(December 28, 2014)
It is a
sobering thought, when reviewing the great sermon that was taught in this
chapter, that the speaker and nearly every person who heart the sermon would be
dead in only a few short years (or perhaps months?). Mormon explicitly points out that the people
who are listening to him are those who are peaceable followers of Christ, and
yet they would shortly be destroyed by a warlike group of apostates striving to
destroy the work of the Lord.
We in
the Church think that because there is a perfect plan that things will go well
for us. Really, there is nothing in the
scriptures that we can point to in order to back up that assertion. The reality is that we can and should expect
our lives to be difficult and painful and for the bad guys to win more often
than not (temporally, at least). There
is absolutely no need for us to get upset at this, or to claim that things aren’t
fair, because in reality things really aren’t fair – but they aren’t fair to
our benefit. If things were fair, we
would be lost forever because of our sins.
It doesn’t
matter how righteous our goals might be or how willing we are to work for them –
we are called only to fight and the Lord will grant us victory at His
discretion. This doesn’t for a moment
justify our slackening of our efforts (Mormon certainly didn’t slack in his
efforts even though he had a pretty good idea that his cause was hopeless). Nor should we ever worry if our efforts result
in nothing temporally – we are not here to build temporal lives or temporal
kingdoms, but rather to build the Kingdom
of God
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