Yes, but the same is true of hearing silence. The fact of the words being spoken evidences that the speaker of the words intended something other than whatever meaning might be conveyed by silence.

(Still thinking about your prior post with the various scriptures — had to teach YM tonight on cultural variations and expectations for future missionaries, so I haven’t had time to get through them all deliberately yet.)

Here’s another stab at answering, something that came to me as I was trying to avoid other work today: I agree with the first part of what you say, that advice to trust God is not an exercise in evaluating God’s trustworthiness. However, I don’t think it is an exercise in testing the credibility of the person making the statement. Instead, I think it is a test of the person hearing the statement. Anyone can say “God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” What matters is what I hear when I hear that and what hearing it leads to.

Consider each of the scriptures in which the phrase “the same yesterday, today, and for ever” occur.

Hebrews 13:8: At the end of a series of admonitions, Paul adds an admonition to follow the faith of those who lead us in the Church, people whose faith is in Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. There isn’t a lot there about trusting God because he is trustworthy or because he is unchanging. At most, Paul seems to be saying, “Imitate the faith of those who follow Christ, who [unlike them] is steadfast.”

1 Nephi 10:17-18: Nephi says that he wanted to see, by the Holy Ghost, the things that his father saw. And he adds that the Holy Ghost is a gift of God given to all those who seek God, for God is the same yeterday, today, and forever. Again, this isn’t an argument that we ought to trust God because he is the same at all points in time. It says that he gives the Holy Ghost to those who seek him because he is the same.

2 Nephi 2:4: Those who received the gospel before the coming of Christ are equally blessed as those to whom he ministers in the flesh because he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

2 Nephi 27:23: God will show that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever by working through miracles according to our faith.

2 Nephi 29:8-9: The testimony of two nations will come together to prove that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Alma 31:17: The Zoramites suggest that there can be no Christ and that they are predestined to salvation because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. They don’t work out the argument, but it isn’t difficult to figure out what they might have meant. In any case, it doesn’t help us understand what the scriptures mean by the phrase.

Mormon 9:9: Those who deny revelation and miracles do not understand what the scriptures teach, namely that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, so he will continue to give revelation and work miracles.

Moroni 10:19: Because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, the gifts that Moroni has written about in chapter 10 will never be done away with, except through the people’s unbelief.

D&C 20:12: The revelation of the Book of Mormon proves that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

At least as I read them, none of these scriptures makes the argument that we ought to trust God because he is the same through time. They bear witness that he is, that he manifests his unchanging character in various ways, particularly in miracles and revelation. They encourage us to come to Christ by testifying that he can be trusted to bless us with the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit. Only the Hebrews departs from that theme, and it doesn’t do so to prove or argue anything, but to remind us of Christ’s character: “You can trust him because he is steadfast” does not mean the same as “You should trust him because he is steadfast.”

But if the statement is not “Do X because of Y”, what’s the source of the persuasive value that remains, absent appeals to reason or to authority?

Am I misinterpreting the scripture — is it not intended to persuade? Or am I just not getting the point here?

Interesting. As I think about this, such a reflexive (i.e., without external indicia of accuracy) statement about God’s trustworthiness becomes an exercise in evaluating not the trustworthiness of God, but rather the credibility (and, hence, the trustworthiness) of the person making the statement: “you should believe that God is trustworthy because I say that God is trustworthy.”

greenfrog: I am saying that God’s is trustworthy, and that’s what I think those verses say. We can trust him always to do right. However, we may not be able to reduce “what is right” to a set of rules that we can see God following or use for prediction. I don’t think that the verses imply that his actions are internally consistent over time. Rather, it seems to me that each of the verses that speaks of God as “the same yesterday, today, and forever” is hortatory: trust God because he is trustworthy. I don’t think we can easily convert hortatory statements into philosophical ones.

Putting these two principles together we conclude that God must have a prophet now, which was quite good as thats exactly what we were teaching Joseph was!

But I guess the day before Jospeh was called to be a prophet – God had no prophet? So how does the above process apply the day BEFORE Joseph was called?”

This kind of logic has found its way into this month’s Ensign, p. 16. “God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, so if He had called prophets anciently, why would he not call them today? This was something new to me.”

If I understand this correctly, you read these various verses as saying, essentially, that God’s actions are always right? Definitionally, I don’t disagree with that, but to my mind, those verses seem specifically to support a particular kind of confidence and trust — and that confidence and trust is not the sort founded on “God is always right,” but rather that “God’s actions are internally consistent over time and, consequently, predictable.” If the verses only imply the first element of that (i.e., “God’s actions are internally consistent over time”), then they say nothing directly about what we can expect from that fact. My sense of those verses is that they are intended to convey what we can expect to perceive ourselves of God’s actions.

If some level of predictability of divine action is not an intended element of those verses, then I think them misleading, though perhaps in a D&C 19 manner.