Awake!

As I read 2 Nephi 8 today, I thought of my 11^th grade math teacher. He was a strong, tall man with somewhat of a beard and who would tell us stories about how he used to slaughter animals as a job. He had a loud, distinctive voice and there is one thing he did frequently in his class that I have never forgotten. He would walk around the class occasionally as he was teaching, and if he found a student asleep, he would pound on their desk with his fist and say quite loudly, “Wake up!” He was actually a very nice man but he certainly could intimidate his students, and over two decades later I still can distinctly hear his voice and the way he would say with a kind of crescendo in his voice, “Wake up!” I thought of this because of the way that Isaiah also told us to wake up spiritually multiple times as recorded by Jacob. We read, “Awake, awake! Put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days…. Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem…. Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city” (v9, 17, 24). It was perhaps these very passages of scripture that inspired Lehi to say something similar to his sons (a conversation that Jacob perhaps listened to): “O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound, which are the chains which bind the children of men, that they are carried away captive down to the eternal gulf of misery and woe. Awake! and arise from the dust, and hear the words of a trembling parent…. Awake, my sons; put on the armor of righteousness. Shake off the chains with which ye are bound, and come forth out of obscurity, and arise from the dust” (2 Nephi 1:13-14, 23). Laman and Lemuel were in a “deep sleep” spiritually in that they could not recognize their true relationship to God and their need to keep their covenant with Him. Isaiah’s and Lehi’s words invite us to wake up to our true spiritual condition and our need for the Savior, reaching to Him for strength against the adversary who seeks to bind us with his chains.

            Nephi warned us about the tactics of the adversary and described one way that he will seek to entrap us. Speaking, I believe, especially about those who have made covenants with God, he said, “And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell” (2 Nephi 28:21). The word “lull” suggests the opposite of what Isaiah and Lehi were teachings; to lull is to put to sleep, and that’s what the adversary wants to do to us spiritually. He wants us to believe that everything is good and that we are just fine—besides, there are plenty of people more wicked than ourselves. We don’t need to overexert ourselves spiritually, he will whisper to us, because we have done lots of good things in the past and besides, we read our scriptures sometimes. Like Lehonti, he will tell us just to come down a little from the mountain; what’s the harm in that? But to this attitude, prophets of old and of today warn us like my former math teacher, “Wake up!” If we have let the world and its idols put us to sleep spiritually so that, like the people in the time of Cain, we have “loved Satan more than God,” then Moroni’s words call down to us: “Awake to a sense of your awful situation” (Moses 5:13, Ether 8:24). To emphasize the importance of this call, Moroni finished the Book of Mormon with this paraphrase of Isaiah: “I would exhort you that ye would come unto Christ, and lay hold upon every good gift, and touch not the evil gift, nor the unclean thing. And awake, and arise from the dust, O Jerusalem; yea, and put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion; and strengthen thy stakes and enlarge thy borders forever, that thou mayest no more be confounded, that the covenants of the Eternal Father which he hath made unto thee, O house of Israel, may be fulfilled.” We must awake and reject the things of the world and put on the strength of Christ through the power of our covenants. Only then can we be clean from the sins of this world and be “sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ” (Moroni 10:30-33).