among this my people. But I desire that this land be a land of liberty, and every man may enjoy his rights and privileges alike, so long as the Lord sees fit that we may live and inherit the land... (Mosiah 13:8, RE)

Liberty, rights and privileges, iniquity and unequality... are all based upon the land. Notice that Mosiah mentioned land twice in the verse above. It is because of iniquity that our land has been taken away from us. This has created a situation where we have lost our rights and privileges and where there is a giant wedge between the rich and the poor.

In our modern society, only the upper-middle and wealthy classes can afford to buy land (now incorrectly labeled as "real estate"), while the poor live in ghettos and slums. Land was never supposed to be for sale. It was a gift from God to all His people. If the poor were allowed to settle their God-given land they could easily grow their own food, and wouldn't be dependent on government welfare programs for subsistence. 

The middle and upper classes are not much better off. They are still slaves, because if they do not pay their rents on their lands, homes, vehicles, labor, and profits, the king [government] will take away everything they have and throw them in prison. 

We have all embraced laws that are causing us to commit iniquity. And that iniquity is ripening. In April of 2024, the other half of the giant X over America will be manifested to us in the next American solar eclipse. In my opinion, this signals the beginning of the sweeping off warned of in the Book of Mormon. 

We need to ask ourselves the following question: has the time come when the voice of our people have chosen iniquity? 

We have lost our land, we have lost our Constitutional rights, and we live in a military dictatorship in which our unelected, de facto president can pass any law he wishes by signing an executive order. Our justice system serves only the government and its Gaddiantons, and we have become mere persons of diminished status in society. Our laws have become fiction, and through our consent we have chosen to be slaves in a fictitious system. 

God does not want to destroy us, but real justice must prevail. He must restore the law of the land that makes men and women free. He must restore the right of land ownership to the people, especially the poor. 

Mosiah explained one more critically important concept. He gave us the true definition of equality. Equality does not mean that everyone is forced to be equal through socialism/wokism. Equality, according to Mosiah, means that "every man should have an equal chance throughout all the land." 

He used the word land yet again. It is all based upon the land. How in the world can men and women have equal chances to prosper if they are not allowed to own the land that God has given them?  

Mosiah's use of the word chance means that we have to do the work ourselves. We don't get to live off of the spoils of others that the government has stolen from them. God gives us the land and we go to work on it, and some people work harder and smarter than others. Those who produce more are asked by God to voluntarily share their abundance with those who produce less. 

This is the formula for Zion. And Zion can't happen without land. 

I want to end on a somewhat positive note. Although we face impending destruction as a nation, we should rejoice in the fact that God desires to make us free. In the coming months and years we must all make a choice: will we rise up and become freemen, or will be bow down to the New World Order masters who want to round us up and imprison us in smart-city concentration camps?

Remember, Nephi said that the global elites will eventually destroy themselves, and Jacob gave us the clue to surviving the destruction. We must believe in Christ, which is more than to say we believe, it is to do the works of a Christian. We must not cast out and kill the prophets that God sends among us, and we must not build up and support secret combinations. In third Nephi, those who were destroyed engaged in both of the sins and iniquities described above. Furthermore, God said that He would protect His saints who are the elect according to the covenant

God has given us all the secrets for surviving the sweeping off of the greatest nation on earth. Will you heed the scriptures and become like the Nephites of old who survived and were visited by the Savior? Or will you face destruction with the rest of the fictional slaves? 

The choice is yours... 

Stay tuned for Part III, where I'll get more into Land Patents and the history of how the government has taken our land away. 

In the meantime here are a few other pieces I wrote that have to do with this subject:

Mystery Babylon Part III: Ignorance and Fear-- In this post I go into what the elites believe money is and how it is used to control society. (Based on a leaked document known as "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars") 

The Beast is Coming to Utah III: Beyond Conspiracy--In this one I go deeper into corrupted language, maritime law, the court systems, and who really owns the world. (Hint: The Vatican)

Sunday, July 23, 2023

Upon This Land: A Promised Land Forever

 Previously: The Corporation has no Clothes




One of my favorite movies when I was a kid was Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. It was released in 1992 when I was at the impressionable age of 14. It's about two Irish immigrants that came to America in the late 1800s looking for opportunity. They landed in Boston and worked for several months, but eventually found themselves going west in search of "free land." 

The movie was based on the Land Run of 1889, when the federal government allowed settlers to stake claims on land they had purchased from the Cherokee Nation for pennies on the dollar. The land was formerly Cherokee grazing land, and was located in what would become present day Oklahoma.

Just as portrayed in the movie, on September 16th of 1893, 100,000 settlers lined up to stake a claim on the 6 million acres up for grabs. The acreage was divided up into homesteads, and sadly, most of the participants were unsuccessful in staking a claim. 

Tom Cruise played a poor Irish farmer whose family was plagued by the feudal lords that controlled the land and collected the rents. When his father was late in paying the rent, he was ruffed up by the noble's henchmen and later died from the damage to his body. In the scene where he passed away, he muttered a phrase that has always stuck with me:
Without land, a man is nothing. 

Now, I'm not one to take life lessons from Hollywood (especially from Scientologists like Cruise), but there is something peculiar about the land. There is something inside of us that yearns to mix our labor with the elements of the earth. That yearning is a consequence of our being the offspring of God. We long to be a creator as He is, and He gave us that opportunity by making an earth that we can till and reap the harvests of. 

King Benjamin once declared that we were created out of the dust of the earth. He wasn't being derogatory or condescending. He was teaching us a great truth. Our bodies are made of the same elements that exist in the earth's fertile soil. We are connected to that soil, it is part of our constitution and chemical make up. 

The first thing that God told Adam to do when he was cast out of the garden was to "till the earth," and to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow. This was not a punishment as almost everyone assumes, this was an opportunity. There is a satisfaction that only mortals can experience when they work hard and reap a reward. That can't happen in a spiritual state.

Let me give you an example. I'm a landscaper and we install sprinkler systems. It involves a lot of hard labor. Digging with a shovel through that infamous Idahoan river rock and hard clay on a 90-degree day can be exhausting. But when the job is done and it's time to turn on the water and adjust the sprinklers, a little bit of magic happens. 

For me it's the smell. When parched ground gets a long-awaited drink of water it emits a certain fragrance. I can't even describe what it smells like, except that it's the smell of inactive dirt being activated. It's the smell of dead earth being brought back to life and rejuvenated. It's the smell of the elements of the earth being awakened out of a deep sleep. The very smell of the cycle of life, symbolic of death and resurrection.  

For me its nostalgic. It means I'm done and can get paid. It means that I can take satisfaction in the fact that I brought water to a thirsty parcel of land... that I created an mini-oasis in the midst of a scorched desert. When I smell that smell, it actually brings me joy. 

Now that might sound corny to you, but for me it's very real. Someone who is a cabinet maker might experience something similar when he presents a finished kitchen to a couple who are building a house. Or the plumber who turns on the water in a freshly trimmed kitchen or bathroom, an electrician who turns on the power and the lights, a carpenter who finishes a beautiful crown molding, or the farmer who cuts his last acre of grain. 

The point? Hard work is satisfying. It is actually a gift from God, only to be experienced in mortality. And it's impossible without land. 

Can you think of any commodity, product, good, or service that didn't first originate with raw materials extracted from the land? 

Take cars for example. Vehicles that move us across vast tracts of land at high speeds. The steel and aluminum that make up the frame and the motor are mined, as well as the copper that runs your electrical system. The rubber from the tires come from trees like the Hevea Brasiliensis that grow in the Amazon jungle. The leather on your seats come from cows who graze on ranch lands. 

If your car has cloth seats they were made from wool, silk, and cotton, grown on farms or harvested from animals. The plastic that is formed into buttons, speakers, air vents, and dashboards comes from the byproducts of crude oil and natural gas extracted from the ground, the same sources that create the fuel that runs the engine. The taxi driver, uber driver, bus driver, or air port shuttle driver, would not have a job if it weren't for the land that produced the elements to manufacture the vehicles. 

And I wouldn't be able to run my landscaping company without trucks, trailers, pipe pullers, spray machines, lawn mowers, shovels and tools... all of which come from the land. 

We are totally dependent on the land for all of our needs. God has truly prepared every needful thing. He created this earth to produce an abundance for all of His children. 

And He gave us the land for free. 

You've probably figured out that this new series is about land... and I realize it may not sound as intriguing as Beasts and corrupt religious leaders. But rest assured, this rabbit hole is about as deep as it gets, and it is connected to what the UN has been doing since its inception in 1948. 

But the battle over land began long before that.

There has been a deliberate, calculated, and systematic attack on land for a very long time in this country. And for good reason. And that reason is that freedom is impossible without land. The formulae is simple: take land away from the common people, and you make them slaves. 

The Book of Mormon holds the key to understanding the significance of the land. It contains the prophetic history of four different groups who were led by the hand of the Lord to this land, i.e., the promised land of America. These groups were the Jaredites, the Nephites, the Mulekites, and the 17th century Gentiles escaping European tyranny.

God made a covenant with each of these groups when He granted them title to the land. The stipulations of which are that they must serve the God of this land or be swept off when they become ripened in iniquity. This usually happened when the voice of the people began choosing evil and the government had been subjugated by secret societies and combinations. 

Captain Moroni made a most interesting statement when he demanded that Zerahemnah depart with his armies. He revealed the significance between a people and their land. One can only imagine hearing these words booming out of Moroni's mouth as he boldly declared them:

And now Zerahemnah, I command you in the name of that all-powerful God, who has strengthened our arms that we have gained power over you by our faith, by our religion, and by our rites of worship, and by our church, and by the sacred support which we owe to our wives and our children, and by that liberty which binds us to our lands and our country... (Alma 20:13, RE. emphasis added)

When you hear or read these words from Moroni, you should also be able to feel them. You should feel that you are literally bound to this land, and that adhesive that binds you is liberty. 

That binding agent is still active today, and whether we are conscious of it or not, it is written upon our hearts. 

All it takes is a single airplane ride across America to get an idea of how much land there actually is in this country... much of it unused. And even a child can sense when they see an enormous city where people are packed like sardines in massive high rises that something is not right. 

God never intended for us to live that way. He gave us the land and He created it to be used. He has hidden things on it that He intended for us to find, as well as things in it and even under it. That earth he made for us... not for global elites to own and hoard for themselves while they corral the rest of us into cities. 

God intended for us to be land owners, not serfs and peasants who eek out of a living on rented land or in rented buildings. 

Before I get ahead of myself let's start at the beginning, when the waters receded off of this land of America. 

Brought by the Hand of the Lord

Ether testified of the promises upon this land. He saw that when the waters receded from off the face of it that it became a choice land (I believe Ether if referring to the waters of creation, not the waters of the flood). A land where the future New Jerusalem would "come down out of Heaven." 

The Jaredites rejected all the words of Ether, they had embraced secret combinations and indulged in warful vengeance. They had rejected Christ. God withdrew His divine protection from them and left them to themselves. They are the first chronological example in scripture that we have of God leading a small group of the righteous away from tyranny and into a promised land.

From whose tyranny were they escaping? None other than king Nimrod himself. 

He was the first postdiluvian dictator of  the then-known world. He ruled over a one-world kingdom, where unalienable rights were denied to the populace. Like the desires of modern-day globalists, he crammed everyone into large cities with little to no land. They were no better off than serfs and peasants. But because Nimrod offered his "protection" to them, they sustained him as their ruler. Like American's today, they probably believed that the slavery they labored under was "freedom." 

In an apocryphal work known as the The Writings of Abraham, it reveals just how bad king Nimrod was. He, like Cain of old, had sold his soul to Lucifer in exchange for power:

Nimrod was a man of mighty power for he was Master Mahan and had in his hands the secrets of the ancients as they had come down from Cain wherein he knew the words of power and the signs for using them and he had the holy garments which had been given unto Adam in the garden in which was great power. 

All of this power did Nimrod use to get gain after the manner of the secret combination. 

With his power he had set out to build a tower which would reach to heaven, even the city of my father Enoch which had been taken up, that he, Nimrod, might depose God from his throne for God had taken up his abode among the people of Enoch. 

But God frustrated the plans of Nimrod by confounding the language of him and his people that they could no longer remember the sacred words and they scattered forth over the face of the earth...

And through the administration of Satan he did receive again some of the words of power and did reorganize the secret combination among his people; but he had not power as at the first for the fullness of the pure language was not restored to him according to the decree of the Most High God. (Chapter 2) 

The Brother of Jared desperately prayed for his people not to lose those sacred words. Remember, it was the power of the language of Enoch that protected Zion. That language will be restored sometime in the future, and Zion will be protected once again. 

After the Brother of Jared cried unto the Lord for a long time He promised to lead him to a land of promise... where the Jaredites would become the greatest nation on earth

Here we see the pattern beginning. The pattern of the Lord leading a few humble followers out of tyranny and into freedom. 

But, as we know, the Jaredites eventually blew it. They were corrupted from within by secret combinations. The government was destroyed and they descended into chaos and violent bloodshed. 

Enter the Nephites. 

Jerusalem was becoming a dangerous place for rogue prophets like Lehi and Jeremiah. Lehi escaped, Jeremiah was not so lucky. 

God led Lehi out of Jerusalem just in time to escape a sweeping off from Babylonian conquerors. The promised land of Israel is under the same decrees as the land of America. With Lehi we have the first example of a family being led away from one promised land into another. 

This was a symbolic merging of the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph. Two books of scripture connected by the migration of a single family. Joseph of Egypt was given a blessing by his father Jacob, who told him that he was a fruitful bough... by a well, whose branches run over the wall

Bough means "branch" and well means a source of water, branches running over the wall has reference to posterity crossing oceans. Joseph knew that his posterity, emanating from his sons Ephraim and Manasseh, would cross oceans and come to a fruitful land. Lehi is a descendant of Manasseh and many of us Gentiles are descendants of Ephraim. Both groups became mighty nations upon the face of this land.

Like the Jaredites, the Nephites also blew it. Secret combinations took over their government, and they descended into a state of vengeful warfare until almost every Nephite was slain. 

Moroni summed up this Nephite/Jaredite pattern as follows:

And whatsoever nation shall uphold such secret combinations, to get power and gain, until they shall spread over the nation, behold, they shall be destroyed; for the Lord will not suffer that the blood of his saints which shall be shed by them shall always cry unto him from the ground for vengeance upon them yet he avenge them not. (Ether 3:18, RE)

Moroni gave us the reason for destruction... righteous vengeance upon those who murder the Lord's saints and get away with it. Many of those saints are innocent children who are used as sex slaves and blood sacrifices by Luciferians. Others may include prophets who testify against them, or whistleblowers like JFK who turn against them. But the majority of the victims of secret combinations are children. (Another example is legally sanctioned abortion, since Roe v. Wade around 70 million children have been murdered in the U.S.).

One of the reasons that God is compelled to destroy nations is that they have to account for building up these secret combinations and letting them commit egregious atrocities against children. 

The movie Sound of Freedom was an attempt to expose some of these atrocities. But it only implicated random pedophile perps and drug lords as being the instigators. The truth is that child traffickers comprise the highest positions in government and churches, and are strewn throughout all professions and occupations. (Sound of Freedom may have been a psyop to deflect the blame for child trafficking off of elites and onto everyday miscreants and criminals... another classic case of controlled opposition. Listen to this testimony from a trafficking survivor and her opinion of the movie.) 

The articulate lawyer, the "wise" judge, the high-achieving corporate CEO, the "protecting" policeman, the smiling politician, and the hanker-chief-waving clergyman, are all potential abusers. 

This is why we must expose evil at the highest levels of society. We must "waste and wear out our lives in bringing to light all the hidden works of darkness." 

If we do not repent and expose these evil organizations, we may lose our title to the promised land. 

Our experiment began in the early 1600s when the humble Gentiles that Nephi saw began to migrate to the Eastern seaboard of what was about to become colonial America. 

The Spirit come down and wrought upon one of these Gentiles, and he came to the colonies, unto the seed of Nephi's brethren. 

Many have mistakenly concluded that this man was Christopher Columbus (me included). 

Columbus was not escaping European captivity, he was trying to find alternate trade routes to India for Queen Isabella. When he came into contact with the natives, he was terrible to them. He allowed his men to rape their women, kill their men, and steal their goods.

To find out who this prophecy is really about I recommend reading Adrian Larsen's blog series called Destruction, specifically Part I and Part 2

The man who fits the prophecy came to America in 1630, he was banished from Massachusetts by the Puritans in 1636, and during that time he had endeavored to learn the Algonquin language. He believed that the natives should enjoy the same rights and privileges as white Europeans, and he traded peacefully with them. 

Nephi goes on to mention other Gentiles who had humbled themselves before God, and were led out of captivity. These good people were escaping the tyranny of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, the theocratic power structures that ruled Europe with an iron fist. 

The clandestine secret society that dominated Europe was the Jesuit Order. The subject of my last two blog posts. 

Can you see the pattern? Europe had been overtaken by secret combinations and God was leading humble saints out of that awful situation and into this promised land for a new start. 

And what record did these Gentiles have? The Bible that included the record of the Israelites and the five books of Moses. A record of a captive people miraculously delivered and led to their own land of promise. And remember, Nephi sees that our Gentile progenitors were also delivered miraculously from England. 

And even though the Bible had been corrupted by the Great and Abominable Church, there was still enough truth in it to instruct the Gentiles to pattern the American government after the Israelites. 

And this is where the rabbit hole begins. 

Almost everything you have been taught about land, real estate, deeds, titles, mortgages, negotiable instruments, debt, and money is a lie. The American people have been the victims of fraud, and have had their land stolen from them. 

The truth? Those humble Gentiles paid no property tax. They held allodial title to their land, which was gifted to them by God. They didn't pay a dime for it (except for processing fees). They understood this claim to the land through their study of the Bible. 

In an 1878 Supreme Court case known as United States vs Throckmorton, a landmark ruling was made. The case involved the fraudulent acquisition of a land grant by a man named W.A. Richardson. During the 1850s, he had forged the signature of a Mexican governor and dated it back to the 1830s, before the United States had annexed the Mexican territory. 

Justice Samuel Freeman Miller made a famous statement in reference to the case. He said that "fraud vitiates everything."

The word vitiate, in a legal context, means "negates, squashes, annuls, invalidates, revokes, and abrogates."

Dear readers, you have been defrauded. Your land has been stolen from you. Your debt, the currency you use, the real estate you think you own, and the "assets" you think you have... are all an illusion. 

We are all lost in vast sea of maritime law, constantly tossed by the unrelenting waves of feudalism. When we try to stand our ground, the swells move just enough so we lose our footing, the constant flux renders us helpless in our pursuit to stand upon the land

That land was the reason the Revolutionary War was fought. Our Founder's understood the Biblical decrees upon the land, and that a man cannot be "accountable for his own sins" unless he was made a steward over a portion of it. 

In this series, we are going to get into the specifics of how land ownership was viewed by Americans in the antebellum period, the role the federal government played, what the terms sovereign and allodial mean, and how the Book of Mormon ties it all together. 

But what good is history if we can't apply it? 

The great news in all of this is that God is planning to give the promised land back to house of Israel (us Gentiles included)... if we but qualify to assist the remnant of Jacob in building up the New Jerusalem. God has invited everyone to that gathering, and I think understanding the covenant on the land can help us to better prepare for what's coming. 

But before I get into all that heavy stuff, there is a looming irritant that needs to be addressed. There is a lot of controversy about the physical location of where the Book of Mormon took place. There are two models that are in competition: the Mesoamerican and Heartland models. Both sides attempt to use archeological and geographical evidence to prove their theories. But physical evidence pales in comparison to the prophetic utterances we find in the pages of the Book of Mormon.  

According to prophecy, the promised land given to Lehi comprises the same land that we Americans occupy now. This is easily proven by scriptural references from the BOM text itself. 

As it turns out, the Heartland model, espoused by Wayne May, Rod Meldrum, Bruce Porter, Amberli Nelson, and others, is absolutely correct. However, the archeological evidence they present for this model is secondary and an afterthought, a byproduct of exercising faith in what BOM prophets have prophetically stated. 

Understanding the prophecies is paramount to understanding our connection to the land. It is absolutely necessary to comprehend the liberty that binds us to this land. And it is necessary to understand the future prophecies about the New Jerusalem and Zion. 

We need to know that the Heartland model is correct, otherwise, the prophecies mean nothing, and we remain lost at sea, never firmly planting our feet onto the solid ground that God has freely given us. 

"Even Upon the Face of This Land"

Nephi is really the one that ties all of this together. His prophecy about the Revolutionary War leaves no question as to what land the Nephites were led to. He writes:

And it came to pass that I, Nephi, beheld that the gentiles who had gone forth out of captivity did humble themselves before the Lord, and the power of the Lord was with them. 

 And I beheld that their mother gentiles were gathered together upon the waters, and upon the land also, to battle against them. And I beheld that the power of God was with them, and also that the wrath of God was upon all those that were gathered against them to battle.

And I, Nephi, beheld that the Gentiles that had gone forth out of captivity were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations. And it came to pass that I, Nephi, beheld that they did prosper in the land. (1 Nephi 3:20, RE) 

Nephi can only be describing the American Revolution in these passages. What other nation was first settled by Christians seeking for religious freedom? What other nation gained independence from its "mother" nation and was delivered out of the hands of all other nations? What other nation became as economically prosperous as America?

There can be no question as to what nation Nephi is talking about. And in the next few paragraphs, Nephi makes an unmistakable link between the American gentiles and the seed of his father Lehi. He tells us that they are occupying the very same land:

Nevertheless, thou beholdest that the gentiles who have gone forth out of captivity and have been lifted up by the power of God above all other nations upon the face of the land--which is choice above all other lands, which is the land the Lord God hath covenanted with thy father that his seed shall have for the land of their inheritance--will not utterly destroy the mixture of thy seed who are among thy brethren. (1 Nephi 3:22, RE, emphasis added)

And there you have it. Nephi just settled the decades long debate between the Mesoamerican and Heartland models. What central American nation won its independence and became the most powerful and wealthiest country on earth? None of them

As if Nephi's statement wasn't proof enough, the Lord Himself told the Nephite's at Bountiful essentially the same thing. He provides us a second witness. The Lord explains to them the reason why us Gentiles would be set up as a free people was... to bring the knowledge of the covenants of the Lord to their posterity:

... for it is wisdom is the Father that they [the gentiles] should be established in this land and be set up as a free people by the power of the Father, that these things might come forth from them unto a remnant of your seed, that the covenant of the Father may be fulfilled which he hath covenanted with his people, O house of Israel... (3 Nephi 9:11, RE, emphasis added)

In these last two verses quoted above the word nation and phrase in this land create a clear distinction that cannot be mistaken. Nation signifies a specific geographical area with definitive borders. It is synonymous with country and territory. 

The phrase in this land is controlled language. It was meant to convey a high degree of specificity. In this context it could only have reference to the physical location of the Savior when He uttered the words. Royal Skousen has pointed out in his scholarly work on the Book of Mormon text that certain demonstrative words were revealed to Joseph Smith as he did the work of translation. 

These demonstratives come from the Hebrew language, and according to Bruce Porter, they answer the question of "which." Porter writes:

The answer of "which" will fall into two main classifications: 

number, meaning singular or plural, and proximity, indicating near or remote...

Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar states that "the singular demonstrative pronoun always points out a person or thing that is present." The demonstratives are as follows:

Singular Plural Near--This These

Remote--That Those

A simply way of understanding the demonstrative singular is a straightforward cliche: "this" is where I am at, and "that" is where I'm not... (Bruce Porter and Rod Meldrum, Prophecies and Promises: The Book of Mormon and the United States of America, Kindle version, Loc 553-565) 

So when Jesus told the Nephites that the gentiles will be set up as a free people in this land, He was standing upon that very land... the land now occupied by the United States of America.

Now, I'm not going to get into the archeological "evidence" for the Book of Mormon transpiring in America's Heartland. The "evidence" is only secondary, it is only to back up what the prophecies already tell you. We should not base our faith upon archeological evidence, however, God has promised to eventually reveal all things to us, including the true history of the earth and its inhabitants. I think that promise is beginning to unfold. With that in mind here is one of Wayne May's lectures where he ties it all together:


But evidence will never convert the searching soul. Only a spiritual confirmation can do that, preceded by years of study and searching the scriptures. Grasping the prophecies about the promised land requires at least a cursory study of American history. And I'm not talking about establishment history... I'm talking about the true story of the pilgrims... and how they based American government on the decentralization of Christianity.

This story can be found in a book compiled by Verna M. Hall entitled, The Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America: Christian Self-Government. I wrote about this extensively in a blog post called The Constitution of no Authority

Another book I recommend for true colonial history is Murray Rothbard's Conceived in Liberty series, available for free at mises.org

Just these two volumes alone will make Nephi's simple prophecy jump off the page and come to life. 

Before we move on, there is a final and third witness of the Heartland model being the correct historical context of the Book of Mormon. This is from the prophet/narrator Moroni, who links all three groups (the Nephites, the Jaredites, and the Gentiles) in one statement declaring the decrees of God upon this land:

And now we can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God or they shall be swept off when the fulness of his wrath shall come upon them. And the fulness of his wrath cometh upon when they are ripened in iniquity.

For behold, this is a land which is choice above all other lands. Wherefore, he that doth possess it shall serve God or shall be swept off, for it is the everlasting decree of God. And it is not until the fulness of iniquity among the children of the land that they are swept off. 

And this cometh unto you, O ye gentiles, that ye may know the decrees of God, that ye may repent and not continue in your iniquities until the fulness come, that ye may not bring down the fullness of the wrath of God upon you as the inhabitants hath hitherto done

Behold, this is a choice land; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under Heaven if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ, who has been manifested by the things which we have written. (Ether 1:7, RE, emphasis added)  

Moroni is speaking directly to us... the gentiles who now live in America. He is using the demonstrative this to reference the very land he is standing on. He is begging us to not incur the wrath of God as our ancient progenitors have done. He is revealing the link between all three societies. And he is telling us how to avoid destruction--we must serve the God of the land.

The God of the land, Jesus Christ, is also the author of the law of the land. Lucifer, the true God's adversary, is the author of administrative law, or the law of the sea. Just as there are Two Churches Only, there are also two laws only: Common Law and Maritime Admiralty Law (which I wrote about here).

Under common law the individual is sovereign. He/she is endowed with un-alienable rights from the Creator. Jefferson knew exactly what he was doing when he used the term unalienable. It simply means unencumbered, or unable to lien. A lien is defined as follows: 

A claim upon a part of another's property that arises because of an unpaid debt related to that property and that operates as an encumbrance on the property until the debt is satisfied; the right to hold another's property as security for a debt owed. 

Independence to colonial Americans meant that Parliament or the king had no right to place liens upon their private property. And what is private property? First of all, it is yourself, consisting of your body and your mind. You are the rightful owner of yourself, and what logically follows, is that you also own whatever your body mixes with the elements of the land. In other words, you own what you laboriously produce. Those goods or services are an extension of yourself, and as such are also unalienable. 

And guess what? You cannot produce anything without the natural resources that exist in the land. Thus, just as captain Moroni declared, you are bound to the land by a dependence on the elements it contains. You have a symbiotic relationship with the dirt, because, without it you cannot produce the basic provisions of survival, and without you, to till and dress the land, the dirt will only produce whatever grows on it in a wild or natural state. 

Hence, to sum up Hollywood's depiction of an old Irish peasant, "a man is nothing without land." And I would add the caveat, a man who has to pay rents or taxes to a feudal lord, a king, or state, county, or city on a piece of land is a slave

Part of what those humble gentiles that Nephi saw were fighting for was the right to own unencumbered property, the right to work land that was free of rents or taxes. The right to enjoy the fruits of their labors. 

Now, let's take this a step further... the Founder's knew that true land ownership could not be granted to them by the king. If it was then there would be stipulations on the land, or in other words, liens. Thus, true ownership of land, just like the true source of rights, would have to be granted by the Creator Himself. 

This ownership came with a title, not a deed. The two terms are complete opposites. A deed grants you nothing but the permission of another who controls what they are deeding to you. A title, on the other hand, grants you full allodial ownership, unencumbered by liens, stipulations, taxes, etc. An allodial title is a certificate of sovereign right upon a piece of land, and it makes you the king over it. 

The word allodial is derived from the Latin term allodialis, meaning "held in freehold." Black's Law Dictionary defines it as "owing to no one, nor to any lord or superior." Just ponder that for a moment... to us in our modern society it means no property taxes, no zoning laws, no building permits, and no federal, state, country, or city restrictions... period. No encumbrances whatsoever. 

If you have to pay a bureaucracy perpetual rents on your land or ask them for permission to build a structure on it... you DO NOT own it. 

We need to wake up. God granted us the land and He intends for us to use it according to His purposes... and He does not require us to ask permission from a governmental body that is perpetrating fraud on society. There is no constitutional authority for a county to exact property taxes. That is a crime of extortion on land that they do not own. 

But I digress. We will get more into the nuts and bolts of true land ownership in part II. 

Bruce Porter once stated that the Book of Mormon is the Title of Liberty for America. I believe he was 100% correct. It contains the only stipulations that God has ever decreed upon this land. Remember, He owns the land, not kings, governments, or counties, and as the lawful (not legal) owner it is His right to place righteous restrictions upon it. We just went over what those are as laid out by Moroni in Ether 1:7 of the RE edition of the scriptures. 

Now let's get into what the Title of Liberty actually means. 

Title to the Promised Land

Have you ever noticed that the Nephite war for freedom is chronologically placed smack dab in the center of the Book of Mormon? If the Book of Mormon is indeed written in chiasmus form, then the centerpiece is the Title of Liberty

The etymology of the word title comes from the Old French and means "inscription, heading, position," or "legal permit." The word entitle means to "bestow," as in an "estate or property." 

Each group that the Lord brought here had a title agreement, laying out the covenants upon this land. The Nephites had the Brass Plates, the 17th century Gentiles had the Bible, and we have the Book of Mormon (we are not told what record the Jaredites had but it could have been the Book of Remembrance written by Adam). 

And speaking of the Brass Plates, Enoch makes an interesting statement in the Joseph Smith Translation of the Old Testament. He describes two groups of people: the people of Canaan and the people of Shum. The people of Canaan, who appear to be wicked, are apparently used to sweep the people of Shum off the land, unto their utter destruction. The Lord then cursed the land with heat and barrenness. Read the account here

Why would Enoch slip this little vignette into his account? And why was it important enough for the Lord to reveal it to Joseph during his work of translation on the Old Testament? 

Another scripture provides us a clue:

And he [Alma] said, Thus saith the Lord: Cursed shall be the land, yea, this land, unto every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, unto destruction, which do wickedly, when they are fully ripe; and as I have said, so shall it be. For this is the cursing and the blessing of God upon the land... (Alma 21:3, RE, emphasis added) 

Were the people of Shum and Canaan just repeating another cycle of a group being led to and eventually swept off this promised land? And was Enoch the prophet who was called to gather the elect who had not been destroyed to the city of Zion as the world descended into violence and chaos? 

And is this the pattern that we will see repeated when us gentiles are swept off this very same land?

These are things we should ponder. 

If my suppositions are correct about the people of Shum and Canaan, then that means that the Title of Liberty already existed, thousands of years before captain Moroni's inspiring march to gather volunteer troops to fight a war against tyranny. The land of Adam-ondi-Ahman, where Adam gave his last blessings to his descendants, was after all, right here in America.

Does that mean that Enoch's city was also right here in America?

Captain Moroni talked about the Title of Liberty as if it was something that was already in existence. As he went around waving his flag and receiving troops by covenant, he explained to them the terms of the title that God had granted to them upon the land:

And he said, Surely God shall not suffer that we who are despised because we take upon us the name of Christ shall be trodden down and destroyed, until we bring it upon us by our own transgressions. And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing that he had wrote upon the rent, and, crying with a loud voice, saying, Behold, whosoever will maintain this title upon the land, let him come forth in the strength of the Lord and enter into a covenant that they will maintain their rights and their religion, that the Lord God may bless them. (Alma 21:8, RE, emphasis added) 

Notice Moroni's use of the word maintain. He was declaring that the Title of Liberty upon the land was already in place, and that the rights of the people were inherent in that title. He is telling you that rights come from God and that the people had an inherent right to defend the land that God had given them. Moroni is making a direct link between the title and the land.

Are you paying attention? 

We need to understand something... the promised land given to the Nephites was not owned by the Nephite government. It was owned and maintained by the people. They were stewards over it. During righteous times, even when kings were in place before Mosiah introduced the Israelitish system of judges, the people spread out over the land according to population growth. Jarom explains this pattern as follows:

And we multiplied exceedingly, and spread upon the face of the land, and became exceeding rich in gold, and in silver, and in precious things, and in fine workmanship of wood, in buildings, and in machinery, and also in iron, and copper, and brass, and steel, making all manner of tools of every kind to till the ground, and weapons of war--yea, the sharp pointed arrow, and the quiver, and the dart, and the javelin, and all preparations of war... the word of the Lord was verified which he spake unto our fathers, saying that inasmuch as ye will keep my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land. (Jarom 1:4, RE)

As they multiplied, they spread over the face of the land. And because of that process they engaged in mining and industry. In other words, they worked the land, which is an individual and entrepreneurial pursuit. This could've only happened if the land had been distributed to them in some fashion. How much did each family get? We are not told. But the fact that they become so prosperous suggests that individual ownership of land was part of the equation. 

And it is my contention that they did not have to purchase it. I believe the Title of Liberty was the land grant agreement for each families' stake upon their own piece of property. 

Land, like water, is a natural resource. God made plenty of it. Don't ever believe the propaganda that we are running out of land or natural resources. God planned ahead when He created the earth. Not only does this earth contain abundant resources, more then enough to sustain 8 billion people, but God intended that each family be granted a stewardship over a certain portion of it. 

And I'm not talking about the measly 1/4 acre that most us get who live in zoned subdivisions. Let me do some simple math to illustrate.  

In the continental U.S. alone there are approximately 1.9 billion acres of land and 340 million people. If every individual man, woman, and child was granted their own piece of property, there is enough land for just over 5 acres each. But let's take it a step further. 

Most families consist of 6-8 people. When you figure an average of 7 people in each family and you divide up the land accordingly, every family would receive 40 acres. 

Now, 40 is a number with very deep meaning. It is the number of years in a generation, and generations are familial. 40 years to produce a number of children and grandchildren, and 40 acres to feed and sustain them. 

40 is also a number associated with fasting, which is symbolic of sacrifice. Moses fasted 40 days and nights as he was with the Lord receiving the ten commandments. Jesus fasted 40 days and nights just prior to beginning his ministry. Each of those fasting periods inaugurated new dispensations upon the earth. They are symbolic of renewal, just as 40 years is symbolic of generational renewal, and of men and women fulfilling their injunction to multiply and replenish the earth. 

Now let's go a bit deeper. The number 40 is also associated with God's pattern of leading the righteous out of captivity and into promised lands. Two examples come to mind. Let's start with the most obvious. The children of Israel were delivered from Egyptian bondage and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness; a single generation. 

In the Book of Mormon there is a mini-typology of this very history. If you'll recall, king Mosiah sent sixteen men (the same number of stones that the finger of God lit up for the brother of Jared; another example of leading away the righteous) to wander in the wilderness in search for the people of Zeniff. Listen to the language used in the text:

And they knew not the course they should travel in the wilderness to go up to the land of Nephi-Lehi; therefore they wandered many days in the wilderness, even forty days did they wander. (Mosiah 5:2, RE, emphasis added) 

When they found king Limhi and his people they were in bondage to the Lamanites, just as the Israelites were in bondage to the Egyptians. The next day king Limhi addressed his people, and he brought up the very subject of the Israelites and likened it to their situation. He admonished his people as follows:

Therefore, lift up your heads and rejoice, and put your trust in God, in that God who was the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and also that God who brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, and caused that they should walk through the Red Sea on dry ground, and fed them with manna that they might not perish in the wilderness; and many more things did he do for them. And again, that same God has brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem, and has kept and preserved his people, even until now. And behold, it is because of our iniquities and abominations that has brought us into bondage. (Mosiah 5:7, RE)

Did you catch that? Limhi just repeated the entire cycle of being led into promised lands and then brought into bondage because of iniquity. These cycles begin with the number 40: 40 years for the Israelites and 40 days for the people of Zeniff. 

But there is more. The Old Testament is full of references to the number 40. For instance, during the great deluge, God caused it to rain forty days and forty nights upon the earth. This was again symbolic of destruction and renewal. When the ark landed the sons of Noah had a fresh start at repopulating the earth. 

Here are some other interesting references to the number 40. Both Solomon and David reigned over Israel for forty years each. Joash also reigned for forty years. Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah to wife, Jonah was told that Nineveh would be destroyed in 40 days. When Jacob died, he was embalmed for forty days as part of the mourning process. 

After Moses died, Joshua raised an army of forty thousand troops to prepare to cleanse the promised land, a land that he had been sent to spy out forty-five years earlier when he was 40 years old. Goliath and the Philistines challenged and taunted the Israelites for 40 days until David agreed to fight. When Moses and Aaron sent men to search out the land of Canaan (one man from each tribe), they returned after 40 days. 

What does it all mean? 

Forty is also symbolic of a trial or testing period. When you multiply it by ten, the number symbolic of completion, you arrive at a complete cycle of destruction. Adrian Larsen has also written about the significance of 400 year cycles. The Nephites experienced one, and us Gentiles are only seven years away from experiencing our own. Read Adrian's blog post to find out more...

There is one more account in the Old Testament of a mini-cycle of blessing and cursing that is similar to the BOM account of the people of Limhi. This is found in the first few chapters of Judges.

Joshua, the great war captain and leader of the Israelites, had just passed away at 110 years old. And Caleb was attempting to finish the work of driving out the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites from the promised land (whom I believe were descendants of the Nephilim races, but that is a subject for an entire blog series).   

The Israelites were not successful in driving them all out, and consequently were chastened by an angel of the Lord, who spoke in behalf of God, stating:

I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land, you shall throw down their alters. But you have not obeyed my voice. Why have you done this? Wherefore, I also said, I will not drive them out from before you, but they shall be as thorns in your side, and their gods shall be a snare unto you. (Judges 1:4, RE)

The next generation of Israelites grew up not knowing the true God, and began intermarrying with the surrounding tribes and serving their gods, namely, Baal and Ashtaroth. So God delivered them into the hands of spoilers to chasten them. Then He raised up judges to deliver them, but they refused to listen to them. So God refused to continue to drive out the other races in further attempts to prove them. 

This patterns continues throughout the book of Judges. God kept raising up deliverers and the people kept rejecting them and serving pagan gods. After a few of these cycles the text says that the "land had rest forty years." 

There is that number again. 

Notice that God never broke His covenant with Israel. He kept trying to deliver them from the surrounding (Nephilim) tribes. He never forsook them but they constantly rejected Him. All He wanted to do was to give them the promised land and give them a chance to establish Zion. They couldn't do it; the lure of false gods and worldly goods was too tempting. 

Jesus spoke the following words to the Nephites, and they can be applied to the ancient Israelites and, well... us:

... how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye would not! (3 Nephi 4:9, RE) 

The ultimate purpose of the Lord attempting to gather His people is to establish Zion. But it has only been accomplished a few times in the history of the world. The establishment of Zion requires a place to gather, it requires land. And in Zion there will be no property taxes or zoning laws. There will be no coercion... period. And each family will have enough land to produce an abundance of food and provisions so that no person will have to go without. 

Having "no poor among" us is much easier accomplished if there are no encumbrances upon the land. Government restrictions and red tape create class distinctions. They create an economic barrier between who can pay to get around the regulations and those who cannot. They bolster the state-favored corporations at the expense of the local ma and pa shops. And you better believe it was designed that way. 

God has a different plan in mind for us... one in which every man should have an equal chance throughout the land.

There has always been a Title of Liberty upon the promised lands. The stipulations of which have never changed. It is a contract between us the Lord, the laws of which are written upon our hearts. We all know them and easily recognize them when we hear them. That spirit of freedom lives deep within our souls. We long to be free and we long to be stewards over the land. It was created for that very purpose. 

We Gentiles are being proven at this every instant. We are nearing the end of a destruction cycle that will result in a sweeping off similar to what the Jaredites and Nephites experienced. But in the midst of all the fearful anticipation we can still find hope. That hope is found within the pages of the Book of Mormon.

In addition to it being an ascension text and a testament of Jesus Christ, it is also a contract with a title. The stipulations of the contract are distributed throughout its pages leading up to, and following the central theme of the Title of Liberty. It is a contract written in chiasmus form.

Maintaining the title requires diligence in keeping the terms of the contract. Some of which are as follows:

  • We must not let secret combinations overrun the land and the government.
  • We must not engage in preemptive warfare by attacking nations in their own lands. 
  • We must continually worship Jesus Christ, the God of the land. 
  • We must keep secret combinations from corrupting our laws.
  • We must be willing to enter into a covenant to defend our lands from tyrants, along with our wives, children, religion, etc. 
  • We must seek for honest and upright men to hold public office. 
  • We must only pass laws that punish crime and not consciousness, creativeness, or innovation. 
Now, if we are diligence in keeping these stipulations, God promises freedom, peace, and prosperity upon the land. But we Gentiles have blown it. We have not kept these terms... it is almost impossible to keep them now. Secret combinations are so powerful that even if we vote for honest men they will never be elected into office. The campaign of Ron Paul made that abundantly clear. 

We have been aggressing against foreign nations since the Spanish-American War, and secret combinations have had almost total control of this nation since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. In my opinion, we are in a situation like Sodom and Gomorrah, God is only sparing us now for the sake of the righteous. There are still many good people who worship the God of the land. God is allowing the wheat and the tares to grow together for the time being. 

But the contract will end for one group and be renewed for another. It is perpetual. God will never disannul it. He created the contract according to just and holy principles, so that men "may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which" God has given us. 

Futurity in this context means that how we use our "moral agency" has future consequences both in mortality and in the eternal world. For nations those consequences have to come about in mortality, for individuals sometimes they are not experienced until after death. 

We cannot escape these consequences. We are all subject to the decrees of God upon this promised land. And if the majority chooses evil there is simply not much we can do about it. Like Mormon and Moroni, we may have to accept our fate and mourn that our people will continually reject God even in the face of looming destruction. 

But I want to end this post with hope, not doom and gloom. Sometimes we just need a glimmer of hope to hold onto, sometimes that is all it takes to get us through. And one thing we can be assured in is that the promised land is not going anywhere. Nephi used a specific word in a few of his prophecies that should give us great hope. That word was forever (although he broke it up into two words). He declared that the promises upon this land will never end, and that us Gentiles can still have hope in inheriting it alongside the seed of Lehi:
And it shall to come to pass that if the gentiles shall hearken unto the Lamb of God in that day that he shall manifest himself in word and also in power, in very deed, unto the taking away of their stumbling blocks, and harden not their hearts against the Lamb of God, they shall be numbered among the seed of my father. Yea, they shall be numbered among the house of Israel; and they shall be a blessed people upon the promised land for ever... (1 Nephi 3:25, RE, emphasis added)

Dear readers..., dear Gentiles, he is speaking directly to us. Can you feel it? The time that Nephi is referencing is now. God is beginning to manifest Himself to us in word and in power, and is beginning to take away our stumbling blocks. He is beginning to restore things that are ancient, that go all the way back to Adam. 

It is my prayer that we all wake up. That we look at this land in a whole new light. That we see it for what it is. That we use it for the intended purposes of its creation.  

This will end part I of this series, but I haven't even scratched the surface. In part II I'll get into the history of American land distribution and land patents, as well as legal terms that were deliberately created to swindle us out of our land. 

Stay tuned..., and in the meantime, here is part of an interview with Amberli Nelson sharing her perspective on the Book of Mormon Heartland Model:

And here is a presentation she did on the meaning of the Jewish Holy Days and how the Nephites practiced them:

Upon This Land II: The Language of Land Ownership

  Previously: A Promised Land Forever A few years ago McKay Platt gave a talk at a Remnant conference about what it really means to have you...