Thresh the Nations

Elder Gregorio E. Casillas taught in the most recent general conference, “Your potential is divine. While it’s certainly important to prepare yourself to succeed in this very competitive world, one of your crucial missions throughout your life is to become a disciple of Jesus Christ and to follow the impressions of the Spirit. As you do this, God will bless your life; He will bless your current or future family; and He will bless the lives of His children who you encounter.” He shared an experience he had visiting members of a stake with their stake president who had indeed learned to follow the impressions of the Spirit: “After we finished our scheduled visits, the stake president asked me if we could go see one more family. He felt impressed that we should talk with them. We knocked on the door, and a sister opened it. She looked at me, but she didn’t know who I was, so she didn’t express much. I pointed my hand toward the stake president, who greeted her by name. As soon as she heard and saw him, she rejoiced. Standing there at the door, they both hugged each other and cried together. This set the tone for our visit. We didn’t know that the sister had received chemotherapy the day before. She felt too weak to care for her adult son. So I helped the stake president dress her son, and we put him in his wheelchair. We fed him the food that another sweet sister from the ward had brought earlier, and we helped with other tasks. Before we left their home, we were able to bless them.” The story highlights both the stake president’s willingness to follow the Spirit, leading them to the home of this sister, and the Lord’s love for all His children. It is also a reminder to me of what true success is in this life: to hear the voice of the Lord and do what He wants us to do. That may look differently for each of us because we have varying opportunities and abilities, but for all of us our attitude should be like that of the Savior’s: “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34).

               There is a passage in this week’s Come, Follow Me reading which is difficult to understand but which ultimately ties back I believe to this idea of learning to follow the Spirit. The Savior, in speaking of the house of Israel in the last days, taught the Nephites and Lamanites, “For I will make my people with whom the Father hath covenanted, yea, I will make thy horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass. And thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the Lord of the whole earth. And behold, I am he who doeth it” (3 Nephi 20:19). This language sounds violent—His people will beat in pieces other people—so what did He really mean by it? It was a quotation from Micah 4:13 which reads this way in our Old Testament: “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion: for I will make thine horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass: and thou shalt beat in pieces many people: and I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the Lord of the whole earth.” Clearly the language is a metaphor since His people of course do not have horns or hoofs, a description that sounds like oxen. It suggests that His people will be strengthened in the last days to perform His work and that they will have some kind of dominance over the wicked. The key word in Micah’s passage that helps us understand the message is thresh. The metaphor is about the threshing process which loosens the edible part of the grain from the straw. Various means for performing the threshing have been used over time, including this one: “The practice of the ancient Egyptians [was to spread] out the loosened sheaves on a circular enclosure of hard ground, and driving oxen, sheep or other animals round and round over it so as to tread out the grain.” To me that matches the description of the Savior’s words. It may be that the He was comparing the house of Israel to oxen used to thresh (stomp on) grain, beating the grain in pieces with strong hoofs. This then connects with an instruction that the Lord in our dispensation and tells us how the figurative threshing should be done by His people in the last days: “Wherefore, I call upon the weak things of the world, those who are unlearned and despised, to thresh the nations by the power of my Spirit” (Doctrine and Covenants 35:13). He said again in another revelation, “And by the weak things of the earth the Lord shall thresh the nations by the power of his Spirit” (Doctrine and Covenants 133:59). To me that is the key: the threshing and beating down is not done with physical, violent means, but by the power of His Spirit. The Lord would have His people show forth His power through their connection with the Holy Ghost. We are called not to foment a violent revolution in the last days to gain power over the enemies of the Lord; rather, we are to learn to receive spiritual power through His Spirit to accomplish His glorious work.

               To me an example of this is found in the story of Joseph in in a Missouri Jail after being wrongfully imprisoned in 1838. As Elder David B. Haight related the story, Joseph was “confined in a dungeon, he rebuked the guards. He and his brethren were trying to get a little sleep but were kept awake by the awful blasphemies and obscene jests of their jailers, who were recounting the dreadful deeds of robbery and murder they had committed among the Mormons. These were no idle boasts, for these awful atrocities had actually been committed. Suddenly, Joseph rose to his feet and, in a voice that seemed to shake the very building, cried out: ‘SILENCE, ye fiends of the infernal pit! In the name of Jesus Christ I rebuke you, and command you to be still; I will not live another minute and hear such language. Cease such talk, or you or I die THIS INSTANT!’ (quoted in Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, 180; emphasis in original). The effect must have been electric in its suddenness. Some begged his pardon, while others slunk into the dark corners of the jail to hide their shame. The power of Jesus Christ, whose name he had invoked in his rebuke, was upon him. His hands and feet were in chains, but these the guards did not see. They saw only the righteous anger in his shining face, and felt the divine power in his voice as he rebuked them.” Joseph was filled with the power of the Spirit, and though there was no physical action taken in that moment, with His words and the force of the Holy Ghost, he did “thresh the nations by the power of [the Lord’s] Spirit.” We need that kind of power in the last days to reject wickedness and to do good, and it will come as we learn to consistently follow the impressions of the Spirit, just like Elder Casillas’s stake president.