Living Righteously in a Wicked World

While reading Moroni 7 this morning it occurred to me, Mormon, whom Moroni is quoting, is speaking in “Sacrament Meeting.” Moroni was old enough to take notes and remember this talk his father gave. I’ve written in previous times of the great lessons in the talk so I won’t restate them today. If you’d like to read them, here are links: Judging, and Faith, Hope and Charity.

What’s significant, is this is the time when Mormon wrote the Nephites were given over to awful depravity and wickedness. Mormon never mentions these good people and only hints at them when he recounts the awful losses at the Cumorah Massacre. So how could he speak in church in such a wicked society?

Mormon was the military commander of a nation at war. As such, he was exposed to the whole horror of a fallen people in a conflict which brought out their most wicked and vile aspects. Moroni was still at home and it's him who’s speaking now. His subjective experience of the Nephites was different. He saw and lived things which his father didn’t see. Moroni saw the righteous saints who lived in this world gone crazy with wickedness. That was the difference he needed to see this talk as important.

Because Moroni saw our day too, he felt impressed to use a lot of his precious remaining plate space to tell this story. Why? Because we would find ourselves living in a similar time. Think about it. We live in a world gone crazy where as Isaiah prophesied, “good would be called evil and evil good.” Just as those righteous few struggled to determine what was good and what wasn’t, we do too. Which is why this sermon, which touches on how to judge between good and evil, is so important.

2 Nephi 24 - Winding up Isaiah

It’s hard to believe that I’m through the Isaiah chapters in Nephi. Well, almost, there’s just one more after this one, Isaiah 29 but after that we won’t see him until Abinadi quotes him at length in his sermon to king Noah. After that, we won’t read of him until the Savior quotes him.

But on with this chapter. In it, Isaiah speaks of the final rewards of how we live in this life. He resumes using the pattern of alternating consequences for the righteous and the evil right at the end of the chapter.

People marvel at how small and insignificant Satan is when they see him bereft of his power. Their epitaph will be, “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble?” They won’t believe what they see at that day.

The whole chapter is a recitation on the destruction of the evil in this world. The centerpiece of it being the end of Satan’s power and the revelation of his true appearance without it. Kinda makes you wonder, who’s side do you want to be on doesn’t it.

He has so much now because we give it to him. God’s power is within Him. From it flows His love for us. Satan on the other hand has only what he can deceive us into giving him. It’s quite the contrast.

The chapter ends with a couple of Hebrew parallelisms portraying the fate of the righteous: the firstborn of the poor will feed and the needy will lie down in safety while the nation of the wicked is dissolved with none to deliver them. As we’ll read later on, God is with us through the end of all things. Satan can’t. Additionally, he abandons us when he has no further use for us.