Call Upon the Inhabitants to Repent

In the revelation that followed “the law” to the Church, the Savior gave these instructions: “Lift up your voices and spare not. Call upon the nations to repent, both old and young, both bond and free, saying: Prepare yourselves for the great day of the Lord.” So, after describing the commandments in detail, He invited His Saints to repent and follow them. If we want to know how to prepare for His Second Coming, the answer is here and summarized in one word: repent. He suggested that His efforts to call on us to repent go beyond sending missionaries to teach the gospel: “For if I, who am a man, do lift up my voice and call upon you to repent, and ye hate me, what will ye say when the day cometh when the thunders shall utter their voices from the ends of the earth, speaking to the ears of all that live, saying—Repent, and prepare for the great day of the Lord?” He will speak with “thunders” that call on the world to repent, but that is not all. He continued, “Yea, and again, when the lightnings shall streak forth from the east unto the west, and shall utter forth their voices unto all that live, and make the ears of all tingle that hear, saying these words—Repent ye, for the great day of the Lord is come?” He will speak with lightning which streaks from the east to the west, but that is not all either. He continued, “How oft have I called upon you by the mouth of my servants, and by the ministering of angels, and by mine own voice, and by the voice of thunderings, and by the voice of lightnings, and by the voice of tempests, and by the voice of earthquakes, and great hailstorms, and by the voice of famines and pestilences of every kind, and by the great sound of a trump, and by the voice of judgment, and by the voice of mercy all the day long, and by the voice of glory and honor and the riches of eternal life, and would have saved you with an everlasting salvation, but ye would not!” (Doctrine and Covenants 43:20-25). The Lord has used nearly every means to invite us to repent, from natural disasters to angels to His own voice out of heaven. He has promised eternal life and glory, He has sent His servants, and He has even caused great trials to come upon the earth, all with the same goal: to motivate us to repent. And yet, for so many, they still would not repent! As a parent I can perhaps relate in a very small degree to the feeling—you can do everything to help a child to make the right choices, but, in the end, they must choose for themselves. And the Lord will not force His children to choose Him.

               The next month after this revelation was given, the Savior spoke about some of the challenges of the last days as He commented on His own Olivet Discourse. He said this: “Ye hear of wars in foreign lands; but, behold, I say unto you, they are nigh, even at your doors, and not many years hence ye shall hear of wars in your own lands. Wherefore I, the Lord, have said, gather ye out from the eastern lands, assemble ye yourselves together ye elders of my church; go ye forth into the western countries, call upon the inhabitants to repent, and inasmuch as they do repent, build up churches unto me.” How do we prepare for the wars and other calamities that will come upon the world in our day? We must repent. This verse may have been alluding specifically to the terrible Civil War, which is still the war with the most US casualties of all time. The Saints were largely spared the awful consequences of that war as they heeded His call to leave the eastern lands and head west. Our situation may be different today, but we still seek to establish what those early Saints started: “And with one heart and with one mind, gather up your riches that ye may purchase an inheritance which shall hereafter be appointed unto you. And it shall be called the New Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the saints of the Most High God; And the glory of the Lord shall be there, and the terror of the Lord also shall be there, insomuch that the wicked will not come unto it, and it shall be called Zion. And it shall come to pass among the wicked, that every man that will not take his sword against his neighbor must needs flee unto Zion for safety. And there shall be gathered unto it out of every nation under heaven; and it shall be the only people that shall not be at war one with another” (Doctrine and Covenants 45:64-69). Our protection lies in establishing Zion, and at some future day in physically building the New Jerusalem. And how do we do that? The answer is again repentance. They were originally unsuccessful in the 1830s because they did not adequately repent: “Behold, I say unto you, there were jarrings, and contentions, and envyings, and strifes, and lustful and covetous desires among them; therefore by these things they polluted their inheritances” (Doctrine and Covenants 101:6). We will build up Zion and the New Jerusalem only in the measure that we repent and hearken ourselves unto the voice of the Lord. Therein lies our safety in the uncertain days ahead.