Today I read Doctrine and Covenants section 105, which was given to Joseph Smith while in Zion's camp as they were headed to redeem the Saints in Missouri. The Lord spoke of many things in this section but I feel like it was basically three different main ideas that the Lord is expounding on in this section. Those ideas are that the Lord will fight our battles for us, that the Lord had an endowment of power to give His elders, and that all things are for our good.
It has always intrigued me when I read in the scriptures that the Lord fights our battles for us and to read the accounts of when the Lord fights our battles. Now, in my reading of the scriptures, I believe there are two ways that the Lord will fight our battles. The first is He will uplift His people during the battle and keep them safe from the enemies so that even if they are outnumbered, the people will be safe and will be victorious. The second way the Lord fights our battles for us is He stops them from even happening as He did with Enoch, and the Israelites with the battle of Jericho and in more recent times, at Zion's Camp.
As strange as it may sound, the second way of protection, that of using the elements of the world to protect the Saints is easier for me to understand. The has moved mountains and changed the course of rivers, has used weather and tumbled walls in order to keep His people from having to fight. That makes perfect sense to me because God is the God of nature and the elements love and obey His word. It is the protection of His people during an actual battle that I don't understand how He does it. But protect them He does. The scriptures are replete with stories of the Lord miraculously keeping His saints safe, probably the most miraculous being the story of Helaman's Stripling Warriors. While we don't really have many physical battles to fight anymore, the Lord still protects us in our day.
The second part of this section as I mentioned was the Lord telling His elders that He wanted them to be endowed with power from heaven. The Lord of course is speaking of the temple and it's blessings that wait for all worthy members of the church. The temple blessings bring wonderful strength to us in this life and help us to stay on the right path. The sacred covenants we make in the temple with our Heavenly Father are beautiful and provide us with the strength and power we need to stay strong in this life. The Lord knows this and that is why He asks us to build so many temples and why we put such an emphasis on temple worship. We have talked quite extensively on this in the past so I will not dwell too much on this one but needless to say the temple is for our benefit just as much as it is for the dead.
Finally, all the things that we experience in this life are for our good. This can sometimes seem harsh when we see some of the extremely horrible things that happen to some people in this life. This world is a harsh, and cruel world and sometimes really horrible things happen to people, sometimes to innocent children who have done nothing except be born. I hate to watch the news and television these days try to emulate real life and do so so effectively that it hurts my spirit to watch such programs. But the Lord tells us that these things are for the benefit of those that suffer those things. I believe that the Lord does not do anything to be cruel. It is not in His nature.
He does not do things just because He thinks it is a good idea. He only does things for us because He knows us, He knows what our weaknesses are and what will help us to overcome those weaknesses. Despite how horrible some of the things that some people suffer might be, we need to have faith in God that it is for the benefit of that person and that it will help them overcome their weaknesses and help them become more Christlike. As we have our trials and tribulations in this life, we truly should thank the Lord for those trials because as long as we endure them with the proper spirit, we will become better people because of them. Now it is really, really hard to be thankful for trials while we are going through them, but truly we should be thankful for them because it means we have a chance to grow.
The Lord loves us and wants us to grow and become better men and women. By relying on Him to fight our battle for us, by participating in temple worship so that we have the powers of Heaven behind us, bolstering us and uplifting us, and finally by recognizing that all things we suffer in this life are for our good, will have a tremendous effect on our lives and help us to become more like Him. And that is the ultimate goal, isn't it? Until tomorrow.
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