Slippery

The Book of Mormon has an interesting description of what happens to really wicked societies.  It happened to the Nephites as they were destroyed in the days of Mormon and it happened to the Jaredites in their final days.  Samuel the Lamanite prophesied about it in the wicked days preceding the coming of the Savior.  The common characteristic was simply that the wicked people would not be able to hold on to their riches.  And surely it is a foreshadowing of our own day. 

Samuel the Lamanite told the Nephites “And behold, the time cometh that [the Lord] 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).  A couple of verses later he said again, “O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us” (Helaman 13:33).  He added a third time, “For behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them” (Helaman 13:36).  And we see at least one instance where that certainly came to pass for this group of people.  After the Savior’s death there was devastation across the land and those who weren’t killed still lost just about everything, left to “[groan]… because of the darkness and the great destruction which had come upon them” (3 Nephi 8:23).  All their “riches” and worldly possessions were gone, almost in an instance. 

Mormon wrote about his time in connection with this prophecy from Samuel the Lamanite.  Using very similar language he said, “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 again….  even unto the fulfilling of all the words of Abinadi, and also Samuel the Lamanite” (Mormon 1:18).  I’m not sure exactly what it means to be “slippery,” but apparently the things of the world they were focused on simply disappeared.  The Jaredites had the same problem.  Moroni described things this way as they were winding down: “And now 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).  Ultimately both the Nephites and the Jaredites proved that even their own lives were slippery: they lost everything.

So what does that have to do with us today?  I think these Book of Mormon passages stand as a warning to us that our “possession” of the things of this world is terribly tenuous.  We may think that we have much and are set for the future, grounded in worldly goods, but then the Lord will figuratively come and say to us, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (Luke 12:20)  And it’s not even difficult to imagine suddenly losing what we have: nearly all the money in the world is digitally stored.  The scenarios are not too farfetched to imagine some event that simply “erased” all of that.  Our riches are certainly slippery: a stock market crash, a cyberattack, or simply a few bad choices, and what we have could be gone.  The key is to make our foundation Jesus Christ and His gospel, and come what may to our possessions, we will have the true riches of eternity.