Last Friday, when I was talking about exceeding strongholds and keeping prisoners in there, I mentioned that the Book of Mormon gives us an example of how to escape such strongholds by showing us how the Nephites did it. The particular instance of which I was thinking is found in Alma chapter 55, but it's not what I had hoped it would be.
I remembered that in this story, an army of the Nephites tossed in weapons to the Nephite prisoners while the Lamanite guards were sleeping, so when the guards woke up, there was a Nephite army on the outside, and the prisoners were armed on the inside, so there was no way the Lamanite guards could stand against them. Based on this story, I was planning to share a message about how we need both inner strength and external aid to escape the chains of the second death. That would have been a good blog post, but it would have left something out.
In order for the Nephite army to toss weapons in to the Nephite prisoners, they had to take out the guards first, and Moroni didn't want to do it by fighting. The Lamanites were in their stronghold. If Moroni challenged them openly, the Lamanites would have the upper hand. So he thought of a sneakier plan. He found one of his men who was a Lamanite by birth, whose name just happened to be Laman, and sent him to the Lamanite guards with some wine. Laman the Nephite told the Lamanite guards that he had escaped the Nephites and took some of their wine with him. The guards drank of the wine until they were drunk and passed out, and then the army of Nephites came in to arm the prisoners.
So, in order to escape the power of Satan, we need someone (a guardian angel, a friend, whoever) to pretend to be a devil long enough to give the actual devils some wine, and when all the evil spirits that had been tempting us are drunk, then we can defeat them and get our freedom back.
That can't be right. Whatever God's plan is for us to break free from our sins, I don't think it involves anyone pretending to be an evil spirit, even for a moment.
But what else could this mean? If this was meant to be symbolic instructions for how to escape the power of Satan, what could the literal escape plan be? It seems to involve someone somehow disabling the guards long enough for us to get the upper hand, but who's supposed to take the guards out and how are they supposed to do it? Maybe there are other Nephite vs Lamanite escape scenes in the Book of Mormon that can give us a different perspective.
In Mosiah chapter 22, a group of Nephites under the rule of King Limhi were in bondage to the Lamanites, but they escaped all by themselves by going to the back pass through the back wall on the back side of the city, giving the guards there a bunch of wine and escaping while the guards were passed out.
In Mosiah 23, the hung-over Lamanite guards went after the people of Limhi, but couldn't find them. They found the people of Alma (the elder) instead. So the Lamanites took them prisoner. Now, the people of Alma seemed not to have wine, or maybe Alma just didn't think of it, or maybe the Lamanites weren't stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice in a row (though they did fall for it again in Alma 55). In any case, there was no wine in the escape plan this time. This time, God simply put the Lamanites to sleep and Alma's people escaped while the guards were sleeping.
In all three cases, the Nephites gain the advantage by first disabling the Lamanites somehow, usually with wine. So we're supposed to disable the evil spirits somehow? But how? In this analogy, what could the wine represent?
Then it hit me: What does the wine usually represent?
In Revelations chapter 12, we learn that in the war in heaven, when the righteous spirits were confronted by the devil and his forces, "they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony;" Emphasis Added.
When the Lord instituted the Sacrament, he gave the Apostles wine that represented His blood, which He would shed for the sins of mankind. That night, in Gethsemane, the Savior completed the Atonement, which caused Him great pain even until He bled at every pore. That act made it possible for us to be cleansed from our sins and escape the power of the devil.
The wine represents the blood of the Lamb and the power of His Atonement.
When we find ourselves trapped in Satan's stronghold, which happens to all of us at some time or another, we will probably feel powerless to escape. We may feel hopeless. We might conclude that it would take a miracle to make us free again. Fortunately, such a miracle has already been provided. Through the power of the Atonement, Christ can weaken the forces that hold us captive and give us the strength to stand against them. He can drug the guards and toss weapons over the wall, giving us the advantage in the battle to take back our souls.
The battle will still be ours to fight, and unlike the Lamanites, Satan isn't going to surrender just because we have the upper hand. But with the the strength of the Lord (which I've recently learned is more than twice as powerful as the strength of dragons), it's a battle I'm sure we can win.
1 comment:
Perceptive!
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