How Mormon Survived Spiritually

I have wondered how Mormon could stay true to the gospel and to the Lord during his lifetime that was so filled with wickedness and depravity all around him.  He was involved in countless battles between the Lamanites and Nephites, witnessed the complete rejection of the gospel by his people, and ultimately watched hundreds of thousands of people be slain until essentially all of the Nephites were gone.  He saw such terrible wickedness that he cried out at one point, “O the depravity of my people! They are without order and without mercy….  They delight in everything save that which is good; and the suffering of our women and our children upon all the face of this land doth exceed everything; yea, tongue cannot tell, neither can it be written” (Moroni 9:18-19).  Given that, it is incredible that he could remain hopeful in the gospel and endure to the end in faith, encouraging his son Moroni in the midst of such awful circumstances, “Notwithstanding their hardness, let us labor diligently… for we have a labor to perform whilst in this tabernacle of clay, that we may conquer the enemy of all righteousness, and rest our souls in the kingdom of God” (Moroni 9:6).  How was he able to thus conquer the enemy of all righteousness himself when nearly his whole people were vanquished by the adversary? 

               It seems to me that at least one answer to this question is that in his life he was focused on the scriptures.  When he was only ten years old, Ammaron came to him, giving him instructions about the sacred records.  He was told, “Ye shall take the plates of Nephi unto yourself… ye shall engrave on the plates of Nephi all the things that ye have observed concerning this people.”  So from a very early age he knew the importance of the sacred records, and he told us, “I remembered the things which Ammaron commanded me” (Mormon 1:4-5).  We do not have a lot of detail about when Mormon actual made his abridgement of the records, but he obviously did it because we have it.  He simply said, “I had gone according to the word of Ammaron, and taken the plates of Nephi, and did make a record according to the words of Ammaron” (Mormon 2:17).  It was clearly a monumental undertaking, writing what we have today in Words of Mormon through Mormon 7 as well as an account similar to what we have in 1 Nephi through Omni.  He gave us a sense of the size of the records he was combing through in order to make his abridgment when he wrote, “I cannot write the hundredth part of the things of my people” (Words of Mormon 1:5).  If we take this literally, it would mean that the total records he had from Nephite prophets were somewhere on the order of one hundred times as long as the current Book of Mormon.  He must have spent a huge portion of his time over decades reading and studying the words of the prophets and then writing his own record through the inspiration of the Spirit.  Surely that focus on the scriptures and the words of the prophets and the Savior Himself that he poured over allowed him to block out the wickedness of his people and stay true to the faith.  It was likely his own contrasting experiences of being immersed in the words of God while at the same time living in such wickedness that led him to declare, “Yea, we see that whosoever will may lay hold upon the word of God, which is quick and powerful, which shall divide asunder all the cunning and the snares and the wiles of the devil, and lead the man of Christ in a strait and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery which is prepared to engulf the wicked—And land their souls, yea, their immortal souls, at the right hand of God in the kingdom of heaven” (Helaman 3:29).  The words of God did just that for him, and his example is a powerful one for us today as the world increasingly rejects the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  We must like Mormon lay hold upon the word of God, similarly devoting a significant part of our own lives to the scriptures, if we want to make through the snares and cunning and wiles of the devil in these last days.