“Looking Beyond the Mark”
There was something unique, wrote Elder Bruce R. McConkie, “about Jewish apostasy in the meridian day. It grew out of one of the most resolute attempts ever made by men to live what they assumed was the will of Jehovah. It grew out of what their Nephite kinsmen, long before, had called ’looking beyond the mark.’ These words, spoken concerning the Jews of Jacob’s day, applied in full measure also to their descendants in Jesus’ day...
For generations that went before, and then in the day of our Lord’s ministry, his Israelite brethren, by ’looking beyond the mark, ’ turned the truth of heaven into a system that led them to hell. That is to say, they took the plain and simple things of pure religion and added to them a host of their own interpretations; they embellished them with added rites and performances; and they took a happy, joyous way of worship and turned it into a restrictive, curtailing, depressive system of rituals and performances. The living spirit of the Lord’s law became in their hands the dead letter of Jewish ritualism.” (Mortal Messiah 1:238; see also 2:392.)