"Ask With a Firmness Unshaken" (Mormon 9:28)

Moroni invites us all to repent and come unto Christ

Doubt not, but be believing, and begin as in times of old, and come unto the Lord with all your heart, and work out your own salvation with fear and trembling before him. Be wise in the days of your probation; strip yourselves of all uncleanliness; ask not that ye may consume it on your lusts, but ask with a firmness unshaken, that ye will yield to no temptation, but that ye will serve the true and living God (Mormon 9:27-28).

Thomas Rogers who served as a mission President in Russia wrote of the conversion of a man he first approached on a street to whom he introduced the Book of Mormon. .

As we emerged from behind the building onto an unfamiliar street, we saw a tall, muscular man and his petite wife pushing a baby carriage in our direction. As missionaries, we’d been challenged to speak to someone within three minutes of leaving our apartments. On this morning, it was my turn to make the first contact, so I approached the large man with the respect and caution his immense size demanded.

He was surprisingly polite and agreed to listen to my message. . . . For the next few minutes, he listened intently as I introduced myself and told him a little bit about the Church. When I removed the Book of Mormon from my bag to show him, his eyes immediately widened and he ceased looking at me. For the rest of the conversation, his gaze was focused on that Book of Mormon. He agreed to meet with us the next day, and when I gave him the book, he cradled it gently in his hand as if it were a small child.

When we arrived the next day to teach Aleksandr the first discussion, he had already read fifteen chapters in the Book of Mormon. It took several minutes to answer all his questions before we could begin to teach him the discussion. Over the next month, I was amazed to see hm grow. He attended church every week and continued reading the Book of Mormon. I could see the sparkle of a testimony in his eyes.

Only one obstacle stood between Aleksandr and baptism. He loved to smoke. He told me later that after weeks of struggling with that habit, he finally approached the Lord in prayer. He told the Lord how grateful he was for the Church and the Book of Mormon. He expressed his burning desire to be baptized and then asked the Lord to help him quit smoking. As he opened his eyes, the immediately came to rest on a pack of cigarettes. He removed one of them and looked at it. Suddenly he realized that his physical craving to smoke had disappeared. The cigarette in his hand did not even appeal to him. In fact, it was repulsive. He tossed the whole pack over his balcony railing and walked back into his apartment. From that moment Aleksandr has never experienced the craving for a cigarette!

I baptized Aleksandr on August 6. The ordinance was performed in a lake not far from his home. As he came up out of the water, his face shone with light. My emotions grew tender as he immersed me in a giant bear hug. I felt like I’d been preparing for that moment for nineteen years.

(Thomas F. Rogers, A Call to Russia: Glimpses of Missionary Life. Provo: BYU Studies, 1999, 61).

Young Generals

Modern readers of the Book of Mormon might wonder a bit at the precociousness of some of the military leaders. Moroni "was only twenty and five years old when he was appointed chief captain over the armies of the Nephites." (Alma 43:17). Mormon says that when he was "fifteen years of age" (Mormon 1:15), "the people of Nephi appointed me that I should be their leader, or the leader of their armies. Therefore it came to pass that in my sixteenth year I did go forth at the head of an army of the Nephites" (Mormon 2:1–2).

Other leaders were also young. The text reports that "Moroni yielded up the command of his armies into the hands of his son, whose name was Moronihah" (Alma 62:43) in the thirty-second year of the reign of the judges (see Alma 62:39). Moroni was twenty-five in the eighteenth year (Alma 43:3-4, 17) just fourteen years earlier. Even if we assume that Moronihah was born when Moroni was fifteen, Moronihah could not have been more than twenty-four when he took over command of all the armies.

On the one hand, mortality rates in the ancient world were significantly higher than they are now. So individuals simply had to take over responsibilities at an earlier age. On the other hand, there may have been a cultural factor at play as well.

Bernardino de Sahagun reports the custom among the Aztecs of sending young men to live in a "young men's house" (tepuchcali):

And when [he was] yet an untried youth, then they took him into the forest. They had him bear upon his back what they called logs of wood--perchance now only one, or, then, two. Thus they tested whether perhaps he might do well in war when, still an untried youth, they took him into battle. He only went to carry a shield upon his back.

And when [he was] already a youth, if mature and prudent, if he was discreet in his talking, and especially if [he was] of good heart, then he was made a master of youths; he was named tiachcauh. And if he became valiant, if he reached manhood, then he was named ruler of youths (telpochtlato). He governed them all; he spoke for all the youths. If one [of them] sinned, this one judged him; he sentenced [the youths] and corrected them. He dealt justice.

And if he was brave, if he took four [captives] then he attained [the office of] commanding general, [or] chief. (Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, Florentine Codex 3, appendix 5, in Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, Florentine Codex [Santa Fe, NM: The School of American Research, 1952], 4:53.)

While Sahagun is writing about Aztecs, not Nephites, and about customs of a much later time, we do not know how far back the customs stretch. The custom, however, provides a plausible parallel for how a man could rise to be a commanding officer at an early age.

Hugh Nibley on the Destruction of Nephite Civilization

Hugh Nibley discussed the steps that led to the destruction of Nephite Civilization:

About two hundred years after Christ visited the people, they became tired of intellectual integrity and self-control and opted to give up the law of consecration. From then on everything went in a fatal declension, each step of which has been duly marked and described in the Book of Mormon.

First they became privatized. They no longer had “their goods and their substance . . . [in] common” (4 Nephi 1:25). Then they became ethnicized as they “taught [their children] to hate” the Nephites and Lamanites they had been playing with (4 Nephi 1:39). Then they became nationalized by serving the careers of ambitious men. Then they become militarized, from the need for large-scale security when mutual trust gave away to self-interest. And they were terrorized as shrewd men saw the advantages of organized crime. Then they became regionalized as people began to form various combinations for protection and profit, entering through business relations with the criminal society and even sharing in their profits. Then they became tribalized as they finally succeeded at the urging of various powerful interests in abolishing the central government completely. Then they became fragmentized into paramilitary groups, wandering bands, family shelters, and so forth. Then they become polarized; to check the general disorder and insecurity, great armies were formed around competent leaders by forced recruitment or conquest. And they became pulverized as the great armies smashed each other and left the land utterly desolate. It is left for a future generation to take the final step and become vaporized. Viewing the state of the land at the American bicentennial, President Spencer W. Kimball declared himself “appalled and frightened” by what he saw, and in this and in his last published address he quoted many passages we have just cited from the Book of Mormon. Now, President Ezra Taft Benson issues an inspired appeal to make the Book of Mormon an object of our most intense concern. Suddenly, we find ourselves there: scenes and circumstances that not long ago seemed as distant as Ninevah and Tyre suddenly come to life about us. Could Joseph Smith have made all this up? (Hugh Nibely, "Last Call: An Apocalyptic Warning from the Book of Mormon," The Prophetic Book of Mormon, Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 8 [Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1989], 530–531).