Can Ye Pay Even One Senine?

In the passages I’ve been discussing the past two days, there is one significant difference between the version that the Savior gave to the Nephites and the one that He gave in the Sermon on the Mount.  In addition to using a senine for the Nephites and a farthing for the people in the Old World, the Savior added one phrase in the Nephite version: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence until thou hast paid the uttermost senine. And while ye are in prison can ye pay even one senine? Verily, verily, I say unto you, Nay” (3 Nephi 12:25-26).  Those last two sentences are not in the New Testament version.  I’ve been wondering what exactly the Savior was trying to say here, assuming that, as mentioned yesterday, this prison spoken of is really a spiritual one in which we must suffer for our sins.  With the additional two sentences, the Lord seems to be saying that we can never get out of this prison: you are there until you pay all the money you owe, and while you are there you have no power to pay anything.  So what message here is He trying to convey? 

               One interpretation of this might be to suggest that the Savior was referring to those sons of perdition for whom there will indeed be no relief from their prison.  We read that “they are they who are the sons of perdition, of whom I say that it had been better for them never to have been born….  And the only ones on whom the second death shall have any power; Yea, verily, the only ones who shall not be redeemed in the due time of the Lord, after the sufferings of his wrath….  Wherefore, he saves all except them….  And the end thereof, neither the place thereof, nor their torment, no man knows” (D&C 76:32-45).  Clearly these few who obtain the status of sons of perdition will be in prison and yet will be unable to pay any debt—their debt, as far as is revealed, will be unsurmountable and they will suffer forever because of their absolute rejection of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  So perhaps the Lord was warning about this extreme case when He made the emphasis that in prison ye cannot pay anything.

               But perhaps there is a different interpretation.  We know that those who go to a state of prison in the next life, who are “thrust down to hell” where they must suffer for their own sins, are those of the telestial glory (D&C 76:81, 84).  They will eventually exit this state of punishment, for they shall be “redeemed from the devil” at “the last resurrection,” but they will not at that point be able to dwell eternally in the presence of the Father or the Son.  We read that they “receive not of his fulness in the eternal world, but of the Holy Spirit through the ministration of the terrestrial….  They shall be servants of the Most High; but where God and Christ dwell they cannot come, worlds without end” (D&C 76:86, 112).  They receive a type of salvation in the sense that they obtain a kingdom of glory, but they are not permitted to dwell in the presence of the Father and the Son.  Perhaps the Savior’s emphasis that while you are in prison ye cannot pay “even one senine” is a warning that once they have gone too far, once they have rejected the gospel fully and must suffer for their sins, they cannot change their final destination to return with the Father.  They will escape one prison, yes, but they will be in another because they will not, as far as it has been revealed, be able to progress beyond the telestial kingdom.  It may be the Savior’s emphasis here to the Nephites was in a similar spirit to the one that Amulek gave the Nephites, “Ye cannot say, when ye are brought to that awful crisis, that I will repent, that I will return to my God. Nay, ye cannot say this….  For behold, if ye have procrastinated the day of your repentance even until death, behold, ye have become subjected to the spirit of the devil” (Alma 34:34-35).  The bottom line is that now is the time to repent and to prepare to meet God; now is the time to live so that the adversary will have no power to cast us into prison because Christ, not the devil, has “seal[ed] [us] his” (Mosiah 5:15).