Alma 1

(March 15, 2014)
There is an instinctual knowledge of what steps you need to take in order to defend yourself.  We need to return railing for railing, persecution for persecution, eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.  We all, somewhere in our physical, instinctual core know this.  But this is something that we all know that is wholly wrong.

The answer is not to return an eye for an eye, but to turn the other cheek.  We feel defenseless, and feel like our behavior is only encouraging the bad behavior of others.  But we are wrong to think that – the Lord has taught us how to act, and how to let Him fight our battles for us. It is an issue of faith, on our part, to let Him work out our defense for us.

Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of how we determine when this isn’t the case.  Mormon, the man who wrote these words about the dangers of fighting back, was also a warrior of some capability.  He certainly didn’t shrink from a fight (but knew also when to withdraw from an unrighteous one).  I suppose that is the difficulty that we must negotiate, but we can only work out which fights are to be fought if we are not looking inward but are instead looking outward.  I think that is the difference.