Come, Follow Me May 6-12: Mosiah 7-10
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Redemption from the Regret of Overzealousness
By J.B. Haws
Regret is a singularly painful emotion. Who hasn’t been haunted by mental replays in which we hope against hope that somehow, impossibly, a moment from our past would just play out differently this time as we relive the agony—we’d bite our tongue, we’d leave on time, we’d listen to the advice we should have taken, we’d turn onto a different street, and on and on. Self-recriminations are a special kind of accusation, but our minds cannot seem to help themselves from poking those painful spots again and again.
We’re in good company. Mosiah 7, 8, and 9 bring regret to the forefront. Some of this may be due to the abridged nature of the account we have, but as it stands, almost as soon as Limhi learns of Ammon’s true identity and the greetings are out of the way, Limhi moves right into rehearsing the regrets that so obviously weigh heavily on him and his people. It is almost as if Limhi couldn’t help himself, so close to the surface were his feelings—and so relevant were his regrets to his people’s current circumstances.
One regret is centered on the Abinadi story (Mosiah 7:26-33). If only the people had listened to Abinadi, Limhi laments. How could we have killed a prophet, with his life-giving message of a Savior we so desperately needed, a realization we’ve now only come to, and far too slowly? The remorse is still raw, all these years later.
But another regret has apparently plagued the people—and plagued with special poignance, no doubt, Limhi’s own family—for even longer. The second regret Limhi mentions has persisted into the third generation. Limhi repeats what he knows his grandfather, Zeniff, regretted to the end of his days. Why had Zeniff let his overzealousness blind him to the cunning deception by which his people fell captive to a subjugating King Laman (Mosiah 7:21-24)? Why hadn’t he seen this coming?
For those of us, then, who have felt the pangs of regret (read: all of us!), Mosiah is a book that can speak to us. So much of the narrative that will follow these Mosiah 7-10 chapters reinforces that best of all good news: that Jesus is mighty to save us from the pits that we’ve dug for ourselves, as well as the pits that others have dug for us. The Savior’s atoning work wonderfully and mercifully offers us redemption from regret. Story after story in Mosiah reminds us of that promised deliverance, for individuals and communities. In this way, the people in the book of Mosiah truly do “stand as witnesses” that “the Lord God [does] visit [his] people in their afflictions” (Mosiah 24:14). In one of the most reassuring restatements of that truth, Joseph Smith said, “All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection, provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the almighty I have seen it.” [1]
But along with that message of redemption—so soothing to the soul—it seems that Mosiah 7-10 might have something else to say on this topic of regret, in terms of helping us steer clear of rocky shoals that we might not see otherwise.
There’s something intriguing in the fact that Limhi and Ammon’s exchange about the gift of seership/prophethood (in Mosiah 8:13-20) is set in the midst of all of these ‘what might have been’ mournings. It’s not hard to imagine where Limhi’s mind may have gone as he heard Ammon describe a prophet’s abilities of foresight (“a seer can know of things which are to come . . . secret things shall be manifest, and hidden things shall come to light” [Mosiah 8:17]), since Limhi had just lamented that his grandfather, Zeniff, had not been able to see what was ahead. Could a prophet have warned them away from this danger? Couple that with what Limhi’s people had experienced as a result of bringing a prophet to a violent end, and it’s not hard to imagine that Limhi and his people may have been especially sobered as they thought about their particular problems—and regrets— in terms of an ever-deepening appreciation for the value of a prophet. Ammon’s words must have struck some resonant chords in this particular audience.
And they might strike some chords for readers in 2024, too.
We should hasten to make the point that, of course, even careful attention to the guidance of prophets will not spare us from all pain or all deceivers or even all regret. Scriptural history and our life experiences confirm that we are not warned away from all deceivers, nor protected from all of the misuses of agency, ours or others’. President Nelson said in 2022, “Entering into a covenant relationship with God binds us to Him in a way that makes everything about life easier. Please do not misunderstand me: I did not say that making covenants makes life easy. In fact, expect opposition” [2]; that itself is worthy of another whole discussion. But what interests me here from Mosiah 7-10 is considering how a prophet might help us avoid the pain of one specific class of regrets: those that might grow out of our own overzealousness.
What did Zeniff mean when he described himself that way—“overzealous” (Mosiah 9:3)? What did Limhi mean when he used that very same description for Zeniff (Mosiah. 7:21)?
On the one hand, it seems that there is so much to commend in Zeniff. He is an example of one who saw past entrenched prejudice, who stood up against injustice and violence, who saw the best in people different than himself. So, why the regret and recrimination? True, Zeniff may have just been hard on himself because of the way things played out. But it also may be that Zeniff wanted to signal that he always knew, but he would not know (to borrow from Amulek), or he saw, but he would not see. In other words, maybe he wanted to come to grips with (and warn others against) an excess he saw in himself, a more-conscious-than-he-wanted-to-admit-to-himself decision to ignore warning signs that he disregarded as less important than they would prove to be. Maybe his regret was not about credulity or naivete or lack of sophistication or being duped but over stubbornness or ego or susceptibility to flattery or pride—or self-righteousness.
Putting Zeniff’s and Limhi’s regrets in conversation with Ammon’s description of a prophet’s gifts can bring us to a question that we could ask again and again: what “overzealousness” could prophets help us see in ourselves?
Here’s but one possibility: President Nelson’s “Peacemakers Needed” talk in the April 2023 General Conference. This address just crackled with prophetic power. Talk about a message for our time! If ever “overzealous” characterized the spirit of an age, it might be ours. “Overzealous” might be the charitable way of describing all that is troubling in our civic discourse and relationships. “Civility and decency,” President Nelson observed in “Peacemakers Needed,” “seem to have disappeared during this era of polarization and passionate disagreements.” [3]
And, if anything, overzealousness does indeed seem to be a sin of passion, a “strengths can become our downfall” kind of vulnerability.[4] President Nelson spoke against the ideological and partisan overzealousness we see in our world in the strongest of terms: “I am greatly concerned that so many people seem to believe that it is completely acceptable to condemn, malign, and vilify anyone who does not agree with them.” [5]
What especially makes “Peacemakers Needed” a contemporary case study in Ammon’s profile of a prophet, though, is how clearly President Nelson identified the trap that has been laid for us and our current susceptibility to overzealousness. “Make no mistake about it,” President Nelson said, there is a trap being laid by a cunning adversary: “Contention is evil! Jesus Christ declared that those who have ‘the spirit of contention’ are not of Him but are ‘of the devil, who is the father of contention, and [the devil] stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.’ Those who foster contention are taking a page out of Satan’s playbook, whether they realize it or not. ‘No man can serve two masters.’ We cannot support Satan with our verbal assaults and then think that we can still serve God.” [6]
I’ve always admired Zeniff’s honest admission about himself, and every time I read it, it brings me up short. So, too, does a plea like President Nelson’s that we “please listen carefully.” “My dear brothers and sisters,” he said, “how we treat each other really matters! How we speak to and about others at home, at church, at work, and online really matters. Today, I am asking us to interact with others in a higher, holier way.” [7]
Our brilliant and remarkable colleague, Melissa Inouye, who passed away last month, put this higher, holier way in practical terms. After pointing out how much time we devote to rallying to prepare meals for neighbors who need them, or to offer help when a neighbor is moving, Melissa suggested that we should be just as “willing to give twenty minutes to listen” when we are interacting with people whose positions on complex social and political issues are “completely opposite to our own.” Her recommendation was that “when we hear potentially offensive comments” at Church or in family settings, etc., and when to us those comments reflect a lack of empathy or wisdom, “our knee-jerk reaction should be active listening. The people with whom we disagree on a specific issue must be able to feel our love and respect for them as people who deeply desire to be part of the body of Christ.” [8] Developing that “knee-jerk reaction” of “active listening” could be just the check that we need to push back on today’s kind of overzealousness and the too-often-unrecognized trap that it might be obscuring.
The thing that President Nelson’s talk made clear was that this is a high-stakes matter. “Brothers and sisters, we can literally change the world—one person and one interaction at a time. How? By modeling how to manage honest differences of opinion with mutual respect and dignified dialogue. . . . Charity is the principal characteristic of a true follower of Jesus Christ. Charity defines a peacemaker.” [9]
Given our moment and given our prophet’s guidance, I think Zeniff and Limhi and Ammon would say, “hear, hear.”
[1] Discourse, 16 April 1843, as Reported by Willard Richards, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/discourse-16-april-1843-as-reported-by-willard-richards/7?highlight=all%20your%20losses.
[2] Russell M. Nelson, “Overcome the World and Find Rest,” General Conference, October 2022, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2022/10/47nelson?lang=eng.
[3] Russell M. Nelson, “Peacemakers Needed,” General Conference, April 2023, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2023/04/47nelson?lang=eng.
[4] See Dallin H. Oaks, “Our Strengths Can Become Our Downfall,” a June 7, 1992 BYU Devotional, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks/strengths-can-become-downfall/; also reprinted in the October 1994 Ensign.
[5] Russell M. Nelson, “Peacemakers Needed.”
[6] Italics added for “whether they realize it or not”; all other italics in the original.
[7] Russell M. Nelson, “Peacemakers Needed.”
[8] Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Crossings (Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, and Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019), 116-117.
[9] Russell M. Nelson, “Peacemakers Needed.”