Scripture Prophesied This Reaction

I shared a link to one of my articles recently with someone who used to support Donald Trump enthusiastically, voted for him, and has now turned against him completely. I thought the scriptural evidence might open a door worth walking through together. Their response was three words: "I don't believe it."

I have seen that reply more times than I can count. And every time, that same verse comes to my mind.

The Lord did not say there might be people who will not believe it. He said there shall be. He announced it as a certainty. The great and marvelous work of the Father will unfold in the last days, a man will declare it, and people will look that man in the eye and say: I don't believe it.

We are watching this prophecy fulfill itself in real time. And remarkably, the people fulfilling it are often the same ones who say they believe every word of scripture.

We Live in the Age of "I Don't Believe It"

To be fair, the problem runs deeper than just this one topic. We are living through a period of almost total epistemic collapse. Nothing is accepted at face value. Everything is a cover-up. Every institution is corrupt. Every official account is hiding something.

The Artemis mission is currently sending astronauts around the dark side of the moon, the first time humans have been in that vicinity in fifty years. It is a genuine, historic moment. And across Facebook, YouTube, and every corner of the internet, there are people posting videos arguing it is all fake, all CGI, all a massive deception. We never went to the moon the first time, they say, and we are not going now.

I watched someone make that argument recently and a woman replied in the comments: "What? I was standing in Florida when it lifted off. What are you talking about?" Others piled on with their own firsthand accounts and documented evidence. The original poster did not respond. She did not engage with a single point. She just quietly deleted the post.

That is more telling than any argument she could have made. She was not persuaded. She was cornered. And rather than acknowledge that the evidence had exposed a problem with her position, she simply made the evidence disappear. The belief did not change. It just went somewhere less visible.

Now here is something I want to be honest about. Conspiracies do exist. The Book of Mormon does not warn us about secret combinations as a hypothetical. It warns us because they are real, they are operating, and they will infiltrate governments and judicial systems to protect themselves from accountability. I believe that. The problem is not skepticism itself. The problem is when wholesale unbelief becomes the lens through which everything is filtered, including the things God is actually doing. When that happens, we lose the ability to distinguish between a lie and a miracle.

The Real Limitation They Are Placing

When I present the scriptural evidence that Donald Trump is the servant prophesied in Isaiah and identified by Christ Himself in Third Nephi, the objection I hear most often is not a theological argument. It is a personal one. It amounts to this: God would never choose someone like him.

What they are really saying, whether they know it or not, is that there is something Donald Trump has done that places him permanently beyond the reach of God's forgiveness and God's purposes. That the Atonement of Jesus Christ is infinite and eternal in every case except this one.

Think about who God has chosen to work through across the entire span of scripture.

Moses killed an Egyptian and spent forty years in exile before God called him from a burning bush. Paul stood and watched while Stephen was stoned to death, and then spent years hunting down and imprisoning Christians before the Lord knocked him off his horse. Alma the younger fought against the Church with such effectiveness that Mormon describes him as one of its greatest enemies. And yet every one of them became an instrument in the hands of God, not in spite of their failures but, in some cases, precisely because of what those failures taught them about mercy and redemption.

God can forgive all of them. He forgave the man who watched a martyr die. He forgave the murderer who became the lawgiver. He forgave the enemy of the Church who became its greatest missionary. But He cannot, they insist, forgive Donald Trump.

That is not a theological position. That is hatred dressed in theological clothing. And I have written at length about what hatred does to our ability to see truth clearly. It is not a small problem. It is a blinding one.

The Pharisee Pattern

The Pharisees were not evil men by most measures. They were devout. They studied scripture. They kept the commandments meticulously. They were the most religiously serious people in their society. And they completely, utterly missed the Messiah standing right in front of them.

Why? Because Jesus did not speak the way they expected. He did not validate their interpretations of the law. He called out their pride publicly. He associated with people they considered beneath them. He violated their Sabbath rules. He was nothing like the Messiah they had spent their entire lives preparing to recognize.

The same pattern is playing out now in precise detail. People who have spent their lives studying prophecy, who know the scriptural descriptions of the last days servant, who can quote Isaiah and cite Third Nephi from memory, are looking at the fulfillment of those prophecies and saying: that cannot be him. He does not talk right. He does not act right. He is nothing like what I expected.

And in doing so they are fulfilling the very scripture they claim to believe. The marred servant prophecy says he will be despised. They despise him. It says he will be rejected by his own people. They reject him. It says his appearance will be marred more than any man. They are the ones doing the marring. They are not bystanders watching prophecy unfold. They are participants in it.

What Is Actually Coming

I want to say something carefully here because I do not want to overstate what I know and I do not want to give away things that are better discovered in their full context.

What is coming is not a slow, gradual shift in opinion. The prophets who saw our day were not describing incremental change. Isaiah and Daniel saw things so overwhelming that they described the visions as burdens. Things so terrible they were laid low for days afterward. But also things so magnificent, so glorious, so far beyond anything the world has seen, that you would expect them to dissolve every objection and silence every critic.

Some objections will survive even that. Some people, even witnessing the most astonishing events in human history, will find a way to explain them away. The capacity of a hardened heart to resist evidence is, as I have written about before, essentially unlimited.

But many will not be able to look away. A change is coming that will be visible, undeniable, and historically unprecedented. When it arrives, the people who rejected the servant will face a reckoning that is not punitive but personal. They will have to decide, in the full light of what God has done, whether they are willing to set aside their prior conclusions and receive what the Lord is offering.

Some will accept what God has done and change course. Many will not. And the separation between those two groups will define what the last days look like for an entire generation.

Why It Still Matters to Declare It

I get asked sometimes why I keep writing and speaking about this when so many people reply with hostility or dismissal. The honest answer is in that same passage from Third Nephi. Christ said a man would declare these things, and there would be those who would not believe it. He did not say the man should stop declaring.

I am not the servant referenced in that verse. I want to be clear about that. I am just a man who has studied these scriptures for years and who has seen, with more clarity than I ever expected to have, how precisely they describe what is happening in our world right now. Sharing that is not about convincing the unconvinceable. It is about reaching the quieter, more receptive audience that is watching all of this and genuinely trying to understand what they are seeing.

There are people right now who sense that something historic is happening. Who feel it in the weight of current events even if they cannot name what it is. Who are open to the possibility that God is doing something in our generation that does not look like what they were taught to expect. This is for them.

If that is you, I would start with the evidence. Not with feelings or impressions but with the actual scriptural case. Read about whether Donald Trump appears in biblical prophecy. Read about who the Davidic Servant actually is according to Isaiah. Come to it with the same openness you would bring to any scripture study, and let the evidence speak for itself.

The great and marvelous work of the Father is underway. A man is declaring it. You do not have to be among those who will not believe it. That choice, right now, is still yours to make.

Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman: Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy. He is a lifelong student of biblical prophecy and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.