Slippery Riches

One of the prophecies of Samuel the Lamanite to the Nephites was, “Behold the time cometh that he curseth your riches, that they become slippery, that ye cannot hold them; and in the days of your poverty ye cannot retain them” (Helaman 13:31).  Mormon alluded to this same prophecy in the previous chapter when he lamented the wickedness of the Nephites: “And behold, if a man hide up a treasure in the earth, and the Lord shall say—Let it be accursed, because of the iniquity of him who hath hid it up—behold, it shall be accursed” (Helaman 12:18).  The direct fulfillment of this prophecy came in Mormon’s day when the people were ripe for destruction.  He wrote of the situation in his days, “The inhabitants thereof began to hide up their treasures in the earth; and they became slippery, because the Lord had cursed the land, that they could not hold them, nor retain them” (Mormon 1:18).  The same thing happened to the Jaredites as they were on the road to self-destruction.  In their last days, “there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon his shelf, or upon the place whither he would keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could not find it, so great was the curse upon the land” (Ether 14:1).  I think that these examples serve as a warning for us today.  We live in a similar time where the people “do always remember [their] riches, not to thank the Lord [their] God for them” (Helaman 13:22).  If the Book of Mormon is meant for our day and serves to prepare us for the coming of the Savior, then surely this is a kind of curse that the Lord will bring upon us if we do not repent and value the Lord above our riches.  In fact, it is all too easy today for this to occur—all that has to happen is the stock market plummets, and suddenly riches that people thought they had are gone.  Of course this has already happened to some extent multiple times, and we have to learn to place our hearts upon the things of the Lord and not the ephemeral riches we might obtain.