Going forward from yesterday, Elder Neal A. Maxwell said: “To continue the suggestion about connecting up the scriptures and the human condition, the words of Isiah indicate that the dwellers of the earth will be “desolate: (Isaiah 24:6). “Desolate” connotes joylessness or a grief-stricken condition—a state kindred to the spiritlessness which the word languish connotes.
Why did all this happen? Because, said Isaiah, the people had “transgressed the laws, changed the ordinances, broken the everlasting covenant” (Isaiah 24:5) When such basic breakdowns happen, then sweeping and sad consequences follow.
We see other symptoms in our own time. As prophesied by the Savior, “because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold” (Matthew 24:12). The capacity of human beings to love—whether it is love of God, of life, or of others—shrinks in a climate of iniquity.
As life thus loses its meaning and purpose for those so afflicted, despair replaces joy. Anomie or drift drive out purpose. When people mock God’s messengers and despise His words, deterioration sets in “till there [is] no remedy” (see 2 Chronicles 36:16).
The remedy, the redemption, of course, is to be found in Jesus and His encompassing and emancipating message. He is the centerpiece of human history, the validation and verification of the meaning of life. He is the executor of Our Father’s glorious and redemptive “plan of happiness” (Alma 42:8). And it is He about whom the scriptures testify so abundantly:
Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me (John 5:39).
Peter foresaw that heresies and apostasies would have at their center the ultimate deviation: to denigrate and to “deny the Lord that bought them” (2 Peter 2:1). For those so mistaken the denial of Jesus and of His purchasing atonement dissolves the meaning and purpose of life. With this denial, for those so deluded, any assurance of immortality and individuality and personal accountability exit also (see 1 Corinthians 6:20). Men are then left to try to find their own ways:
- In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Judges 17:6) see also Judges 21:25). They seek not the Lord to establish His righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish in Babylon, even Babylon the great, which shall fall. (Doctrine and Covenants 1:16).
What we often fail to add, however, in our declaration about the Restoration, is the glorious perspective which the restoration and the full gospel give to us about the meaning of life on this planet and the unfolding of God’s plan of salvation. It is this, too, which can give meaning to life and which can remedy those conditions in which people languish and droop and are desolate. An *aristocracy of Saints is what is needed, since finally no other *aristocracy can really lead the way—certainly not any like the “haughty people” Isaiah saw.
In a great many ways we are therefore bearers of a message of far greater and deeper significance than we can now possibly imagine.
The restored gospel is thus a gospel of hope and meaning: not a vague generalized hope but a message of specific and justified hope for which myriad mortals hunger and which all mortals need.
One major example is the verification of the reality of the resurrection. . . .
~Neal A. Maxwell, ‘Sermons Not Spoken’, Bookcraft 1985, p. 68-72
*Though the word ‘aristocracy’ carries increasingly negative connotations in mans political and other arenas, being led by a Prophet of God, Apostles and others chosen by Jesus Christ and ordained / set apart to lead the work (by those having proper authority) is a ‘sacred aristocracy’ commissioned from Heaven’ (trusted by the faithful). k
