Abide: Jeremiah and Lamentations Part II

In last week’s episode, we discussed how Jeremiah introduces ideas about seemingly disparate events, including the apocalyptic here and now, and the hope of a better future for all humankind. As we continue into our second episode on Jeremiah, we take a turn to more earthy practicalities. How do we commit ourselves to God’s work? How do we recognize prophetic teachings? And what’s important about the fact that Lehi and Jeremiah lived at the same time? We discuss that and much more on today’s episode of Abide: A Maxwell Institute podcast. My name is Joseph Stuart. I’m the Public Communication Specialist for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for religious scholarship at Brigham Young University. Kristian Heal is a research fellow at the Institute. Each week we discuss the week’s block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Come, Follow Me curriculum. We aren’t here to present a lesson, but rather to hit on a few key themes from the scripture block, as well as to help fulfill the Maxwell Institute’s mission to inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and engage the world of religious ideas. 

Joseph Stuart: Today we are joined by Abby Ellis, a research assistant here at the Maxwell Institute. Abby is a junior at BYU from Kaysville, Utah studying editing and publishing. Her interests generally revolve around stories, watching them, reading them, and telling them. After she graduates she hopes to help others tell their stories too. Welcome to the podcast, Abby.

Abby Ellis: Thank you.

Joseph Stuart: Thank you for being here. Now, Kristian, we went over a little bit of the background of Jeremiah in our last episode, but what should we know as we go into our second episode on Jeremiah?

Kristian Heal: So last time, we looked at Jeremiah one through 25, and noted that chapters 26 through 45 offer stories about Jeremiah, including warnings and prophecies to Israel, and experiences from the siege of Jerusalem. And chapters 46 through 52 give Jeremiah’s oracles to the other nations that would be destroyed or war with Babylonia, and then oracles against Babylonia itself in chapters 50-51. And that this book concludes with the historical coda, in the final chapter borrowed from Second Kings 24 and 25. Jeremiah is a complex book, as one scholar said, “the reader who is not confused by reading the book of Jeremiah has not understood it.” Understanding the broad structure of the book is useful. But it’s also important to understand a little of the historical context of the ancient near east at this time. So we’ll do a bit of that in this introduction. The northern kingdom of Israel had been conquered and scattered by the Assyrian armies in the late eighth century, leaving only the southern kingdom of Judah. At the end of Isaiah 39, Isaiah warns of the rise of the kingdom of Babylonia, and it is the rise of this kingdom that forms the geopolitical backdrop for the book of Jeremiah. Babylonia was the less powerful southern neighbor of Assyria. In the seventh century, Babylonia rises to power and drives out and then conquers Assyria, with the city of Asher folding in 614 BCE, and Nineveh in 612. Concerned that this change in the political landscape, Egypt, the other superpower in the region, joined Assyria to fight against the new Babylonian power, but this combined force was defeated in 605. The general who led the army of this emerging Empire was Nebuchadnezzar. And he was crowned king in 604 and rained for the next four decades. This new kingdom soon became an empire as it extended its power and rule westward, first taking Syria and then Ashkelon on the coast. At this point, Jehoiakim could do nothing but submit to being a vassal state of the new superpower. But when Babylonia faltered in its war against Egypt in 601 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar was weakened. Jehoiakim decided to declare independence from Babylonia at this point, and align with the seemingly stronger Egyptian empire. After two years of rebuilding his army, Nebuchadnezzar returned and in 598, invaded and conquered Judah, removing the treasures including temple treasures, and the king’s wealth, and taking nobles into captivity. Zedekiah was installed as the puppet king at that point, but ignoring Jeremiah’s counsel, he revolted against the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian troops returned in 588 BCE, and as James Google said, “prepared to take Jerusalem in what was to be a prolonged and cruel siege.” John Collins notes in his introduction to the Bible, “more than any other biblical writer, Jeremiah evokes the sheer terror of military conquest from the victim’s point of view.” This is pointedly illustrated in Jeremiah 4:19, “my anguish, my anguish I writhe in pain. Oh the wall of my heart, my heart is beating wildly. I cannot keep silent. For I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.” The book of Lamentations is also part of this week’s reading. This work is traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, and it’s made up of five poems that appear to record the lived experience of the terrors, the fall of Jerusalem and its aftermath in 580-86 BCE. Using the ancient genre of lament poetry, there are even examples of this genre in ancient Sumerian literature. So this is an ancient genre going about as places are destroyed and laments are given. These are artfully constructed poems. As John Collins observes, “all five poems are shaped in some way by the Hebrew alphabet.” Three are acrostic poems, meaning that each stanza begins with one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The fifth is not acrostic, but it’s composed in 22 lines. The third is the most complex, written not only as an acrostic, but as a triple acrostic with each line of three verses that make up a stanza, beginning with the same letter. The poems assume Israel’s guilt and describe its punishment, in vivid and poignant imagery, of the atrocities of war. As one scholar says, “the book of Lamentations is cherished mainly for its poetic expressions of unspeakable horror.”

Joseph Stuart: So not a particularly cheerful book, makes me think about Mormon in his last years as he is editing the records that become the Book of Mormon. And him being by himself and knowing the destruction that is going to come, but nevertheless, pursuing on in his work as a prophet. And I think that in some ways, especially as a younger person, I thought of being the prophet as a pretty awesome deal. You get to speak for God, you have all these responsibilities, and everyone thinks you’re great. But then I ran across a sermon by President Hinckley that he gave at BYU, called the loneliness of leadership. In which he talks about how the Savior had not a place to rest his head, and borrowing from Shakespeare “heavy is the head that wears the crown.” What are some of the perils or pains of being called to the work that you see in the book of Jeremiah?

Kristian Heal: I think we see the personal side of the prophet much more clearly in Jeremiah than in any other book in the Old Testament. As John Collins wrote in his introduction to the Old Testament, “one of the most distinctive features of Jeremiah’s prophecy is the acute sense of impending disaster that informs much of his poetic oracles.” He’s preaching in a time when he has very little good news. And so he is always a figure who is fraught, and we see a glimpse of his own feelings, this series of personal laments that appeared two chapters 11 through 20. We’re used to those called by God lamenting their weakness at their call. This is a sort of something of a trope, “I’m not worthy. I can’t take this on.” But we hear more from Jeremiah. Jeremiah feels the pain and pressures of his call deeply. There’s a deep sense that he’s troubled by just how thoroughly he is despised for responding to God’s call. Most poignantly is Jeremiah chapter 15:10, where we hear, “Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me, a man of conflict and strife with all the land, I have not lent, and I have not borrowed yet everyone curses me.” Jeremiah, as a lonely figure, as someone who really experiences, as you said, this feeling of the loneliness of leadership. So some of these laments have an almost psalmic nature about them as we spent time with the Psalms. So take, for example, Jeremiah 17:14, through 18, “heal me, oh, Lord, and let me be healed. Save me and let me be saved, for you are my glory. See, they say to me, where is the protection of the Lord? Let it come to pass. But I have not evaded being a shepherd in your service, nor have I longed for the fateful day. You know, the utterances of my lips, they were ever before you. Do not be a cause of dismay to me. You are my refuge in a day of calamity, let my persecutors be shamed, and let not me be shamed. Let them be dismayed, and let not me be dismayed. Bring on them the day of disaster and shatter them with double destruction.” So the plea for healing that which is opened is plaintive and beautiful.These opening words are ones that we have all felt to pray at some point in our lives. But the rest of the poem reflects the words of a man haunted by his calling, wrestling with the feeling of being battered and battled by ridicule and shame, and concerned that God might fail him. There’s a double edge to the lament, one that both fears being let down, while also expressing confidence and desire that God will not let him down.

Joseph Stuart: I think it sort of reveals the vulnerability that faith requires of us that even in the act of prayer, we have to open ourselves up to communicate with someone that we cannot see. And thinking of the hymn that to be able to see one step in front of us is good enough for the author of the hymn. That’s usually not what I’m asking for, I have to be in pretty dire straits to only want to see one step in front of me. How else do we see this working, as Jeremiah knows what is going to happen, but nevertheless is trying to demonstrate his faith and his confidence that things will work out for the best.

Kristian Heal: It really feels like God is expecting Jeremiah to walk further out into the darkness. We have that lovely idea from Elder Uchtdorf, where he said, “There are times when we have to step into the darkness in faith, confident that God will place solid ground beneath our feet once we do.” And in other expressions of this, you have this notion of stepping into the darkness, having the confidence that light will sort of follow you. And it feels like Jeremiah, and many who are called to such difficult callings, have to step further into the darkness than most of us are required to do. Their calling requires them to sort of be fully kind of out on a limb. We rarely hear the laments of such people. Our leaders, the prophets tend to sort of keep their concerns to themselves, or perhaps between themselves and their therapist. Doctrine and Covenants 121 is a moment in which Joseph Smith sort of expresses his concern, but these are rare. But we have here the witness of Jeremiah, that being called to the work may require bearing shame and calamity, even perhaps feeling that the Lord has abandoned you to which the only suitable cry is “save me, and let me be saved. For you are my glory.”

Joseph Stuart: I think it’s important to remember this vulnerability, this requirement that we have to take a step out into the darkness at times, and that often, the most appealing voices are those that promise us certainty, or promise us a particular way that things are going to be done with them having no idea of how they’re going to be able to cash that check, so to speak. So how do we see these ideas, these really appealing ideas that Jeremiah frames as false prophets being illustrated in the second half of the book of Jeremiah?

Kristian Heal: So one of the problems that Jeremiah wrestled with is not just the kind of recalcitrance of the people, their unwillingness to give up their idols, or sort of take care of the poor, or follow the Lord in righteousness, they were competing voices. In fact that much of the power structure in Jerusalem seemed to have been against him. As one scholar said, in the notes of the Jewish Study Bible, “Jeremiah gives us unique insights into the prophet’s intense relationship with his audience in Jerusalem. Priests, prophets, officials, and the entire people. Jeremiah seems to be taking on the entire administration.” And it’s interesting that we find among this administration, people who are called prophets, and for our own sake, we characterize them as false prophets, but they’re never distinguished as such in the text, they are just other prophets. And these other prophets are prophesying things different to Jeremiah. And so there’s this moment of crisis that’s described in Jeremiah 27-29, where these false prophets, as we will call them arise and say, to the king, King Zedekiah, “don’t worry,” this is that moment that we kind of talked about in the introduction, where Zedekiah decides that he’s going to declare his independence because the false prophets are telling him that God is going to protect them. It’s this sort of old notion that has been experienced by Israel, that God is going to protect us. And Jeremiah is saying, no you’re going to be in captivity for 70 years. So don’t start sort of threatening, and he counseled Zedekiah to take upon him to accept the yoke of the Babylonia. So these prophets seem to be more adept at hearing God’s past promises than his present warnings. And ironically, it was heading the council of these false prophets that ultimately led to the destruction of Jerusalem. There’s a sense that if Zedekiah had simply remained a client, vassal king, Nebuchadnezzar would never have come and destroyed the temple and destroyed the city. They could have just been in captivity for this long period. So we have these concerns laid out where Jeremiah is telling the King to keep this yoke upon your neck, and these prophets are prophesying success and peace, while Jeremiah is prophesying this long period of subjugation. And put a name to the face as it were in chapter 28, where we have the Prophet Hananiah emerging as Jeremiah is principal opponent, he actually breaks the yoke that Jeremiah is wearing as a symbol of Israel’s subservience to Babylonia, and this Hananiah prophecies, “in two years, I will restore to this place all the vessels of the house of the Lord was King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia took from this place, and brought to Babylon. And I will bring back to this place King Jeconiah, son of Jehoiakim, of Judah, and all the Judean exiles who went into Babylon. Declares the Lord, yes, I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.” Now this sounds just like other Israelite prophecy. This sounds like a good solid prophecy. It’s got thus saith the Lord in it, we have these, you know, breaking of the yoke, that Israel is going to win, that good things are going to happen. But because of these false prophecies, Jeremiah actually says, no, you had a wooden yoke, but now you’re going to have this iron yoke upon you. And this is how Jeremiah responds, “listen Hananiah, the Lord did not send you. And you have given this people lying assurances, Assuredly, Thus saith the Lord, I’m going to banish you off the Earth. This year, you shall die. But you have urged disloyalty to the Lord. And the prophet Hananiah died that year, in the seventh month.”

Joseph Stuart: Yeah. So we’re not accustomed to these sorts of encounters living in this dispensation. And I’m fascinated by the idea that what you said of this good, solid prophecy that he’s using the language of scripture. He’s using language that other prophets have used before. How do we distinguish between someone who is relying on words that previous prophets have said and the words that our current prophet has for us today?

Kristian Heal: This is one of the kinds of great questions because I think you’re right. I mean, there’s not like an alternate General Conference. Or there’s not like competing, sort of General Conference podiums. We don’t sort of see this, so sort of starkly. But we definitely hear competing voices as members of the church. We definitely hear people using the scriptures to create a vision of our religion or of the tradition that is sort of at odds, perhaps with the voice of the prophets.

Joseph Stuart: And this is nothing that’s peculiar to one side of the ideological spectrum or the other. I think the warning that we should pay attention when folks are intermingling the words of scripture with their own philosophy are something that we should keep in mind here.

Kristian Heal: Yeah, exactly. I think this is, this is a question that I think the problem that we’re all confronted with, as we’re weighing our opposing views, even if we’re doing is, as President Oaks counsels us, choosing between good, better and best. And it’s not such a stark thing.

Abby Ellis: I think that’s something you can do to yourself to not just like with church things. I like how he talked about relying on past things that have happened instead of relying on the present and the future. Because I know like in my own life, it’s so easy to be like, well, in the past, that’s what happened. So why would it happen this time? Or why would it be any different? But like, obviously, we don’t want the future to be oh, you have to stay in captivity. But you know, just relying on stuff in the future and what God promises versus what you think has already happened in the past.

Kristian Heal: It’s a really kind of valuable point, isn’t it? That we can kind of stay present. A lot of kind of fundamentalist ideas come from wanting to kind of stick with the past idea. And this is the great blessing of being in part of the restored church with living prophets is this notion of continuing revelation. The past is valuable, I speak here with Joey as a historian, yes, you’re important, Joey.

Joseph Stuart: You can see me beaming.

[Kristian chuckles]

Kristian Heal: But, but we want to kind of use the past to stay relevant to the present, we want to be listening to these contemporary voices. And it becomes this kind of symbiosis, I think, this kind of living conversation between the past and the present that allows us to sort of stay connected to the contemporary prophets, while being enriched by past prophets.

Joseph Stuart: I have come to recognize in my own life that there’s no direct formula that I can plug what someone says into to determine if that’s something that is good for me, or if it’s something that’s authoritative. But I do like what John Goldingay has to say; he gives us four ideas that we can take into account when we’re thinking about prophetic utterances.

Kristian Heal: Yeah, he gives this kind of response where he’s saying, Okay, what are some ways that we can kind of distinguish from these true and false prophets? And there’s no kind of clear categorical answer here. But these are sort of suggestions. He says that the false prophets are going to want to be popular, they’re going to want to be successful. Whereas true prophets are people who are willing to preach both good news, but also point out the bad things when they need to. So they’re willing to be unliked, they’re willing to sort of predict that things are not going to succeed, if we, if we don’t change. But there is also a kind of an institutional imperative in these kinds of false prophets, they’re connected to, to the power structures, and want to say things which will support and sustain the power structures. That’s what we seem to have there with Hananiah, which I think is important. So there’s the pressure of the institution to say good things. As this will this notion to become popular John Goldingay says, “sometimes, popular religion, too easily assumes that God is with us, God is committed to us that we are right.” That was the message of Hananiah not Jeremiah. “If our message is that God is with us, we may be only a hair, hair’s breadth, if that away, from false prophecy. At other times, however popular religion may be convinced that God has abandoned us, there’s no hope.” So we have to kind of avoid these, these extremes he tells us, and the final way that Goldingay sort of suggests that we distinguish between these two is the power of tradition. He says, “Hananiah’s assumption that God is with us had its basis in tradition, in the Psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah, in Deuteronomy. In scripture, you could say, it was sound and biblical. The trouble was that His word was out of due time.” So this is the point that we were making later. Goldingay says, “he was preaching a biblical message. His theology was orthodox, but it belonged to a previous century.”

Joseph Stuart: Thanks so much for that Kristian. Now, switching tack a little bit, I’ve always found it compelling that Jeremiah and Lehi were operating as prophets at the same time. And Abby, as you were researching that reality this week, what are some of the things that you found interesting in your research?

Abby Ellis: Well, I remember when I first realized that Lehi and Jeremiah were prophets at the same time, and it just like never occurred to me that there was a part in the Bible where Lehi came out of it till I was in seminary. But I think there, it’s kind of poetic in a way that they’re both together, because their stories are so opposite of each other. But they’re also very similar at the same time. As we’ve been talking about, there’s a lot of different prophets and people preaching, you know, we have Jeremiah, who’s trying to help the people repent of their ways. And so from the outside, Lehi and Jeremiah probably looked very similar. You know, they both cried repentance, they both prophesied of the destruction that was coming. They’re both rejected and persecuted for what they taught. They’re also both priests, you know, got the priesthood to serve the Lord. They both testified of Christ and the redemption of Israel. They both are patriarchs in their own sense. Lehi being a patriarch over his family, and then Jeremiah kind of being seen as a patriarch over this divided Israel. But what I found, like really enlightening to look at is how they complement each other in their stories, and in their callings. So for Jeremiah, he was called at a very, like a young age to be a prophet. And like Moses and others before him, he was hesitant to accept it. And then as we’ve been talking about he continued to kind of be hesitant a little bit. But he accepted it and spent 40 years or more, I don’t know much exactly, you know, preaching to the people. And they just kept getting more and more wicked. And in the end, his calling led him to, you know, stay there in Jerusalem and witness this like destruction and exile of his people. And Jeremiah, you know, he also was commanded not to marry, to not have children, because they would have just died in like this destruction. So in comparison to Lehi, you know, he has a rather lonely calling, because Lehi, he had a family, he had a wife, six sons, an amount of daughters, we don’t know how many. And he was called, as far as we’re aware of, and the record we have as an adult, he’s a lot older. He saw the sins of his people, he saw these prophets, prophesying, and he went and cried unto the Lord of all his hearts in their behalf. And that’s when the Lord called him to go and to preach, and we don’t know how long he preached. But his calling was different than Jeremiah’s, he was told not to stay, but to flee to take his family and leave Jerusalem to leave this promised land and to find a new one.

Joseph Stuart: I find that really remarkable, and it brings to mind when I was serving my mission. And as you can probably tell from this podcast, I’m usually fairly outgoing. I’m very comfortable talking to people. And I was serving with a companion who was usually more reserved, usually more quiet. But with one family that we taught, we switched roles. I was the much more reserved one. I was the quieter one, and he was much more outgoing and initiating conversations, including hard conversations that he usually shied away from, and this is to say that there is no one right way of doing things, or one right way of serving the Lord. And that the Lord doesn’t require us to be the same in every situation. But he also doesn’t require us to be perfect in order to serve Him and help achieve His purposes.

Abby Ellis: Yeah, I think we definitely see that illustrated really well with these two because like you said, there’s no right way of doing something like even though they have the same calling, it doesn’t look the same. And you know that neither of them were perfect prophets. You know, we’ve kind of discussed how maybe Jeremiah can seem as imperfect, you know, through his confessions and the lamentations he goes through where he’s angry at God and kind of at his calling for what he’s been asked to do. And, you know, we see Lehi in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes he appears a little more untouchable because we kind of see him through his son’s eyes, but there’s times when he complains against God and murmurs and kind of wants to go back to Jerusalem. But even though they were so imperfect, you know, God was still able to do his work through them and kind of teach us generations later. In their article about these two prophets, David and Jo Ann Seely, they point out how Jeremiah is kind of seen as a symbol of God’s justice. And Lehi can be seen as a symbol of his mercy. No, because Jeremiah was commanded not to do these things like not to have family because they would die. He’s commanded not to mourn for his people, because the Lord has taken away his loving kindness and mercy. He’s also commanded, he’s not allowed to participate in the house of feasting and joy because the day was upon Judah when gladness would cease, as he witnesses this, you know, God’s justice coming down on his people. And for Lehi over and over again. In the Book of Mormon they talk about the tender mercies of the Lord and how he spared them. They didn’t have to witness that destruction or they gave him a way out, gave him this promised land and at least half of Lehi’s children, they’re described as living after the matter of happiness, very different from Jeremiah in Jerusalem.

Joseph Stuart: Something I really enjoy about the Seely’s article is that they point out, though, that neither one is an exact embodiment of either justice or of mercy, that they both are revealing it in their ministries just in different ways.

Abby Ellis: Yeah, you do see, kind of like echoes of both justice and mercy within their stories because Lehi, he sees God’s justice and apostasy of his sons. He views the future destruction of his people, his people end up being destroyed because of their wickedness. And Jeremiah, even though there’s a lot of God’s justice going on, he experienced His mercy from the Lord when He spared from the destruction, you know, he lives. He continues to find comfort in his relationship with the Lord and he’s still able to help the Jews in exile, even though they’re no longer in Jerusalem. And with these complementary backgrounds, we kind of get to view one of the biggest turning points for the children of Israel in a different way, like the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. It impacts the rest of the Bible and you get this opportunity to see just how they react to it differently. For Jeremiah, he spent most of his life, maybe even all of it doing everything you can to help his people and in some senses, it seems like he’s failed because they’ve been destroyed. As we’ve talked about in Lamentations you see that guilt and that shame and even anger that Jeremiah feels, and even probably all of Jerusalem felt in like the aftermath of the destruction because in Lamentations 2:5 it reads, “the Lord was an enemy he has swallowed up Israel he have swallowed up all her palaces, he hath destroyed his strongholds and has increased in the desire of Judah, mourning and lamentation.”

Joseph Stuart: One of the sermons that I love most from the last 20 years of Latter-day Saint General Conferences is Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin’s Sunday will come, where he really opens up and shares about the pain that he had recently experienced through the death of family members and experiencing old age. In some ways, it’s a faithful lamentation about the imperfections of life and how difficult it can be, and lonely. And I, personally, am really heartened when I see in Jeremiah and lamentations that it’s not just everything going, well, one after the upper or here’s the obstacle, let’s overcome it. And then something good happens after it. Even prophets have to wrestle with the reality that progress isn’t linear, and neither is happiness.

Kristian Heal: I mean, this is the sort of juxtaposition of these two characters and the different way that life in God can be led. I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as this kind of faithful witness of Jesus, but finding himself within the kind of German occupied territory and losing his life in the war as a witness, while other people were able to outside still be witnesses, but not experience the things that they experienced. But we can be faithful and have these completely different lives, that our job is not to sort of compare it to sort of look over and say, you know, why me? Why not me? Why am I not having that experience? Almost allow God to live through us, wherever we’re called to present. As Elder Uchtdorf sort of said it so well just to lift where we stand, to sort of tend the garden that we’ve been given.

Joseph Stuart: Yeah, I think in the example that you just gave of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he still is executed. And he is fulfilling this Jeremiah type role. That just because he’s called a God doesn’t mean that he is exempt from pain or suffering.

Abby Ellis: Yeah. And the Bible contains these cries of anguish and pain, as the children of Israel, you know, are taken away, and they’re angry, and they see God as like an enemy because of the ruin that’s been inflicted upon them. But there’s also many beautiful promises of redemption, you know, that have been given to them through Jeremiah. And in Jeremiah 30 it says “therefore fear not, oh, my servant, Jacob, saith the Lord, neither be dismayed always O Israel, for lo, I will save the from afar, and thy seed from the land of their captivity, and Jacob shall return, and shall be in rest and be quiet, and none shall make him afraid. For I’m with thee, saith the Lord to save thee though I make a full end of the nation’s whither I gave scattered it, yet will I not make a full end of thee.” So for Jeremiah and his fellow Jews, like this destruction is, you know, it’s a very present thing. They’re there, they witnessed it firsthand and live through it.

Kristian Heal: I think, when you’re in the midst of a trial, that it obscures the vision of everything else. That actually takes place a lot, you can see quite a lot to kind of break through somebody who is suffering, to provide hope. Because I think that sort of difficulty, that darkness can just be all pervasive, I think we see that coming out in Jeremiah sort of laments in lamentation, this is a sort of a total feeling, can feel like there’s no hope. And so I think it’s lovely to point out that Jeremiah kept piercing that darkness with these kinds of voices of light to get he kept coming back to his people who were experiencing the atrocities of war, and just reminding them, just like offering these rays of hope in the midst of this darkness.

Abby Ellis: And for Lehi’s family that wasn’t there. They don’t have that same darkness and sorrow, anything. It’s not really mentioned at all, like grief that they might have felt because of the destruction of Jerusalem because they were spared from it, they left. Yes, they face their own trials, once they leave, but it’s nothing like the war and the calamity that the people of Jerusalem felt. And then every time in the Book of Mormon, that the destruction is mentioned, they always, like tag on the fact that they were spared, that they received this mercy from the Lord, as if like, that’s what the destruction reminds them of. Not of the grief and the pain, because they didn’t experience it, they said to them, it means that they were saved, like Lehi led them out. He was kind of there like Moses, in a sense, they had their own exodus out of this land. And I bet that at least Lehi, Nephi, they probably did grieve over it because they knew people, but because of just the perspective of the Book of Mormon, and the way it’s written, we’re not shown that. Instead, they focus on that mercy. And years ago, I heard someone say that sometimes God calms the storm, but sometimes he lets the storm rage on and calms the child. And I think we see that a lot in this comparison between Lehi and Jeremiah, sometimes we are Lehi, and we’re able to escape, you know, the storms calm, the trial goes away, or, but other times, you know, we’re Jeremiah, and that trial isn’t taken away. I think it’s important, both of them like they’re hard in their own ways. Because when we find ourselves spared, you know, it’s up to us to remember that the Lord did, gave mercy to us. And he spared us from something. Because, you know, you see Laman and Lemuel, they forget that a lot in the Book of Mormon, they forget and take advantage of the blessings that they’ve been given. And so it’s important for us to remember that God has shown us mercy and that it could be worse than it is sometimes. But when we’re like Jeremiah, and we find ourselves amidst this destruction, it’s important to remember the promises that God has made with us to redeem us. You know, he’s always saying you’re not afraid I’m with thee. He hasn’t abandoned us even though sometimes it might feel like he has. He will always be there to help us.

Joseph Stuart: Think that’s the perfect place for us to end this week. Have a blessed week, y’all.

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