THE POWER OF CHOICE

 

 

I continue to be amazed by the tolerance and longsuffering of our God. How patiently He waits for us to turn ourselves around, to make the right choice, to forsake our path to destruction. How it must pain His merciful heart when that right choice that would lead us to our better end never eventuates!

Reflect on how the principle of the Saviour’s longsuffering played out in Nephites’ time. Their demise and unfortunate end did not happen in 400 A.D. but in 360 A.D. when they made the choice that guaranteed their end. Between 327-50 A.D. the Saviour suffered their wickedness and spared them three times granting them three victories over the Lamanites through which they could recognize His protection (Mormon 2:16,25,27). It did not work.

The second chance came by peace. According to the Mosaic observance of the Jubilee year which happened every 50 years, the land was allowed to rest and was restored to its original inherited line of ownership (see Leviticus 25). During the three hundred and forty ninth year, heading into the Jubilee year, a 10 year peace treaty was made between the Nephites and the Lamanites as the land of their inheritance was divided (Mormon 2:28,29).

During the ten years of peace Mormon was commanded by the Lord to call the people to repentance so they can be spared when the time of peace ended (Mormon 3:1,2). Mormon did so but the people did not recognize that ‘it was the Lord that had spared them, and granted unto them a chance for repentance’ (v 3). What could have been a quite time of contemplation and retrospection, turned into a comfort zone of negligence and pride.

Even though they were granted three more victories over the Lamanites, they still refused to repent ‘boasting in their own strength’ (Mormon 3:13).  From there their thirst for killing headed them into the direction of death as they ‘delighted in the shedding of blood continually’ (v 8,10; 4:11).

And so in 360 A.D. the Lord declared that the Nephites ‘shall be cut off from the face of the earth’ (Mormon 3:15). It was not that they had exhausted the Saviour’s abundance of mercy but that they had made a choice from which there was no return. When we make a choice and intently pursue it to the end, we eventually reap its reward.

As it happened with the Nephites, very often we don’t recognize our opportunities and chances for repentance. And very often we don’t realise that there is such a thing as a point of no return. Mormon realized 40 years before the end that ‘the day of grace was passed’ with his people and the story was finished (Mormon 2:15). Nephites had learnt the worst lesson of all: that it is possible for time to run out as the Spirit of God will not always strive with man (D&C 1:33).

This is the lesson we can take away from this sad part of history, the day of repentance can pass: “…..sin is intensely habit-forming and sometimes moves men to the tragic point of no return…As the transgressor moves deeper and deeper in his sin, and the error is entrenched more deeply and the will to change is weakened, it becomes increasingly near-hopeless, and he skids down and down until either he does not want to climb back or he has lost the power to do so” (President Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness, [1969], p 117)

Did Your heart break

As on the cross You hung

Knowing many lambs will go astray?

Did you know they will reject

Your blood and all You had to pay?

 

And still You hoped

And still You sorrowed

Over godly well-known fears

For all they’ll have to suffer

To pay the ransom for

Your sacred tears.

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: Gentle Saviour by Greg Collins)