Cast It From Thee

Yesterday I had a good discussion with a friend who told me of some challenges he has had recently with his oldest teenager who became addicted to video games.  The games became all-consuming for his son, so much so that he was staying up all hours of the night to play them and every other aspect of his life was deteriorating.  After failed attempts at enforcing moderation, my friend finally decided that it had to stop, and he took away the games completely and told his son that they would never be coming back.  This, as would be expected, was not well received by his son who continues to petition for their return.  Conversations around this subject still cause contention in their home, but my friend is confident that it was the right choice—the video games had to be removed completely so he could develop in the areas of his life that really matter.  He was following the spirit of the Savior’s counsel in the Sermon on the Mount: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” (Matt. 5:29).

As I have pondered our discussion and this decision my friend made to help his son, I was reminded of the difficult choice that Joseph Smith and the Nauvoo City Council made to destroy the Nauvoo Expositor which was publishing libel against Joseph Smith and the Church.  It was not a rash decision but one taken after careful deliberation and studying their legal authority.  They determined that the paper was a public nuisance and that destroying it would be better than letting it stir up even further the hostile environment around them that was threatening already to break out into bloodshed.  It was a controversial move, but the consequences of doing nothing would have been much worse.  A friend of the Prophet later recorded: “Brother Joseph called a meeting at his own house and told us that God showed to him in an open vision in daylight that if he did not destroy that printing press that it would cause the blood of the Saints to flow in the streets and by this was that evil destroyed.”  Sometimes we have to fully cut off those pernicious influences from our lives which would destroy souls, even if such a decision causes other challenges. 

               That we may sometimes need to take drastic measure to remove a certain evil influences completely from our lives is also seen in the scriptures.  For example, at the beginning and end of His ministry, the Savior “cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves” in a dramatic show of righteous indignation (Matt. 21:12).  He saw that it was more important to rid the temple of the evil these people were doing than to allow them the agency to continue destroying the spirituality of the people and place.  The people of Ammon also chose to rid themselves of the evil effect of their weapons on them: “They took their swords, and all the weapons which were used for the shedding of man’s blood, and they did bury them up deep in the earth. And this they did, it being in their view a testimony to God, and also to men, that they never would use weapons again for the shedding of man’s blood” (Alma 24:17).  It was not that weapons could never be used in a positive way, but because the temptation for them to employ them for evil was too strong they had to rid themselves of all opportunity to use them.  They had succumbed to Satan too often with these weapons to allow any use of them whatsoever.    As Elder Scott once commented, “Satan will try to use our memory of any previous guilt to lure us back into his influence. We must be ever vigilant to avoid his enticements. Such was the case of the faithful Ammonite fathers. Even after their years of faithful living, it was imperative for them to protect themselves spiritually from any attraction to the memory of past sins.”

               I admire my friend for his willingness to follow his inspiration as a parent to cut off completely the thing that was dragging his son down.  Surely we all have in our lives similar temptations and distractions and sins that seek to pull us away from the Savior and those things that are most important.  We must find the strength to symbolically bury those weapons, cast out our own money changers, and destroy the libelous press that would drag us down to that “gulf of misery and endless wo” (Helaman 5:12).