No Other Gods

When Enos described the Lamanites, he said that they were “full of idolatry and filthiness” (Enos 1:20). Zeniff similarly wrote that the Lamanites “were a lazy and an idolatrous people” (Mosiah 9:12). When Mormon wrote of the missionary labors of Ammon and his brethren, he said this of the Lamanites: “Thus they were a very indolent people, many of whom did worship idols, and the curse of God had fallen upon them because of the traditions of their fathers” (Alma 17:15). This implies that they were a people who worshipped idols, and it is perhaps instructive that the Nephites who then surrounded themselves with Lamanites eventually turned to idolatry. Zeniff brought his people into the midst of these idol-worshipping Lamanites, and many years later when his son Noah took over the kingdom the Nephites followed suite. Mormon described how Noah and his priests “were supported in their laziness, and in their idolatry, and in their whoredoms, by the taxes which king Noah had put upon his people.” This idolatry of the leaders of the people then led them to follow: “Thus did the people labor exceedingly to support iniquity. Yea, and they also became idolatrous, because they were deceived by the vain and flattering words of the king and priests; for they did speak flattering things unto them” (Mosiah 11:6-7). We don’t have any details about what that idolatry looked like, but perhaps some of the traditions of the Lamanites—even though they were enemies—rubbed off on the Nephites when they put themselves in the midst of them, and the Nephites found themselves violating the first of the ten commandments: “Thou shalt have no other God before me” (Mosiah 12:35). Abinadi called them out on violating this, and he continued, “Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them” (Mosiah 13:13). Whether these Nephites had physical objects that they worshipped as idols or whether their riches and buildings and wine and immorality were their idols, it doesn’t matter. They no longer worshipped the Lord their God.

                The story of the King Noah and his people is a warning to us today against idolatry. We too live in the midst of a people who are idolatrous—the world as a whole around us is—and we have to learn how to continue to worship the Lord our God first in spite of that fact. Nearly 50 years ago President Spencer W. Kimball gave a powerful message called The False Gods We Worship and said this: “Whatever thing a man sets his heart and his trust in most is his god; and if his god doesn’t also happen to be the true and living God of Israel, that man is laboring in idolatry.” He also wrote, “In spite of our delight in defining ourselves as modern, and our tendency to think we possess a sophistication that no people in the past ever had—in spite of these things, we are, on the whole, an idolatrous people—a condition most repugnant to the Lord.” He lamented, “Many people spend most of their time working in the service of a self-image that includes sufficient money, stocks, bonds, investment portfolios, property, credit cards, furnishings, automobiles, and the like to guarantee carnal security throughout, it is hoped, a long and happy life.” The list could certainly be added to today with all that technology has brought us in the last five decades, but the principle is the same: the world wants us to give our heart to anything but to the one true God. The Lord lamented in our dispensation, “They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish in Babylon, even Babylon the great, which shall fall” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:16). Babylon, full of idolatry, indeed fell in the past and it will fall again. We must learn to seek the Lord and establish his righteousness first in our lives. If we do not then the idolatry surrounding us will, like it did to the people of King Noah, turn us away from His protection.