Forgotten Stakes

Helaman 7:16 Yea, how could you have given way to the enticing of him who is seeking to hurl away your souls down to everlasting misery and endless wo?

You know, I think we sometimes forget the stakes we're fighting for. We're not only fighting for righteousness and Eternal Life, but we're also fighting against wickedness and eternal damnation. Yet, when we're down here on Earth, it's easy to forget that heaven and hell are real places, and our day-to-day choices will determine which afterlife we get.

I think part of the reason it's so easy for us to forget about heaven and hell is because the adversary wants us to, and to some extent, so does God. Satan wants us to forget about heaven and hell to remove that motivation. If heaven is the carrot and hell is the stick, the devil wants to keep both of them out of sight and out of mind so they don't influence our decisions.

God, oddly enough, seems to have a similar desire. He placed the veil of forgetfulness over our minds before we were born, partly so mortality could be a proper test. If we had the same eternal perspective He has, our day-to-day decisions would be no-brainers. Of course we should spend a mere century proving our faithfulness, if it means we get to spend an eternity in a heaven that's just as good, if not even better, than the one we were raised in for an immeasurable amount of time before we were born. If we could remember what we're fighting for and how long eternity is, mortality wouldn't be much of a test. God wants us to make good decisions because we're good people, not because we remember what we're going to get out of it. Granted, God tells us about heaven and hell, blessings and punishments, but still, He has us take those things on faith, not with the certainty of memory.

So, in answer to Nephi's rhetorical question, the Nephites could have given way to the enticings of the devil partly because they forgot the full ramifications of what they were doing, partly because both God and Satan wanted them to. God wants us to make good choices for good reasons, and Satan doesn't want us to make good choices at all, so both of them have reasons to not make it too obvious that our eternal welfare is at stake. And that's something that we would do well to remember.