The post caught my eye because I had just been reading Alma 14 about the martyrdom of the righteous women and children in Ammonihah and the horror felt by Amulek and Alma at being forced to watch. Even in the midst of all of the terrible things happening today, I still shudder at the evilness of people who could do something like that. I found myself commenting on Alma's testimony to Amulek that sometimes God doesn't want us to intervene and that those who suffer are taken quickly into the arms of God. There suffering stands as a testimony of their evil at the last day.
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| The Stoning of Stephen |
This link to a Book of Mormon Central KnoWhy on the subject sheds a lot of light on that question.
It appears to center around the principal of agency. If God interfered in every instance, He would set his whole principal of agency and accountability fail. We sometimes look at situations with our mortal eyes, without recognizing that God's vision is far broader and deeper than ours.
God comforts those who suffer. In this instance, by taking them quickly to his bosom as He did Stephen when he was stoned. Before dying, Stephen saw Jesus Christ standing on the right hand of His Father, waiting to receive him.
God comforts those who witness such evil and feel powerless and impotent, but angry. He can calm our hearts and bring comfort as he did to Alma. Our earthly tribunals are often unjust or corrupt. The Ultimate Judge of the Universe, while compassionate to the penitent, is absolutely just with the unrepentant.
When we witness suffering or when we suffer ourselves, we can either let it harden us into cynicism or heal us into stronger faith in Him. C. S. Lewis once wrote this suffering that pain can bring us closer to God if we allow it. Wrote he, pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (The Problem of Pain. 1940)
The Apostle Paul put it this way in his letter to the Romans: but we glory in tribulation also: knowing tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope; And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. (Romans 5: 3-5) This scripture has helped me through many a painful trial, although I must admit that I often have to get on the other side of the tribulation before I am able to be grateful for it! That it doesn't take me as long to get there as it did when I was younger tells me that I am on the right path.
Finally, suffering can help us differentiate between those things we can control and those we cannot. In the Book of Judges, the people living under the protection of the Judge, Gideon, were suffering and starving at the hands of their enemies. Gideon appealed to God for relief. The scripture tells us that the angel of the Lord appeared unto him, and said unto him, The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor. To which Gideon answered, If the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us? . . . The Lord's answer to Gideon was to Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel from the hands of the Midianites; have I not sent thee? (Judges 6: 12-14) Gideon had been called by God to handle the issue and he had the ability to do so. He just needed to wake up to the realization that, with God's help, he was to bring about the deliverance. I think this point is summed up in this prayer from Alcoholics Annonymous:
© Dr. Kathleen Rawlings Buntin Danielson April 2020
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