To the Moles and the Bats

Isaiah wrote this about what will happen to our possessions and the worldly things that we worship when the Savior comes again: “The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. And the idols he shall utterly abolish. And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for the fear of the Lord shall come upon them and the glory of his majesty shall smite them, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which he hath made for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats” (2 Nephi 12:17-20). Our idols will all be destroyed, which means all those possessions that we in reality worship and seek after—the cars and the houses and the land and the technology—will be gone. We have indeed made many “idols of silver” and “idols of gold” that we worship, and these will be cast away “to the moles and to the bats.” Moles are animals that live primarily underground, and bats are animals that only come out in the dark of night. And so, I believe his point is that we won’t want to see our riches anymore—we will want them buried underground and hidden in the dark. We will finally realize in that day that the pursuit of money has not helped us but rather taken us away from God. Like the converts at Ephesus, we will be ready to burn up all those things that have prevented us from coming unto Jesus Christ, even if they are worth “fifty thousand pieces of silver” (Acts 19:19).   

This reminds me of a scene from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When Caspian and his group reached an unknown island on their ship, the boy Eustace had wandered off alone and found a dead dragon and the dragon’s treasure of gold in a cave. He said to himself, “They don’t have any tax here. And you don’t have to give treasure to the government. With some of this stuff I could have quite a decent time here—perhaps in Calormen…. I wonder how much I can carry? That bracelet now—those things in it are probably diamonds—I’ll slip that on my own wrist. Too big, but not if I push it right up here above my elbow. Then fill my pockets with diamonds—that’s easier than gold.” After this he fell asleep on the treasure, but he woke up as a dragon. He had been transformed: “He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.” One of the consequences of his actions was that his much bigger dragon arm was in severe pain because of the bracelet he had put on it, and he couldn’t get it off. He spent several days as a dragon until finally Aslan came in the night to help him shed his dragon skin. He finally became a normal boy again, and the narrator gave this comment: “The jewels with which Eustace had crammed his pockets in the cave had disappeared along with the clothes he had then been wearing: but no one, least of all Eustace himself, felt any desire to go back to that valley for more treasure.” Eustace was happy to leave all that treasure where the moles and the bats could have it—he realized the harm it had caused him and he had lost his desire for it. If we too could see clearly our own lives and the idols we worship, we might also be ready to leave some things behind which prevent us from coming fully unto the Lord.  

My wife shared with me yesterday this verse from the Old Testament: “And keep the charge of the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his judgments, and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses, that thou mayest prosper in all that thou doest, and whithersoever thou turnest thyself” (1 Kings 2:3). She looked up the word “prosper” here in Strong’s concordance of the Bible to find out what that really meant in Hebrew and found this: “to be prudent, be circumspect, wisely understand.” In other words, to prosper according to this version of the word is to become wise. And thus, perhaps when the Lord promises that we shall prosper—something repeated many times in the Book of Mormon—He is telling us not that we will obtain the riches of the world but that we will gain divine wisdom. That is what we should prize far more than the idols of silver and gold that tempt us. The Savior said it best in this injunction in modern revelation: “Seek not for riches but for wisdom, and behold, the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto you, and then shall you be made rich. Behold, he that hath eternal life is rich” (Doctrine and Covenants 6:7).