“Why will ye die?” So
asked the ancient prophet of the Jews, Jeremiah, of his unwise king, Zedekiah
(Jeremiah 27:13). God knew what Zedekiah
knew but what the king did not want to believe, that the Babylonians were ready
and able to conquer all the lands about them.
Since Zedekiah and his people had chosen evil and rejected the Lord, the
Lord could not help them. So, through
His prophet, the Lord gave Zedekiah the next best advice: do not fight the Babylonians, but submit to
them and live.
Zedekiah rejected the Lord’s counsel again, and so he died,
blinded physically as much as he had blinded himself spiritually. Jerusalem was captured and laid waste, its
walls leveled. The Temple of the Lord,
built by Solomon, was destroyed. Most of
the people were transported captive to Babylon.
To the people of the Jews in captivity, the Lord asked the
question by another prophet, Ezekiel.
“As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the
wicked . . . turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die?” (Ezekiel 33:11)
In ancient America, to a people once free and prosperous, but
whose social corruption put their government in the hands of gang leaders, the
Lord again by His prophet asked, “Why will ye die?” The prophet, Nephi, diagnosed their malady: “ye have set your hearts upon riches and the
vain things of this world, for which ye do murder, and plunder, and steal, and
bear false witness against your neighbor, and do all manner of iniquity.”
(Helaman 7:17, 21)
The Lord did not want them poor, having blessed them with
prosperity, material and spiritual. Yet they
turned their focus to the perishable things of the world, its vanities, turning
against each other in a spiral of death and destruction instead of triumph of
kindness and life.
Now, in more modern times—and we always live in modern
times—the Lord has both blessed and warned us.
In the summer of 1859, the Lord’s prophet, Brigham Young, warned that, “The
Lord will sift the people, and the time is not far distant when he will sift
the nations with a sieve of vanity, and the time is at your doors when he will
hold a controversy with the nations and will plead with all flesh, and it will
be known who is for God, and who is not.
(Brigham Young, July 31, 1859, Journal of Discourses, Vol.7,
p.204). It was not a new prophetic
warning, but it was one about to be fulfilled, which sifting began within two
years of the prophet’s words.
The Lord frequently cautions and invites us to life. His prophet of today, Russell M. Nelson, recently
reminded that God is not a God of contention.
He called for us to be followers of Christ, “the Prince of Peace. Now more than ever, we need the peace only He
can bring. How can we expect peace to
exist in the world when we are not individually seeking peace and harmony?” The prophet encouraged us to build momentum
in personally doing good, in laying aside contention. “None of us can control nations or the
actions of others . . . But we can control ourselves.”
The sifting of the world with a sieve of vanity is on. We see it. Let the sieve sift out the vanity, as we focus on the stuff of life that Christ offers to us. In the words of the ancient American prophet-king Benjamin, in his last address, “I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual . . .” (Mosiah 2:41) Otherwise, why will ye die?
