Eternal Torment

This week in Come Follow Me we are studying Section 19 of the Doctrine and Covenants. This section has the amazing passage in which Jesus describes his suffering during the atonement. We as a church gain a lot of information about the nature of the atonement from this section. 

Today, however, I want to focus on a different part of Section 19, but first I want to remind the reader of the setting of the section.  Martin Harris has been asked to mortgage most of his farm to pay for the printing of the Book of Mormon. This is a really big ask. His farm is his livelihood, and he has spent his adult life building the farm into a productive vocation. In addition, Martin's wife, Lucy, is against the idea of risking the farm for the sake of what she sees as a scam.  She is afraid Martin is gambling away her future security, which, in fact, he is. He ends up losing both the mortgaged farm and his wife, who separates herself from him after he loses the farm.  

So why was Martin even willing to consider such a huge sacrifice?  It is because just two months before this revelation, he saw an angel who showed him the gold plates.  (it reconfirms my theory that that only people who see angels are those who are about to be asked to make a very big sacrifice).  This section is response to Martin's hesitancy to sacrifice his profession and his marriage to support Joseph Smith's prophetic mission.

This section basically says, "Martin, I am asking you to sacrifice a lot, but think of how much I sacrificed for you." That is why Jesus describes his suffering.  Jesus also warns that failure to be obedient leads to Judgement. He says the judgements have been called, "endless torment" (v. 6) and "eternal damnation." (v. 7), but then he clarifies these terms.  These punishments are called "endless" and "eternal" not because they are, in fact without end.  They are called "endless" and "eternal"  because God is Endless and Eternal, and they are God's punishments. (v. 1-12). He also says that he calls them "endless" and "eternal" so they might be "more express...that it might work upon the hearts of the children of men." (v.7)

I listen to a podcast called "Church History Matters" with Scott Woodward and Casey Griffiths.  In their podcasts they always have a section about the "controversies" found in that week's texts.  This week they both agreed that there weren't any real controversies in section 19.  I am like, What? To me this is one of the most controversial passages in all scripture. Why? because it basically says that God intentionally misleads us. Didn't he just say that he says things like "eternal torment" to "work upon the hearts of men." In modern language that is saying that he says something that he knows we will misconstrue in order to motivate us to do something he knows will be good for us. Dare I say, he lies?  It isn't technically a lie, but it kind of is. It is intentionally misleading. 

I have heard some people say that by reading the Doctrine and Covenants we come to know Jesus because most of the sections are revelations given directly from him. If that is so, and if this section is a revelation from Jesus, we need to accept the notion that God intentionally misleads us sometimes.  I think most people of faith would vehemently deny this idea, but I don't know how else you could interpret it. Could you say that he wasn't intentionally misleading? No, he admits that he is.  Could you say he didn't know we would take it wrong? No, he is omniscient. He knows how we would take it. 

In a way this understanding of the nature of God and how he interacts which his children is a little liberating. I think all of us at some point in time have received an inspiration to do something that didn't work out as we expected. Maybe someone felt inspired to marry someone but that marriage ended up in divorce. Maybe someone is inspired to take a job, only to have that job end disastrously.  The fact that God will mislead our understanding of something doesn't mean he doesn't love us.  In fact, it means the opposite.  It means he loves us so much that he is willing to tell us what we need to hear to motivate us to do the right thing, even if he knows we won't accurately understand what he is telling us.  Often, after whatever happened is over, we can look back and see that the failure caused by the misleading inspiration really was for our good. It made us a better/stronger person than we would have ever been if we hadn't gone through it. 

My conclusion is that we don't have to assume that everything God inspires us to do is going to lead to a happy ending.  I think we just need to trust that everything God inspires us to do will lead to the best ending, even if that doesn't come in this life. Still, it is a hard doctrine and it plays out over and over in early church history. We just have to make peace with it and be faithful and "willing to submit to all things the Lord sees fit to inflict upon him." (Mosiah 3:16).