Why does the Lord continue to chasten His people? This is the question that rose above all others in this week’s lessons.
The question
By reading all the church historical articles, as well as the scriptures and the manual for this week’s lessons, one general question kept popping up in my head – The Lord gives as His reasons for the trials of the Saints that He needed to chastise them, because of their sinful ways. But God is still chastising us today. Why has God been chastising His people for almost 200 years? I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.
This is not a two word answer. I mulled over the possible answers to this question for several days before I felt settled enough to put anything on paper. As you read the material below, try to look at each section as just a part of a whole. This really is a bigger picture that is best understood a piece at a time.
Love
In previous weeks I have discussed this concept that God chastises those whom He loves. Here is a paragraph from last week’s lesson on why God chastens His people.
The rebukes of the Lord are meant to teach and improve us, not demean or belittle us. We shouldn’t be offended when the Lord corrects us, for His corrections are for our benefit, not for our punishment and humiliation. Sometimes we might feel like the Lord’s chastisement is a source of shame, and not the badge of love that it actually is.
As a reminder, God condemns evil wherever it exists, but doesn’t chasten those who don’t make covenants with Him. Only those who make covenants are considered heirs to His throne. He likens the process to a king who doesn’t chasten and correct his servants in the same way he chastens and corrects his own children who will one day take his place on the throne. We will revisit this concept in another part of the article.
The point here is that the need to correct is to enable the person being corrected to improve and become a better person. If God wasn’t trying to help us become like Him, which is His work and His glory, He wouldn’t be so concerned that we learn from our mistakes and become wise in our thoughts and actions. Being corrected is how He teaches and demonstrates to us of His love for our welfare. God is living the ultimate form of a happy life. He is grooming us to be able to enjoy that same lifestyle. But there is much we need to learn in order to comprehend all that goes into that kind of happiness. The truth is that true happiness, as God experiences it, is difficult to attain and requires much of us. As difficult as it is, all the changes we need to make to learn how to experience God’s joy is worth the sacrifices we have to make to experience it.
It is important to remember that we don’t know how much needs to be changed in our own life in order for us to comprehend the happiness and love of God, unless God, Himself teaches us how to obtain that state of being. We can make changes our whole life long and never finish the journey to being as happy as God, but we are one step closer with every cycle of repentance and change we make. Fortunately, God knows this is a very long and drawn out process, and that we won’t finish it in this life. He is more concerned that we are on the path than that we are at the end of the path, just yet.
Patience
Now, lest you begin to think that we as a church have not made much progress in becoming more obedient and faithful to the Lord in the last 200 years, here is an example of what God was working with in the opening of this dispensation. Life was hard in the first years of the restoration of the gospel. People weren’t yet comprehending the Lord’s plan and intentions for them, so they often used their own wisdom (which still happens today) to second guess what God wanted them to do. Instead of turning to the Lord for revelation for their personal actions, they were often guided by their own beliefs from their pre-baptism days that they knew better than God’s anointed servants. The following paragraphs demonstrate how far some of the Saints, and even the apostles went to try to make sure the church was run as they saw fit. The paragraphs quoted here are from the Church website. The link is below.
Joseph traveled that same summer to Canada to visit the Saints in Toronto. In his absence, Joseph Sr. spoke at a Sunday meeting in the Kirtland temple about the floundering Safety Society. He defended his son’s character and condemned the actions of the dissenters, who were sitting at the other end of the room.
As the patriarch addressed the Saints, Warren Parrish stood and demanded to speak. Joseph Sr. told him not to interrupt, but Warren bounded across the room and forced his way onto the stand. He seized Joseph Sr. and tried to pull him away from the pulpit. The patriarch cried out for Oliver Cowdery, who served as the local justice of the peace, but Oliver did nothing to help his old friend.
Seeing his father in danger, William Smith sprang to his feet, threw his arms around Warren, and dragged him off the stand. John Boynton lunged forward, unsheathing a sword. He pointed the blade at William’s chest and threatened to run his fellow apostle through if he took another step. Other dissenters drew knives and pistols from their pockets and surrounded William.
The temple erupted in chaos. People scrambled for doorways or escaped out nearby windows. Constables burst into the room, pushed through the fleeing crowd, and grappled with the armed men.
My first impulse was to ask why people were carrying swords, knives, and pistols to church with them. True, the temple had not yet been dedicated, but still, it was the church they met in each week while it was under construction. I then remembered that this was a common practice in this period of history. There were a lot of outlaws and bandits about, and people tended to take offense quickly and sometimes violently. Living in Joseph Smith’s day wasn’t always a bed of roses.
Secondly, all these people named in this account were the leaders of the church. The account goes on to state that these same men who turned against the prophet also took over God’s temple to use it for their own church.
After months of trying to reconcile with the leading dissenters, the Kirtland high council excommunicated them. The dissenters then seized the temple for their own church meetings and threatened to drive anyone who was still loyal to Joseph out of Kirtland.
I don’t know about you, but I have always considered the people of Joseph Smith’s day to be good, law abiding, and peace loving people. I wondered why the Lord was constantly chastising them for their sins. Now I can see a little more clearly what the Lord was up against as He restored His gospel. And this was in the most free country on earth. As inspired as the constitution is, there were still corrupt politicians and people willing to govern through mob rule. The Lord demonstrated His patience with His people over and over again as He worked with them to teach them humility and forgiveness with each other.
I am convinced that each generation has these kinds of problems to overcome. We just don’t see how far we have to go before we are Zion worthy as a people. So in the meantime the Lord continues to correct and chasten us to help us come closer to the standard of what is required to live in His presence. Hopefully our children will become closer to the ideal than we are today. We all have so far to go that we don’t have any idea just how much progress we as a church have made. All of us need to just keep trying to repent and be better than we have been. This is why we repent every day, not because we are guilty of putting a sword to the chest of an apostle, but because we are still learning to be wise in our choices. All of us are still seeking to bring ourselves to the Christlike ideal. This is and has always been the goal of mortality since Adam and Eve walked the earth.
The difference covenants make
It is important for us to recognize that the process of living the gospel is ongoing even after this mortal experience. Those who have already passed to the other side of the veil can still repent and accept the covenants that state to God that we want to become like Him. Don’t make the mistake that mortality is the only place where these covenants are available to mankind. They can only be made here, that is true, but that is why we have temples. We go to the temple and provide the covenant making opportunities for others who have not necessarily had that opportunity while they were here in mortality.
The covenants are so important. God built into the plan for our salvation that those who choose to become like Him can make then keep sacred covenants that will enable us to become like God. He has promised that for those who make and keep the covenants He has provided to us will receive the Godhead’s personal tutelage in achieving our desired goal. No one else has or needs access to that tutelage, for they haven’t chosen to become like God. Indeed, we are the only Christians on the planet who believe we can become like God. So God is not punishing others for not making covenants. When they are taught the gospel in the spirit world they will have the opportunity to make those covenants and live by them.
Temple work becomes the center of our worship, because returning to our Father in Heaven is truly a family affair. All of God’s children are required to show their celestial nature by sacrificing themselves to save their siblings by providing opportunities for covenants to be made in the temples of God. When I spoke earlier of the king not chastening servants like he chastens his own children, this is what I am referring to. Covenant makers and keepers God considers to be His children who have stated they want to be like Him. The covenant makers are those who embark on the path of change to become like God and Christ. This is how Christ defines those he calls his sons and his daughters.
God still loves all His other children, but He has given us all our agency, and let’s face it, most of God’s children won’t choose to become like Him. They consider it too difficult or challenging, and are happier living life in other ways. They still have the opportunity to change on the other side of the veil of mortality, but most will still choose to live by their own standards rather than by God’s. Our missionary work is focused on finding those who want to return home to God, and on no one else. The church Christ restored is the only church of covenants through Christ’s own priesthood power. This is our focus and purpose, to find those who want to become like Christ and return home to live with God. No one else needs covenants. Covenants are a celestial gift.
All things work together for our good
Every irritant, trial, mistake, and error in mortality has a gift within it. Everything can teach us to rely more on God, to look to God with greater earnestness, to be more humble, to be more prayerful, etc. It doesn’t matter if the problem we have to overcome or live with is one of our own making, the result of someone else’s behavior, or whether it is just a matter of being mortal. All of life’s troubles carry the opportunities to become better and more righteous within them. This is why the Lord isn’t so concerned that we experience trials and suffering. His concern is what we do with them. Are we seeking to learn from them to be more like Christ, or are we feeling pity for ourselves or outrage at someone else’s behavior, or are we raging against nature for causing our suffering or that of our loved one? How we live with these pieces of mortality make all the difference in our relationship with God.
When the Lord corrects His people, He is looking for humility, repentance, forgiveness, patience, and a host of other godly virtues to be learned. All of these virtues are required for us to experience the joy and happiness God experiences all the time. But they are hard to learn, difficult to maintain, and impossible to acquire on our own. We need the help of the Holy Spirit to teach us what to do with our suffering so we can turn our suffering into lessons of growth. This is why learning to live by the Spirit and to commune with the Spirit is so important. He is the one who teaches us what it means to have patience, love, gentleness, courage in adversity, and so forth. Through the Spirit Christ teaches us all we need to know to learn wisdom and the ways of the godly life.
Today’s lesson
Please don’t think that I believe we are not progressing as a people. I believe we are. I also believe we aren’t where we will need to be when the Savior returns. There is still so much we need to learn individually and as a people. This is the burden of our living prophet, to prepare us, individually and as a people, for the Savior’s return. We need to listen to the prophet as never before in the history of the restoration. The more wicked the world becomes, the more difficult it is to navigate being righteous. The Lord shows the prophet the way, and he teaches us what the Lord would have us do today to be happier tomorrow. Just think how much happier the Saints would have been had they all remained true and faithful to Joseph Smith in their own day. Even with his flaws, as they viewed them, he was still the Lord’s mouthpiece, and he deserved better than he got from many of the Lord’s people.
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