The Lord Weeps for His Children

This is my first Come, Follow Me blog post as a two-year Fellow of the Maxwell Institute! So let me introduce myself a little. I'm coming here from the Biology Department at BYU, where I am an evolutionary ecologist. I've taught classes in history and philosophy of biology, bioethics, ecology, population genetics, and for most of my career I've used simulation models to explore complex ecological systems. I'm also a fiction writer of really weird books and stories. All of this will come into play in my work for the Maxwell Institute. My focus in these blog posts will be to learn, as I have in science, to love questions, the imagination, and experimental explorations that, while wrong, might bend our gaze in a way that allows questions to grow deeper and more complex. I'm very comfortable with ambiguity, paradox, and with not being right. I've been a big fan of my mentor James Faulconer (I took his philosophy class as an undergraduate, and he has been a friend and intellectual companion since), and I love his series, “Making the Scriptures Harder Series.” I will explore things much in the spirit of his works.

Moses 7 is a wonderful chapter! It is full of curious and troubling things that can look one way from the perspective of certain theological commitments about the nature of God’s causality—but look very different from a Restoration perspective. The chapter invites us to open our hearts and minds to a richer theological understanding of God as revealed in this chapter.

Let’s open with a little debate in the science of evolutionary biology. In 1961, evolutionary biologist and philosopher Ernst Mayr wrote a paper called “Cause and Effect in Biology,” in which he looked at several ideas of causal explanation in organic evolution. He noted the heuristic distinction between ultimate causes vs. proximal causes. In short, ultimate causes are those that explain why something exists, while proximal causes are those that explain how something happens. For example, one sunny day, I suddenly find myself looking at a fish at the bottom of my riverboat. The proximal cause is that a hook, attached to a fishing line, became embedded in a fish's mouth, and I used the line to bring the fish into the boat. The ultimate reason is based on my love of fried trout, a beautiful day, a friend who doesn't mind the number of times I fall in the water, who invited me to do some fly fishing. Another example is found in exploring what caused my bicep to move as I worked out at the gym. The proximal cause was an electronic signal from my brain that initiated movement in my bicep. The ultimate cause was my new core-strengthening routine. Again, the first tells how the muscle moved, the other why it moved.

We can ask similar questions about God’s role in proximate causes and ultimate causes.

Here’s an example in the Doctrine and Covenants for a scripture that has always perplexed me, in section 117:1. “Verily thus saith the Lord… let them settle up their business speedily and journey from the land of Kirtland, before I, the Lord, send again the snows upon the earth.”

I have a hard time imagining the Lord as the proximate agent in the weather patterns of our planet. I have always read this as the Lord owning the things the creation set in motion, not necessarily as by direct action.  Instead of “Oh, Winter is here! Time to make those snows move from here to there.” it is more that He is the creator and author of the propensities and capacities that are baked into the deep structure of the cosmos.

So, too, with the following scriptures in Moses 7. God is not the proximate cause of suffering, wrath, cursing, smiting, indignation, and fierce anger. Rather, God, in this chapter, owns his role in putting in motion the capacities and propensities of this universe. That may be seen to be a place where wickedness unleashes something that very much looks like, in the rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards, “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

In Moses 7, we read some of the Lord’s unsettling responses to what was happening in Enoch’s time:

1: “…the wrath of God to be poured out upon them.”

8: “…For behold, the Lord shall curse the land with much heat, and the barrenness thereof shall go forth forever;”

10: “…Repent, lest I come out and smite them with a curse, and they die.”

15: And the giants of the land, also, stood afar off; and there went forth a curse upon all people that fought against God;

20: Zion have I blessed, but the residue of the people have I cursed.

34: And the fire of mine indignation is kindled against them; and in my hot displeasure will I send in the floods upon them, for my fierce anger is kindled against them.

38: But behold, these which thine eyes are upon shall perish in the floods; and behold, I will shut them up; a prison have I prepared for them.

43: Wherefore Enoch saw that Noah built an ark; and that the Lord smiled upon it, and held it in his own hand; but upon the residue of the wicked the floods came and swallowed them up.

61: And the day shall come that the Earth shall rest, but before that day the heavens shall be darkened, and a veil of darkness shall cover the Earth and the heavens shall shake, and also great tribulations shall be among the children of men, but my people will I preserve;

66: But before that day he saw great tribulations among the wicked; and he also saw the sea, that it was troubled, and men’s hearts failing them, looking forth with fear for the judgments of the Almighty God, which should come upon the wicked.

These terrible things are not God’s will. They are not things in which God actively goes “a-smiting.” Rather, it is a universe in which much suffering occurs. (We'll explore more as we study Job later in the year.)

The Lord knows that this is a place where hatred causes wars. Where greed can cause the very atmosphere of the Earth to become a place where “much heat and the barrenness there shall go forth.” Where, when love is withheld in the name of efficiency and in the production of stuff, inequalities and injustice follow.

What is God’s actual response in this chapter? He weeps. He is heartbroken. Because in this universe of suffering, the response he wants from us is to help relieve that suffering as agents agenting on behalf of helping, succoring, mourning, and yes, weeping in the face of such cursing and suffering. Our role is the one in which goodness can, on an individual, agential, and supportive level, relieve suffering.

Otherwise, God’s weeping becomes something like the scene in the poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a poem contained in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass. The poem opens with the two titular characters out for a stroll along the beach. Their first tears are shed at the inevitable, unchangeable, and fixed conditions of the universe—

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand!’

‘If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,
‘That they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

This poem does not seem to depict godly weeping. It is a fist of rage shaken at impotent helplessness. A defeatist, nihilistic reaction to the unalterable. Hardly words that describe the Lord. But it gets worse as the poem goes on. They wander down the beach when they are followed by a gang of young oysters.

‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
The Walrus did beseech.
‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:’

They come to a rock where the Walrus says they are going to pause to chat about trivialities and nonsense:

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing—wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.’

But the two characters pull out some bread and vinegar, and the proposed chat never happens. Rather, something terrifyingly cruel comes to pass, which I'm sure you can guess even if you have never read the poem:

‘It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said,
‘To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘The butter’s spread too thick!’

And the Walrus weeps about the trick they have played on the young plump oysters:

‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said.
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size.
Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

The poem ends on the line—They’d eaten every one.

In this chapter in Moses, God's weeping is one of the most poignant scenes in scripture. God is weeping. Enoch is weeping. The Earth itself is weeping. There is much genuine mourning over the people's refusal to repent. “Why?” Enoch asks. “How can this be?” “Thou hast taken Zion to thine own bosom, from all thy creations, from all eternity to all eternity; and naught but peace, justice, and truth is the habitation of thy throne; and mercy shall go before thy face and have no end; how is it thou canst weep?” (Moses 7:31)

The chapter’s setup might, superficially, make it look like the Lord is doing something akin to what the Walrus did in the poem: doing a lot of smiting and cursing and then weeping about his own actions.

But we see that something much different is happening here, when the Lord answers Enoch’s question:

32: “The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;

33: And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood.

The people were given agency, an agency that should have been used for love to enact the very thing the Lord desires for them, i.e., that as Enoch says above, “naught but peace, justice, and truth is the habitation of thy throne; and mercy shall go before thy face and have no end.”

So, for me, this chapter seems to speak of God’s acknowledgement that we live in a universe where suffering is not only possible but also a part of the fabric of creation. He takes responsibility as the ultimate cause of our being willingly thrown into such a place of woundedness. To further his aims for this Earth, his children are asked to help alleviate this suffering by mourning with those who mourn. (Here enacted so beautifully by Enoch mourning with God—Think about that!) Notice how this places the atonement front and center; it is why only Jesus Christ could effect the atonement. He, the ultimate cause of our placement here, enjoining us now to embrace others with “love, justice, and his mercy.” To be agents who bring help to our fellow sufferers. To cease hate, war, greed, and despising others who are different from us (e.g., see in the early part of the chapter that the scripture notes that the people of Canaan were despised among all people). We can ask, was this something condoned or sanctioned by the Lord? Or was it an observation of the facts on the ground that needed changing? A condemnation of a society that despised the people of Canaan because the non-Zion people were, in despising others, more wicked than any people who had ever lived?

I love this chapter in all its complexity. It shows us a vision of the eternities and the possibility of overcoming suffering through ministering to others, just as God does: Suffering with others, weeping together with God and one another. Defining, indeed, a Zion people.